April 2016 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

24th International Congress, Rio, July 2017
by James Sumner 22 Apr '16

22 Apr '16

Dear SIGCIS members I'm writing -- inevitably, far too close to the deadline -- to gauge whether there is interest in offering a symposium submission to the 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23-29 July 2017, <http://www.ichst2017.sbhc.org.br/>. This is the successor to the 24th Congress held in Manchester in 2013, for which I co-chaired the Local Organising Committee and which was the single largest conference in the field to date, with over 1750 participants. The 2013 programme was strong on computing and related themes -- see <http://www.ichstm2013.co.uk/programme/guide/m/discipline.html#a3> -- and included a mathematical, algorithmic and machine-focused symposium, organised by Maarten Bullynck, Liesbeth De Mol and Marie-José Durand-Richard; a symposium on COMECON technology, put together by Helena Durnova and Slawomir Lotysz for ICOHTEC (whose annual meeting occurred as a satellite to the Congress, as will again happen in Rio); and a symposium on computing applications in various contexts which I organised along with Miguel Garcia-Sancho. The Congress has a more global reach than most forums in the history of science and technology, and tends to be inclusive in its programming selection. There will be a separate call for stand-alone papers, but the call for symposia closes relatively soon, on Saturday 30 April. A "symposium" in Congress parlance is a 90-minute thematic session, or group of linked sessions (the largest symposia run for four sessions a day over several days!) consisting of papers and, optionally, commentaries. The symposium call does not require individual paper titles/abstracts, or a definite list of contributors, but does require an indicative contributor list and a short general abstract. One inviolate rule is that the organisation of the symposium must be a collaborative effort between at least two contributors representing different countries. If anyone is interested in contributing or collaborating, I'd be grateful if you would let me know directly. (I'd also be interested to hear news of any proposals for Rio which have already been settled, whether for the Congress or ICOHTEC call.) All best James

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An illustrated History of Computing
by Mounier Kuhn 21 Apr '16

21 Apr '16

Dear friends & colleagues, After two decades of stockpiling photos, ads, data, texts and ideas, a year of friendly collaboration between a historian and a computer scientist yielded a richly illustrated History of Computing (in French in its initial version)*. It embraces computing and data processing over a long period, ranging from Sumerian tables to the internet of things, and tries to embrace the worldwide scene – as far as is allowed in 260 pages. It even appeals to a non-French readership as most of its content is iconographic, which makes it as inherently international as old silent movies! The next step will be to produce an English version of the book. Therefore (this is the second part of my ad) we are looking for a volunteer to translate it. The ideal person would be a native Anglophone knowledgeable in the history of computing, able to read French and to write proper English – and willing to devote several weeks to this work, duly paid by our publisher. Best regards – and hopefully see you in Singapore. Pierre Mounier-Kuhn CNRS & Universite Paris-Sorbonne https://cnrs.academia.edu/PierreMounierKuhn http://koyre.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1203/mounier_kuhn_cv_anglais.pdf * Emmanuel Lazard et Pierre Mounier-Kuhn, Histoire illustree de l’informatique, EDP Sciences, 2016. http://laboutique.edpsciences.fr/produit/846/9782759818198/Histoire%20illus…

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coming up: Andy van Dam film screening, panel, and talk at UMD
by Matthew Kirschenbaum 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

For those who are in range of Washington DC, *Andy van Dam* will be at the University of Maryland College Park next week for two events sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of interest to computer history. The first and most special is a screening on the evening of Monday, April 25th of a 15-minute 1974 film van Dam produced as part of one of his early hypertext collaborations, involving the teaching of poetry. The film has not been previously seen in public. It will be accompanied by a panel discussion with van Dam and UMD faculty on the history (and future!) of humanities and CS collaborations. Here's the key information: Computer Science and the Humanities Then and Now A Film Screening and Discussion with Andy van Dam*7:30pm on the evening of Monday April 25, 2016* 0320 Tawes Hall University of Maryland, College Park And here's some background: In January of 2013, the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) began a project to digitize all of its early grant records from the 1960’s and 1970’s. These records were stored on old punch-cards known as McBee edge-notched cards. Their goal was to get all these cards entered into a grants database by 2015, which was the NEH’s 50th anniversary. In September of 2015, the NEH completed and announced the project. For the first time ever, the public could search for any grant the NEH had ever made. *Time* magazine ran a story in which they featured ten of the old McBee cards. One of these cards described a grant to Andy van Dam at Brown University in 1974. The title was “An Experiment in Computer Based Education Using Hypertext.” The brief description on the card simply said: *To support an experimental program to teach a college-level English poetry course, utilizing a new form of computer based “manuscript,” called a hypertext. A documentary film about the project is being produced. An evaluation is being performed to determine the usefulness of this technique as an aid to humanities education.* The short film that resulted is an early and remarkable document of the kind of collaboration between humanities scholars and students and computer scientists that is increasingly commonplace in the field known as Digital Humanities. It has not been shown in public since its making. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab <http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/about/> at the University of Maryland, and the National Endowment for the Humanities <http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh> cordially invite you to its first public screening at *7:30pm on the evening of Monday April 25, 2016* in the auditorium at 0320 Tawes Hall. The screening will include commentary on this experiment, which built arguably the first online scholarly community, by Professor van Dam, followed by a panel discussion featuring van Dam as well as Maryland’s own Ben Shneiderman, Kari Kraus (Associate Professor, iSchool and English Department), the NEH’s CIO and Director of the Office of Digital Humanities Brett Bobley, and NEH’s Program Analyst Ann Sneesby-Koch (to be moderated by MITH’s Associate Director Matthew Kirschenbaum). *Andy Van Dam will also be joining us for a special Digital Dialogue talk the following Tuesday afternoon, April 26th:* http://mith.umd.edu/dialogues/dd-spring-2016-andy-van-dam/ Both events are free and open to the public. -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

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ENIAC In Action - Forbes Review
by Dag Spicer 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

Glowing and thoughtul review of Tom, Mark and Crispin’s new book… http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/04/18/when-artificial-intelligenc… Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055

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Reply to an odd tweet
by Martha Poon 12 Apr '16

12 Apr '16

Dear SIGCIS, Last weekend at the Business History Conference, an odd tweet came off the SHOT-SIGCIS handle: *#**bhc2016* <https://twitter.com/hashtag/bhc2016?src=hash>* Speaker from **@* *datasociety* <https://twitter.com/datasociety>* loves history of comp. literature, but sees nothing in it to explain big data or social networking today*. What gives computer historians? If someone actually said something so silly at a conference, would it really be worth tweeting?! And why direct the message @ the speaker’s employer?? Let me take this opportunity to introduce myself to the list: My name is Martha Poon. In my research, I track how changes in economic thinking, documented by Philip Mirowski in his book *Machine Dreams *(2002), have been implemented, through networked information systems, in financial markets. I’m trying to draw a link between networked computing and today’s debt-driven capital markets. My key piece of empirical work showed how automation of mortgage underwriting in the 1990s allowed the shadow banking sector to fund US subprime loans: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368209000270 But I published my very first article in an edited volume through SIGCIS (*Technological Innovation in Retail Finance*, 2010) when Bernardo Batiz-Lazo kindly invited me to participate in this working group: http://www.sigcis.org/node/9 At the BHC in Portland, someone asked why I hadn't mentioned the history of computing. In the context of my paper on 19th Century life insurance markets (*Big Data and the Growing Power of Corporate Capitalism*, I’ll attach it), on a panel that paid tribute to *The Age of Fracture* (2012), I quickly replied that computer history and Internet studies were not [as] well equipped [as business historians] to tackle the question of financial value. I would have welcomed the opportunity to converse further with SICGIS members, but nobody from the organization spoke to me after the session. Just this Dadaist tweet addressed to Data & Society’s communication’s team back in New York…! I’m looking forward to attending SHOT and meeting the network properly. In the meantime, should list-members run into me elsewhere in the world, please, come talk to me! I juggle a number of disciplinary interests but I have long been a great admirer of computer history. Those of you in the New York area will find me here, next week, at Laine Nooney’s *Mistakes Were Made*: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mistakes-were-made-20-computer-history-decompi… With warm wishes, Martha -- Martha Poon|martha(a)datasociety.net|Research Fellow | Data & Society Research Institute| www.datasociety.net

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Fwd: From Encrypt to Decrypt -- Lorenz completes the story at TNMOC
by Brian Randell 07 Apr '16

07 Apr '16

Hi: Begin forwarded message: NEWS RELEASE The full story of the pinnacle of Bletchley Park code-breaking from encrypt to decrypt 1940’s cutting edge crypto technology revealed at The National Museum of Computing 7 April 2016 The pinnacle of code-breaking at Bletchley Park can now be told in its entirety from encrypt to decrypt using the full set of 1940’s cutting edge technology following the presentation today of an extremely rare Lorenz SZ42, Hitler’s “unbreakable” cipher machine, for display at The National Museum of Computing. The breaking of the top-secret Lorenz messages of German High Command is credited with shortening the war and saving countless lives. Much more complex than Enigma, the Lorenz cipher could be broken only thanks to Bill Tutte’s deduction of the architecture of a Lorenz machine without ever having seen it. As a result, the Allies were routinely able to read German High Command’s top secret messages. From 1944, with the creation of the Colossus computer by Tommy Flowers, the Allies were able to reduce the decrypt time from weeks to hours, a speed that effectively undermined the German military machine. At a ceremony in central London, Lieutenant Colonel Stein Wilhelm Aasland of the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum presented a Lorenz SZ42 as a long-term loan to Andy Clark, Chairman of TNMOC. The audience included two Wrens who had worked on Colossus along with relatives of those involved in the breaking of Lorenz. Full story with photos here: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-releases/encrypt-decrypt-full-lorenz-story Cheers Brian Randell -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk<mailto:Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk> PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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HSS panel: looking for a third paper
by M. Hicks 04 Apr '16

04 Apr '16

Hi All, Right now I'm looking for a third person to join an HSS panel I'm putting together. We can write the panel proposal to incorporate most topics in the history of computing, I think. One person will be talking about narratives of scientific popularization in computing history, and I'll be talking about how sexuality influences technical design in computing. We are also looking for someone to comment on this panel, so if you are interested please let me know. The deadline to propose is April 8--if you might want to join please get in touch sooner rather than later. Best, Marie ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net | mhicks1(a)iit.edu | @histoftech

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Linux at 25 in IEEE Spectrum
by Stephen Cass 04 Apr '16

04 Apr '16

This is the 25th year of the first public release of the kernel of the Linux operating system. Readers of this list may be interested in two articles we put together for the occasion at IEEE Spectrum. The first is by Christopher Tozzi, titled "Linux at 25: Why It Flourished While Others Fizzled" and can be found at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/linux-at-25-why-it-flourished-w… The second is a Q&A with Torvalds himself, written by yours truly. It can be found at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/linux-at-25-qa-with-linus-torva… One of the most notable things about the Q&A is that Torvalds runs counter to a significant element typical in "Great (Wo)Man" narratives: He explicitly rejects the virtue of possesing some great personal vision in his explanation for the success of Linux: "...The lack of understanding about the eventual scope of the project helped, but so did getting into it without a lot of preconceived notions of where it should go. The fact that I didn’t really know where it would end up meant that I was perhaps more open to outside suggestions and influence than I would have been if I had a very good idea of what I wanted to accomplish. That openness to outside influences I think made it much easier, and much more interesting, for others to join the project. People didn’t have to sign on to somebody else’s vision, but could join with their own vision of where things should go. I think that helped motivate lots of people." We would of course be interested in any feedback you might have on these articles! Cheers, Stephen

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Pioneering Computers
by Dag Spicer 04 Apr '16

04 Apr '16

Scanning the CHM Archives… here is a classic issue of our Museum Report (Winter, 1983) that describes the major contenders in the early computer sweepstakes. This was a special issue used as a companion to an exhibit on early computers called the "Pioneer Computer Timeline." http://tcm.computerhistory.org/reports/TCMReportWinter1983.pdf See esp. synoptic chart on pp. 14-15. (I think we might add ‘stored program’ to ENIAC now, given Tom Haigh’s recent book). Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055

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