April 2017 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Konrad Zuse's 1936 patent - German text?
by Brian Randell 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

Hi Mark: I have a copy of the original 1936 Zuse patent application that I had translated into English for my Origins book. (It took some finding - some of my Zemanek documents had strayed into the middle of the Zuse documents, and so had obscured them! :-) It is a type-written document, on the letterhead of Zuse’s patent attorney Dr.-Ing. Bruno Wolf, Berlin Charlottenberg 5, Kantstrasse 85, dated 9.4.36 (i.e. 9 April 1936). It is some twenty or so pages in length. However I should warn you that some of the pages are barely legible (though could probably be deciphered by someone who knows German - which I don’t). I could scan this document for you if you wish. (I have about two inches thick of documents about Zuse’s work, including a number of patents and patent applications, some pre-war, immediately some post-war, together with several typescripts from him. My plan is that this material will be added to the archive of my files held in the Special Collections section of Newcastle University Library. This already holds all the extensive correspondence that I was involved in while compiling Origins.) Cheers Brian On 24 Jan 2017, at 10:58, Mark Priestley <m.priestley(a)gmail.com<mailto:m.priestley@gmail.com>> wrote: Dear list, Zuse's 1936 patent "Method for Automatic Execution of Calculations with the Aid of Computers" is reprinted in Brian Randell's "Origins of Digital Computers" collections. Does anyone know if/where I can get hold of the German original? Thanks in advance. Mark _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org -- 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.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

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IBM 610
by John Impagliazzo 25 Apr '18

25 Apr '18

Hi All, Allegedly, some consider the IBM 610 Auto-Point computer (1959) the ‘first personal computer’. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html Is this true – even slightly true?? John John Impagliazzo, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Hofstra University IEEE Life Fellow ACM Distinguished Educator

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Email "inventor" claimant to run for U.S. Senate -- alternative facts about technology and democracy collide
by Andrew Meade McGee 18 Sep '17

18 Sep '17

Continuing with the ongoing saga of V. A. Shiva and his claims regarding the invention of e-mail, that gentleman has just announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. https://twitter.com/va_shiva/status/835420061993218048 As several SIGCIS contributors noted earlier this month, this nicely parallels the upcoming SHOT themes of technology and democracy. "Alternate facts" about the history of technology will play a major public element of this campaign next year. --Andrew

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Russian computing history conference
by Petri Paju 15 May '17

15 May '17

Hello all, Here's a short reminder of what's happening in computing and informatics history in Russia: the 4th "international conference "Development of computer technology and its software in Russia and the former Soviet Union: history and prospects (SORUCOM - 2017)", in early October 2017. Call for papers expired April 1 (but perhaps they are flexible). See more at: http://www.sorucom.org/en/ Best, Petri Petri Paju History of Industrialization & Innovation Group, Aalto University, and Department of Cultural History, University of Turku http://utu.academia.edu/PetriPaju

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Does a counterfactual history of the PC still lead us to the same place?
by Thomas Haigh 28 Apr '17

28 Apr '17

Replying more generally on the question of counterfactuals. Thanks to Andy, Evan, and others who replied on this. I will have a look at the papers they mention. In one of my more obscure publications, "Technology's Other Storytellers: Science Fiction as History of Technology," I made the argument that SF writers and historians of technology are both in the business of producing historical narratives in which technology plays a role in changing the course of historical development. The difference is that historians tell a story of what "actually" happened and usually stop their narratives before the time the book is finished, whereas SF writers trace a different chain of events and often follow that chain after the time the book is finished (though by the time the book is read the point of departure from our actual history is inevitably in the past - making SF a form of historical fiction). http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/TechnologysOtherStorytellersDRAFT.pdf I go on to argue that the counterfactual alternative, while usually implicit in the history of technology, is essential to making the historical writing analytical rather than just (as those from outside the field sometimes see it) a list of things that happened arranged end to end. Historical causes are always overdetermined, and there are always too many details to put in a narrative. By picking details and highlighting causes the historian is suggesting that, had those details been different or those particular causes lacking, events would have moved in a different direction. It would be fascinating to see more discussion of counterfactual history of computing. At the risk of being branded a technological determinist, my sense is that there was a lot less flexibility with respect to end points than with respect to the paths to get to them. Particular combinations of technology and business model make sense, and the question is more which firms and platforms can discover the winning model first and execute it best. For example, by the early 1980s the vision of a universal network that would allow email, home shopping, telecommunting, etc. was well established. Over the next decade efforts like OSI, viewdata services, AOL and other online services, smart set top boxes, etc. were funded to try to deliver on it. The contingent part is that it was the Internet/Web combo that blossomed to fill that need, meaning that features such as micropayments for online publishers were missing and email wasn't authenticated to a sender but, on the positive side, the network was open to different services and users. Those details all had profound influences on how online practices and businesses developed, e.g. the destruction of the newspaper industry. With respect to the evolution of personal computing, it's hard for me to imagine the big picture going particularly differently post-1980 if one assumes progress in hardware continuing at roughly the same pace. In the first half of the 1980s GUIs and advanced operating systems overtaxed available hardware, meaning that only expensive but still sluggish workstations could support them. These could only be supported by niche high value applications like engineering, and publishing where the graphical capabilities were crucial. So as some responses suggested, it was probably inevitable that the mass market platform of the mid-1980s would be a simple and efficient text-based OS that didn't impose too much overhead between applications and hardware. Hansen mentioned the Apple II GS - perhaps the real counterfactual is if Apple had introduced this in 1983 instead of Lisa, not crippled its performance, and then evolved it through multiple generations of compatible hardware. By the late 1980s hardware was getting cheaper and faster, GUIs were imposing less of a performance penalty, and mass market machines could hold enough RAM to make multitasking practical. The direction of the future was clear, but the path there over the next decade wasn't. Remember that NT ran on Mips, Alpha, and PowerPC as well as Intel. OS/2 ran windows 3.X apps and also supported multiple platforms. Apple, IBM and others were supporting a common hardware platform, and were supposed to produce Taligent as a common OS. Apple allowed clones, then banned them. There were efforts to standardize Unix. Linux made a push for the desktop. MacOS faltered badly in the late 1990s. Windows 9X was startlingly successful bridging users from the DOS-based 16 bit Windows 3.X to the industrial grade Windows NT underpinnings of Windows 2000 and XP. Intel fell way behind RISC performance but rallied with the later Pentiums. So if you go back and read the play by plays in the industry literature it was a time of incredible uncertainty and rapid change in which all kinds of grand plans and alliance fell apart with amazing speed and key products shipped years late. The other question, as mentioned earlier on the list, was open vs. closed business models for PC producers. Versus 1990 PC makers Apple had its own custom floppy drives, hardware, different processors, OS, keyboard connectors, etc. and users had only one place to by Macs. PC purchases could choose from thousands of suppliers, who were just buying components from thousands of Asian producers and screwing them into a case. In an era of rapid change the PC ecosystem drove down costs and encouraged rapid innovation in components such as graphics cards. This almost drove Apple out of business, and after Jobs returned caused it to retreat to a niche of high priced, good looking premium products. On the other hand, let's step back to look at where things settled down. Apple gave up on having a hardware platform of its own, bit by bit, finishing up with the processor shift to Intel in 2006. On the PC side, Intel integrated everything that was on half a dozen expansion cards into a couple of chips, meaning that PCs are pretty much standard. The shift to laptops and all in one designs means that PCs and Macs are both basically closed internally but can be expanded externally. Both platforms have stable, 64-bit operating systems with equivalent features. Both OSes are, technologically, a complete departure from 1980s PC systems - Windows being NT which is based on Culter's minicomputer projects, OSX being (as discussed by Hansen et al) NeXT Step which in turn is BSD Unix. So the two models have converged in the same place - I liked the BMW vs Ford remark attributed to Jobs in an earlier post, but while BMW is more profitable than Ford (particularly on a per-vehicle basis) either can sell you a fast, comfortable vehicle that will functionally do everything you need. The difference are design, branding, and social cachet. Here's what I mean about the convergence of end points: if the 1990s had gone completely differently and Linux had wiped out Windows on the desktop, or everyone was running OS/2 on Alpha, or Taligent on PowerPC had swept all before it, by about 2005 there probably wouldn't be very much difference. People would still have rock sold, modern operating systems running on cheap fast hardware that was shrinking into laptops or all in one systems. So I can definitely sell a narrative where a different platform dominates early-2000s personal computing. I just tend to feel that it would be running on commodity hardware, be integrated into stylish compact boxes, and do basically what Windows XP and OS X do. I suppose there are some significant differences, for example whether Microsoft makes money on each PC, but that matters more to Microsoft than to users. I can see plenty of paths not taken, but they all seem to lead to the same place. Is this a failure of my imagination? Tom

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Some responses re Lisa/Mac
by Thomas Haigh 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

What an interesting set of replies. Good job SIGCIS! I'll respond to many of these points, but group them into a single message to avoid spamming you. (People who like clean inboxes: remember there is a digest mode available!). First off, this whole question would probably amount to one or two paragraphs in the project I'm working on. Like many aspects of personal computer history, it seems like there ought to be a rich secondary literature to draw on by now, but instead we're still reliant on classic journalistic accounts like Mortiz, Cringely, and Levy. Paul is right: of course I meant Macintosh II, not Apple II. Even the most contrarian historian would have to admit that the Apple II was good for Apple, at least initially. Jobs as industrial designer/emulator of Land. Interest points. As Mahoney liked to say, including his article on the importance of historical metaphor to the rhetoric of software engineering, nothing is unprecedented. But the actor's choice of precedent has very important implications for their actions. Industrial design is important here, and perhaps he'd rather have a box that captures his ideas and doesn't sell than a clunky one that does sell. OTOH, he was a patron and abuser of industrial designers rather than a designer in his own right. Some of the responses remind me that there were many other 68000 based machines in the mid-1980s, beyond the Mac and Lisa. Early Sun and Apollo workstations created a viable niche for graphics workstations. They, IIRC, had similar specs to the Lisa and were if anything more expensive - but targeted technical computing niches. This also points out the importance of expectations and business models. Lisa is called a failure because it only sold 100,000 units in two years, as Apple was expected to sell large volumes for mainstream business use. If a workstation startup had sold 100,000 units it would have been seen as hugely successful. For example, in 3Q 1985 Apollo, then the leading workstation firm, had revenues of about $55 million. That would be about 5,500 Lisas at the $10K launch price. So I suspect that in 1983, $10K is what it a powerful 32-bit networked graphics workstation had to sell for, and the problem was that Apple (and Xerox with the Star) were targeting the markets that couldn't yet support that price tag. Also, in the case of Apple at least, it didn't have the culture or sales machine to effectively target the market it chose. Some companies made comparable hardware more cheaply - most notably Atari in the "power without the price" days of the Atari ST (launched 1985, as Mac-like hardware was getting cheaper to build). This was cheaper than the Mac, added color graphics, and even had the hard drive port that the Mac was missing. It didn't sell at all well in the US, except to musicians who liked the midi ports, but was fairly popular in Britain, particularly with enthusiasts. I had one, and as Morten pointed out Apple was just too expensive for personal users in Europe. In Germany it was widely used by small businesses. The biggest problem was probably the cheap and dirty operating system - a Mac knockoff called GEM with a version of CPM underneath. This points to the importance and difficulty of OS development. The workstations tended to use UNIX-derived systems, which reduced the burden of development. In terms of hardware, the Lisa was as I understand basically a Mac with a bigger screen, networking, and a hard drive. It's the focus of the OS on personal interaction that makes them more profoundly different. Also, as Hansen mentions, the success of Apple in gaining third party application support, including PageMaker, which Cringely used to define the concept of a "killer app" (i.e. something you'd buy a Mac Plus, a hard drive, and a LaserWriter just to run). Although that particular combo must have cost as much as a Lisa, and surely a successful Lisa would have been at least as well placed to win adoption for desktop publishing. It is, however, an example of an application that couldn't run effectively on a DOS PC. Another 68000 machine, the Amiga, found success in video production. That leads us to the importance, as Kimon suggested, of taking the "fan" side of Apple seriously, in as much as something in the design and personality of the Mac did inspire a loyal following. That's borne out by Justin's memory of the students loving the underpowered little Macs. So maybe Jobs deserves credit for that - hard to separate out the perversity and the brilliance of the original Mac. In the big picture it's clear that all these 68000 based GUI machines of the mid-1980s were looking for viable niches, in part because straight forward spreadsheet and word-processing still ran faster and more cheaply on IBM compatibles. The GUI added a lot of overhead. So maybe it's inevitable that the mainstream standard of the 1980s would be something like the PC. OTOH, people in the industry at the time expected GUIs and multitasking OSes to become mainstream sooner or later. If Apple could have successfully established the Lisa as a high end business platform and moved it down-market later that would probably have given it a better shot at taking on the dominance of the PC in the late 1980s than its actual course of establishing the Mac as with enthusiasts and education markets and trying to move it upwards into the business mainstream. Best wishes, Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memory of Harry Huskey
by Brian L. Stuart 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

It is a sad day indeed. Dr. Huskey was one of the most influential, yet least known of the early pioneers. In addition to his work on the ENIAC, the Pilot ACE, the SWAC, and the Bendix G-15 were all designed or influenced by him. As mentioned in the memorial statement, one of his PhD students was Wirth. In addition, one of his master's students was Ken Thompson. If I'm not mistaken, Dr. Huskey was the last living member of any of the pre-industry computer development teams. I cannot help but feel that this marks the passing of the founding generation of our field and the end of an era. BLS -------------------------------------------- On Fri, 4/14/17, Brian Berg <brianberg(a)gmail.com> wrote: In Memory Of Harry Huskey COMPUTER PIONEER AND FOUNDING UC SANTA CRUZ FACULTY MEMBER ...

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History of computer advertising
by Enrico Natale 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Dear list members, For an article I’m writing I am interested in the history of computer adverts in newspapers (1955-1995), but I am having a hard time to find literature on the topic. Maybe some of you could suggest me some literature on computer advertising ? Also, I would be interested to find collections of computer adverts, possibly digitized and accessible online. Any suggestions ? Best, Enrico Natale

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Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
by Thomas Haigh 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Hello SIGCIS, I'm looking for your opinions. I'm currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I'm facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world's most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley's Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer - but tech wasn't ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs' "reality distortion field" to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn't get real multitasking and other "grown up" OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs' hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn't officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn't sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn't be compatible, and it's clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it's chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the "grown up" managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs' success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I'm still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
by Morten Bay 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Tom, this is a great and underexplored subject. I would only add a couple of points to consider if you haven't already: - International markets. The Apple computers were far less succesful or subject to the same veneration in continental Europe as they were in the U.S. I think there are some interesting cultural differences to be considered there, including language and pride in locally developed products (Olivetti?) - Also consider the trajectory of micros. There was a generation who grew up with the micros in the 80s and the free flow of pirated games and software in that market. I'm part of that generation, and for many of us, the closed Apple ecosystem was not a natural successor when we left the C64s and the ZX Spectrums. The Commodore Amigas and Ataris that came out as a continuation of the microcomputer wave served as bridges to the PC platform, rather than to where Apple was at the time. Looking forward to reading what comes out of your research. Morten From: Thomas Haigh Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 1:18 PM Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple ashot at market leadership? To: members(a)sigcis.org Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom

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