July 2018 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Criticism of von Neumann historiography
by Richard Vahrenkamp 08 Jul '18

08 Jul '18

Dear SIGCIS researchers, Dear SIGCIS researchers, In my lecture at the ICOHTEC annual meeting in St. Etienne, I point to the dominance of the subject of the Neumann Computer in the historiography and show on the basis of numerous sources that in the Californian cluster of the aircraft industry, in addition to the IAS in Princeton, a second birthplace of the computing machines (mainly with analog computers) was created after 1944, which was previously considered by the research little. The aircraft cluster found no use for the digital von Neumann machine. Since von Neumann's machine was merely academic and was not used in industry, John von Neumann had to invent fields of application in the future as the legitimacy of his project. He opted for meteorology - although it is not clear that analog computers could not offer solutions here as well. Until 1960, the race between analog and digital computers in aircraft and missile industry was not decided in favor of the latter; in 1961, NASA commissioned a large general-purpose analog computer for the Saturn V project. My thesis of the aviation industry as the source of computing machines after 1944 can also be applied to other countries with strong aircraft industries, such as England and the Soviet Union. It was also no coincidence that Zuse‘s Z3, the first electric digital computer in Germany, was created in 1941 in the context of the Berlin aircraft industry. With kind regards from Berlin Richard Vahrenkamp -- ******************************************** Prof. Dr. Richard Vahrenkamp Logistik Consulting Berlin Phone 0177- 628 3325 E-Mail: Vahrenkamp2016(a)gmx.de Web: www.vahrenkamp.org Trendelenburgstr. 16 14057 Berlin *********************************************

3 2

Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Criticism of von Neumann historiography
by Brian Randell 07 Jul '18

07 Jul '18

Hi Richard: This thread, and your reference to Saturn V, prompts me to recall that when in 1957 I joined the English Electric Company’s Atomic Power Division, in Whetstone, just outside Leicester, analogue computing was in the ascendant there. There was just one digital computer, a DEUCE, but I and my colleagues were confident of the superior prospects for digital over analogue computing - and were soon proved right. We knew a little of the large efforts at Whetstone on analogue computer construction, culminating in a huge one called SATURN that filled a large two storey building. This project was I understood still in difficulties when I left English Electric in 1964 to join the IBM T J Watson Research Center. So I am surprised to learn now that the analogue efforts at Whetstone were regarded as a big success into the 1970s, at least according to this account, which I’ve just found: "In 1957 the Consortium, now know as NNC, constructed at Whetstone an analogue computer known as PLUTO having 115 amplifiers. This was followed in 1959 by MARS, having 210 amplifiers. Both machines were phased out in 1959/1960 and replaced by Saturn having six consoles each having 252 amplifiers, 600 potentiometer and 76 non-linear devices. Over the years these consoles were trunked together to yield a 1500 amplifier which was subsequently supplemented in 1972 with an EAI 8812 analogue computer. It is believed that the SATURN was the largest analogue computer ever built. Excellent service was given by this machine until 1978 when it was scrapped." Advances in Nuclear Science and Technology, Volume 17: Simulators for Nuclear Power (eds. Lewins and Becker) p. 7. https://books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=1461321832 I do recall one of the analogue computers being scrapped, and one of my colleagues being almost in tears because he found out too late that it had been carted away, before he had a chance to plunder it his electronics hobbies. Cheers Brian Randell On 6 Jul 2018, at 07:54, Richard Vahrenkamp <vahrenkamp2016(a)gmx.de<mailto:vahrenkamp2016@gmx.de>> wrote: Dear SIGCIS researchers, In my lecture at the ICOHTEC annual meeting in St. Etienne, I point to the dominance of the subject of the Neumann Computer in the historiography and show on the basis of numerous sources that in the Californian cluster of the aircraft industry, in addition to the IAS in Princeton, a second birthplace of the computing machines (mainly with analog computers) was created after 1944, which was previously considered by the research little. The aircraft cluster found no use for the digital von Neumann machine. Since von Neumann's machine was merely academic and was not used in industry, John von Neumann had to invent fields of application in the future as the legitimacy of his project. He opted for meteorology - although it is not clear that analog computers could not offer solutions here as well. Until 1960, the race between analog and digital computers in aircraft and missile industry was not decided in favor of the latter; in 1961, NASA commissioned a large general-purpose analog computer for the Saturn V project. My thesis of the aviation industry as the source of computing machines after 1944 can also be applied to other countries with strong aircraft industries, such as England and the Soviet Union. It was also no coincidence that Zuse‘s Z3, the first electric digital computer in Germany, was created in 1941 in the context of the Berlin aircraft industry. With kind regards from Berlin Richard Vahrenkamp -- ******************************************** Prof. Dr. Richard Vahrenkamp Logistik Consulting Berlin Phone 0177- 628 3325 E-Mail: Vahrenkamp2016(a)gmx.de<mailto:Vahrenkamp2016@gmx.de> Web: www.vahrenkamp.org<http://www.vahrenkamp.org/> Trendelenburgstr. 16 14057 Berlin ********************************************* _______________________________________________ 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 EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk<mailto:Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk> PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

3 3

CFP - ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*)
by Michael Ekstrand 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

*We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2019 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*) to be held in Atlanta, Georgia in January/February 2019. FAT* is an interdisciplinary conference to connect social, policy and technical domains around broad questions of fairness, accountability and transparency in computing systems, including (but not limited) to machine learning. FAT* features a dedicated track for papers in Law, Policy, and Humanistic/Critical Analysis, and encourages submission from a wide array of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds.The inaugural conference at NYU in February 2018 had an acceptance rate of 25% and was sold-out, with 450 international attendees from across academia, industry and public policy.Papers (8-10 pages, due August 23) are double-blind peer reviewed and published in conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. Conference proceedings are often final publishing venues for computer scientists, but to accommodate a range of disciplinary needs, authors can opt for non-archival submission, subject to the same review process but only appearing as an abstract in the proceedings.Please forward this call to other people or groups you think may be interested.For more details, see https://fatconference.org/2019/cfp.html <https://fatconference.org/2019/cfp.html>*

1 0

IEEE Spectrum Chip Hall of Fame new inductees
by Stephen Cass 03 Jul '18

03 Jul '18

Hello all, The official announcement is July 5th, but I wanted to give you folks a heads up that we've soft-launched the 2018 class of inductees for *IEEE Spectrum*'s Chip Hall of Fame, which tries to tell the stories behind the invention of influential integrated circuits. This years inductees are: · The Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor on a single chip. Intended as a quick side-venture to make some money for then-fledging Intel, this project almost crashed and burned due to a lack of staff. · The RCA CDP 1802 processor, which helped pioneer the concept of having computers in the home for learning and fun. But probably the greatest achievement of Joe Weisbecker’s visionary CPU was when it was used as the brains of the NASA Galileo probe that orbited Jupiter. · The Photobit PB-100 image sensor. Spun out from an attempt to make faster, cheaper, and better cameras for NASA’s later space probes, this sensor first appeared in inexpensive webcams, and its technology became the basis for the smartphone camera revolution. · The Philips TDA7000 radio receiver. This FM radio IC was small enough to put into a pencil, and showed up in countless gadgets. But getting the chip into production over corporate resistance required sneaking illicitly-made demo radios to Japan in order to stoke demand. · The Nvidia NV20 graphics processing unit. Nvidia gambled that making this, the first programmable GPU, would be a desirable boost to developers looking to feed the demand for ever more realistic video games. The NV20 serendipitously opened the door to today’s machine-learning revolution when such programmable GPUs turned out to be the perfect hardware for training deep neural networks. All can be found here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/chip-hall-of-fame

1 0

My 1600-page book on the history of computing has just been published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin/Boston
by herbert.bruderer＠bluewin.ch 02 Jul '18

02 Jul '18

Dear colleagues: My new two-volume book on the history of computing (1600 pages) has just been published. You will find all details in English and in German on the webpage of the publisher, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin/Boston. Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, volume 1 https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/480555 Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, volume 2 https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/503373 Many thanks and best wishes Herbert Bruderer Book reviews (1st edition) Mathematical Association of America (MAA) http://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/meilensteine-der-rechentechnik Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (DMV) in German and in English https://www.mathematik.de/leseecke/geschichte/939-meilensteine-der-rechente… Bruderer Informatik Seehaldenstraße 26 Postfach 47 CH-9401 Rorschach Switzerland Telefon +41 71 855 77 11

1 0