July 2020 - 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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How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History
by Brian Randell 04 Aug '20

04 Aug '20

Hi: "How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History" is the title of a paper by Allison Marsh that has just been published by IEEE Spectrum. It starts: > For an inventor, the main challenge might be technical, but sometimes it’s timing that determines success. Steven Sasson had the technical talent but developed his prototype for an all-digital camera a couple of decades too early. > > A CCD from Fairchild was used in Kodak’s first digital camera prototype > It was 1974, and Sasson, a young electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak Co., in Rochester, N.Y., was looking for a use for Fairchild Semiconductor’s new type 201 charge-coupled device. His boss suggested that he try using the 100-by-100-pixel CCD to digitize an image. So Sasson built a digital camera to capture the photo, store it, and then play it back on another device. > > Sasson’s camera was a kluge of components. He salvaged the lens and exposure mechanism from a Kodak XL55 movie camera to serve as his camera’s optical piece. The CCD would capture the image, which would then be run through a Motorola analog-to-digital converter, stored temporarily in a DRAM array of a dozen 4,096-bit chips, and then transferred to audio tape running on a portable Memodyne data cassette recorder. The camera weighed 3.6 kilograms, ran on 16 AA batteries, and was about the size of a toaster. > > After working on his camera on and off for a year, Sasson decided on 12 December 1975 that he was ready to take his first picture. Lab technician Joy Marshall agreed to pose. The photo took about 23 seconds to record onto the audio tape. But when Sasson played it back on the lab computer, the image was a mess—although the camera could render shades that were clearly dark or light, anything in between appeared as static. So Marshall’s hair looked okay, but her face was missing. She took one look and said, “Needs work.” > > Sasson continued to improve the camera, eventually capturing impressive images of different people and objects around the lab. He and his supervisor, Garreth Lloyd, received U.S. Patent No. 4,131,919 for an electronic still camera in 1978, but the project never went beyond the prototype stage. Sasson estimated that image resolution wouldn’t be competitive with chemical photography until sometime between 1990 and 1995, and that was enough for Kodak to mothball the project. The article ends: > Digital cameras also changed how historians conduct their research > For professional historians, the advent of digital photography has had other important implications. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about how digital cameras in general, and smartphones in particular, have changed the practice of historical research. At the 2020 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, for instance, Ian Milligan, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, gave a talk in which he revealed that 96 percent of historians have no formal training in digital photography and yet the vast majority use digital photographs extensively in their work. About 40 percent said they took more than 2,000 digital photographs of archival material in their latest project. W. Patrick McCray of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told a writer with The Atlantic that he’d accumulated 77 gigabytes of digitized documents and imagery for his latest book project [an aspect of which he recently wrote about for Spectrum]. > > So let’s recap: In the last 45 years, Sasson took his first digital picture, digital cameras were brought into the mainstream and then embedded into another pivotal technology—the cellphone and then the smartphone—and people began taking photos with abandon, for any and every reason. And in the last 25 years, historians went from thinking that looking at a photograph within the past year was a significant marker of engagement with the past to themselves compiling gigabytes of archival images in pursuit of their research. > So are those 1.4 trillion digital photographs that we’ll collectively take this year a part of history? I think it helps to consider how they fit into the overall historical narrative. A century ago, nobody, not even a science fiction writer, predicted that someone would take a photo of a parking lot to remember where they’d left their car. A century from now, who knows if people will still be doing the same thing. In that sense, even the most mundane digital photograph can serve as both a personal memory and a piece of the historical record. Full story at https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/how-the-digital-c… Cheers Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

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eBay is selling an Apple 1 for $1.5 million
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 03 Aug '20

03 Aug '20

https://www.ebay.com/i/174195921349. There is at least a "Make offer" button. I have to say that this is more than a little unhinged, possibly a further sign (as if one were needed) of the approach of the end times. Though I did recently pay $250 for a working Apple IIe with disk drives and monitor. Simple mathematics suggests for a Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg this would be a very much smaller purchase relative to net worth. Full description at http://vi.raptor.ebaydesc.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemDescV4 <http://vi.raptor.ebaydesc.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemDescV4&item=17419592 1349&category=162075&pm=1&ds=0&t=1582079090000&ver=0> &item=174195921349&category=162075&pm=1&ds=0&t=1582079090000&ver=0 Also an entry in the Apple 1 registry (which of course): https://www.apple1registry.com/en/79.html. Best wishes, Tom

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Obscure Edwardian science and engineering magazines, and Percy Ludgate
by Brian Randell 30 Jul '20

30 Jul '20

Hi: For the past several years I have been involved in an extensive project led by Dr Brian Coghlan of Trinity College Dublin that is researching the life and work of Percy Ludgate. The paper that Ludgate published in the Scientific Record of the Royal Dublin Society in 1909 is notable for its description of his design for what we would now term a mechanical programmable digital computer, the first after Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” of over sixty years earlier. In this paper Ludgate said he had made “many drawings of the machine and its parts”, but neither this paper nor the one subsequent article he is known to have published (about Babbage’s machine, in the 1914 Napier Tercentenary Celebration Handbook) contained any illustrations. We have recently determined that Ludgate’s 1909 paper attracted notice at the time (beyond its review by C.V Boys in the journal “Nature”), in that it led promptly to articles in two popular engineering magazines. These were “Engineering” (a London-based monthly magazine founded in 1865 that is still going strongly) and “The English Mechanic and World of Science” (which appeared weekly from 1865 to 1926). Both of these articles included a drawing - presumably by Ludgate - of his “Irish logarithm” multiplication mechanism! Neither of these articles was at all easily found. I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other obscure magazines and journals, or other sources, not necessarily from the UK, whose contents have so far escaped Google’s attention, which might include contemporaneous commentary on Ludgate’s paper and machine or his involvement with the Napier Tercentenary Celebration - and also for help in searching their contents. Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG 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

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Was email really already 75% of ARPANET traffic by 1973?
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 30 Jul '20

30 Jul '20

Hello SIGCIS, Our of the last unsourced footnotes for the Revised History of Modern Computing holds a note to myself concerning a possibly exaggerated factoid from the "Hobbes' Internet Timeline." https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ According to the timeline entry for 1973: "ARPA study shows email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic." Keep in mind that Tomlinson sent the first network mail in 1971 and mail technologies were rather immature for the first few years. If that is true it's certainly a fact worth including in the book to demonstrate the very rapid spread of email on the ARPANET. But "ARPANET study" is not something I can use to confirm the original source. I haven't been able to find anything so specific in Janet Abbate's book Inventing the Internet though she features email prominently and agree that its rise was both rapid and unexpected. Ian Hardy's undergraduate thesis, an early historical look at Internet email, does not include this particular figure. https://www.livinginternet.com/References/Ian%20Hardy%20Email%20Thesis.txt Craig Partridge's IEEE Annals article "Technical Development of Internet Email" didn't, on a recent skim, seem to say anything on this topic either. Does anyone know where this number might be coming from? Or have a well-sourced alternative for slightly later year like 1975 or 76? Best wishes, Tom

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Help on Coffee and Computing
by James Cortada 23 Jul '20

23 Jul '20

The IT community of users, programmers, vendors, etc have for decades had a reputation for being extensive consumers of coffee. In some parts of the IT ecosystem, especially among those who work odd hours, such as programmers, computer operators, and vendor field engineers. I am studying the corporate ephemera of this industry and its cultural attachments, such as coffee cups and what they tell us about computing. Do any of you have any information, ephemera, or sources and citations on this specific issue of coffee and computing? I can get many industry folks, such as IBM retirees, to wax eloquently on the subject in their private FB accounts, but that is not enough. Corporate culture is tough to study. Thanks in advance for your help. Jim -- James W. Cortada Senior Research Fellow Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota jcortada(a)umn.edu 608-274-6382

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Origin of "Hobbes" figures for Web server growth during the 1990s
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 21 Jul '20

21 Jul '20

Hello SIGCIS, One of the final highlighted items in the endnotes for the Revised History of Modern Computing is a note to support figures given for the rapid growth of Web servers during the 1990s. I'm writing to share what I was able to figure out with a few hours of web searching and to ask if anyone has more authoritative knowledge of this. When we drafted the relevant part of the text, we just grabbed numbers from the so-called "Hobbes' Internet Timeline" at https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/#Growth The 1990s data appears in the tabular inset. 10, 50, and 100,000 are suspiciously round numbers, and 1 is clearly a retroactive data point rather than the result of a count. Other numbers like 646,162 give the impression of an actual count of some kind. So now the challenge is to figure out where those numbers came from and what was being counted. An archive version from 2001 (https://web.archive.org/web/20010220202319/https://www.zakon.org/robert/int ernet/timeline/#Growth <https://web.archive.org/web/20010220202319/https:/www.zakon.org/robert/inte rnet/timeline/#Growth> ) has more detailed data for 1996-2000, but lacks the first three data points for 1/90 to 12/92. A note at the bottom reads "WWW growth summary compiled from: - Web growth summary page by Matthew Gray of MIT: http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html - Netcraft at http://www.netcraft.com/survey/" So then I followed http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html which, remarkably, is still live. The personal page of Matthew K. Gray provides the source of the Hobbes figures from 1993 to early 1996. The final two rows (not used by Hobbes) are labelled as "est" for estimate, which implies that the other rows are somehow counted. I found more information at http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/growth/ which explains "The primary tool used to collect the data presented here was the World Wide Web Wanderer, the first automated Web agent or "spider". The Wanderer was first functional in spring of 1993 and performed regular traversals of the Web from June 1993 to June 1995." That solves the mystery of the round 100,000 number for 1/96 which must also be an estimate, though it is not marked as such. He appears to have carried out the measurement work as an undergraduate physics student, some of it while taking a leave to start a company called "net Genesis" to develop web tools. Gray never got around to posting the month-by-month counts he claimed to have made, just the five data points for the six-monthly intervals. So his link for "Web Growth Data" http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-data.html just goes to a note that "The full data sets on web growth will be published here sometime when I get time. Do NOT send me email asking for the data in advance, asking me when it will be available or anything of the sort. It will be available sometime later. It will include the data from the comprehensive list of sites." Gray's MIT site points people to a newer site, which is no longer functional. But I think this is probably the same guy: http://x.gray.org/ and http://matthew.gray.org/ If he still had his original month-by-month lists of all known websites for the period maybe he'd be willing to donate it to an archive. He asked people not to email, but maybe after 23 years it would be OK. Apparently he works for Google now. So the measurements do not come from an official MIT research project, and the data wasn't peer reviewed or even published online except as a one page summary. But on the other hand we can't go back and crawl the early web ourselves, so they may nevertheless be the best numbers available for June 1993-June 1995. Interesting aside: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler) suggests that the first search engine powered by a crawler did not come online until April 1994, but of course crawling the web to count is easier than crawling to produce a searchable public index. This also implies that the rest of the data comes from http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ which is still being updated to this day. The numbers do more or less match. However, the current Netcraft graph shows only "host names" until around the year 2000, at which point it also begins to graph a very much smaller number of "Active sites." https://www.netcraft.com/active-sites/ explains the difference between hosts and active sites thus: In the early days of the web, hostnames were a good indication of actively managed content providing information and services to the internet community. The situation is now considerably more blurred - the web includes a great deal of activity, but also a considerable quantity of sites that are untouched by human hand, produced automatically at the point of customer acquisition by domain registration or hosting service companies, advertising providers or speculative domain registrants, or search-engine optimisation companies. The biggest domain registrars are large enough to be significant in the context of the whole survey. For example, GoDaddy (17M hostnames) and 1&1 (10M hostnames) make up 16% of the 168M hostnames surveyed in May 2008. Circa 1996-1997, the number of distinct IP addresses would have been a good approximation to the number of real sites, since hosting companies would typically allocate an IP address to each site with distinct content, and multiple domain names could point to the IP address being used to serve the same site content. However, with the adoption of HTTP/1.1 virtual hosting, and the availability of load balancing technology it is possible to reliably host a great number of active sites on a single (or relatively few) IP addresses. In June 2000, the first month where both numbers are given, the estimate is 7.5 million active sites vs. 17 million host names. So our current plan is avoid citing the Hobbes page at all, and instead to cite M K Gray's personal page at MIT for the early 1990s numbers and the Netcraft survey estimate of web hostnames for the later ones, with a caveat that the hostname counts for 1998-99 were likely already inflated by domain squatters and spammers. Anyone one got anything to add, or any better sources on 1990s web server numbers and counting methodology to point us to? Thanks, Tom

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Introduction and Humanity and the IBM System/360-descended mainframe
by Reg Harbeck 17 Jul '20

17 Jul '20

Hello, SIGCIS. I am happy to have joined your listserv and be in such excellent company. I've joined this listserv at the recommendation of Dr. Willard McCarty, founder of the Humanist listserv, which I've also joined, and for the same reason: I'm working on my second draft of my thesis for my Master of Arts (Interdisciplinary Humanities) with a subject of the humanity of the IBM System/360-descended mainframe. I've been working on that platform since 1987, the year both of these listservs were founded, as a technologist and, more recently, ecosystem enabler. You can see what I've been up to if you Google "Reg Harbeck" "mainframe" - lots of both technical and cultural content. My research, experience, and perhaps predisposition, lead me to believe that the best of our human and humanities history were brought to bear in the development and announcement of IBM's System/360 mainframe on April 7, 1964. Prior to that, everything from the lessons of deep history (e.g. "measure twice, cut once" and other established practical and philosophical principles), more recent history (e.g. Jacquard, Babbage, WW II, Turing, Von Neumann, Fr. Roberto Busa, etc.), and input from experience and experienced users (e.g. the SHARE user group, founded in August of 1955 - still alive at SHARE.org) from the first two decades of electronic computing, funnelled into the design and creation of this system. Since then, while the actual platform was used by people studying the humanities, including the humanity of computing, until more autonomous systems became generally available, its further advances were more driven by the practical needs of serving humanity - especially business - than by philosophical considerations. Today, the modern mainframe descended from S/360, aka IBM Z, runs the world economy, with the large majority of credit card, financial, tax, and other government and business data of record. But most personal computing happens on other platforms - for now. But Moore's Law has ended, and the world is refocusing from novelty to sustainability, just on time for this same mainframe platform to become an increasingly evident option for quality cloud services. All of which leads to my request from this list: I'm still trying to tie the threads together well enough to ensure my thesis statement is logically supportable by the data I've put together, and my current version of that statement, still somewhat in flux, is something like, "The IBM System/360 mainframe and its successors are a definitive manifestation of the best of historical humanity and humanities, and it has continued to develop in a definitive role as part of our shared humanity, now and into the unforeseeable future." So I would be most grateful if anyone has any publications or other sources they can recommend that speak specifically to these origins and this journey. While I have gathered a great deal of data so far, I'd rather have the same thing recommended to me multiple times than miss an important document that could be the missing link in my thinking. Thank you all so much for reading and considering this, and for your anticipated responses. - Reg Harbeck Reg(a)Harbeck.ca +1.403.605.7986

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"In Event of Moon Disaster" Screening - Deep Fakes and AI
by Deborah Douglas 17 Jul '20

17 Jul '20

Friends, Next week the MIT Museum will be presenting a program on “Deep Fakes” and AI. This video was originally released in Amsterdam last fall by the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality. You may have seen clips or other articles including the promise of a spring release. The pandemic delayed that release until now. Next week is an opportunity to both screen the video and participate in Q&A. Debbie Douglas At In Event of Moon Disaster - Live Screening and Q&A, the live stream of the art installation short, seven minute film of a speech by Richard Nixon he never actually made. Using deep fake techniques“In Event of Moon Disaster” will empower and educate the public on how to discern reality from deepfakes on their own. The piece is designed by a collaborative of artists and computer scientists and directed by Francesca Panetta along with co-director Halsey Burgund. In “In Event of Moon Disaster,” the team has reimagined the story of the moon landing. In a telecast, President Nixon reads a contingency speech written for him by his speech writer, Bill Safire, “in event of moon disaster” which he was to read if the Apollo 11 astronauts had not been able to return to Earth. In this, faked news reel Richard Nixon is seen reading this speech from the Oval Office. To recreate this moving elegy that never happened, the team used deep learning techniques such as synthetic speech working and video dialogue replacement techniques. The resulting video is highly believable, highlighting the possibilities of deepfake technology today. "Our goal was to use the most advanced artificial intelligence techniques available today to create the most believable result possible — and then point to it and say, ‘This is fake; here’s how we did it; and here’s why we did it,’” says Halsey Burgund. Program: In Event of Moon Disaster – Live Screening and Q&A Date: July 20, 2020 Time: 12 ET (9 PT, 17 BST) Youtube link: https://youtu.be/ur8wl20nt9Y Directors: Francesca Panetta & Halsey Burgund Hosts: Loren Hammonds, Senior Programmer, Tribeca Film Festival Brought to you by: Mozilla, the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, & the MIT Museum [cid:5D080649-5FCD-4B39-9131-A33FCA90C917@lan] • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Greg DeFrancis ┃ Director of Engagement and Cambridge Science Festival MIT Museum ┃ Massachusetts Institute of Technology gregd1(a)mit.edu<mailto:gregd1@mit.edu> ┃ 617.253.0527 (o)┃ 802.299.9075 (m) The MIT Museum<https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/> is closed to visitors until further notice due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room N51-209 • 265 Massachusetts Avenue • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 • ddouglas(a)mit.edu<mailto:ddouglas@mit.edu> • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://mitmuseum.mit.edu<http://mitmuseum.mit.edu/> • she/her/hers

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Spacewar(!) contributor Robert A. Sanders says lose the point.
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 17 Jul '20

17 Jul '20

Hello SIGCIS, Robert A. Saunders, one of the contributors to the original Spacewar(!) game has given permission to share his response to yesterday's post. According to Levy (p. 43), "In the later stages of programming, Saunders helped Slug Russell out, and they hacked a few intense six-to-eight hour sessions." Levy also credits Saunders as co-constructor of the first computer joysticks (p.45). Asked by Arthur Daemmrich whether "you have information / evidence that the exclamation mark was an integral part of the name of the program, Spacewar!?" Saunders replied "I do not recall that anyone made a point of distinction of this at the time. However, the exclamation point usage seems to have become common, and I suppose that it could continue to do so. But, in view of the comment below, it is plausible (and perhaps sensible) to eliminate the exclamation point - which I think I would prefer." Meanwhile, the Talk page for the Wikipedia article references this page for support of what I think the hackers would probably have called the "pointful" position: https://www.crummy.com/2013/02/02/0. It reports on an event at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2013. "I asked Russell the question that's been burning in my mind for years: why does Spacewar! have an exclamation mark in its name? His answer: "Once I got it working, I thought it deserved an exclamation point!" I also asked Russell if he considered any other names for the game. "Nope."" So the Spacewar(!) creators themselves to not appear to be of one mind on this point, but if you believe that creators have a moral right to name things that's sufficiently strong to set aside previously widespread usage (which appears to be the logic behind general adoption of Spacewar! over the past fifteen years) then you might reasonably conclude because Russell created more of the game his wishes should predominate. Best wishes, Tom

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