August 2020 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

computer user groups article
by Jonathan Coopersmith 21 Aug '20

21 Aug '20

>From Adam Lashinsky's *Fortune Data Sheet* newsletter, August 20: *FOOD FOR THOUGHT * Way before Slack and Reddit and pretty much anything online, people used to swap information about technology and computers by meeting up in real life. Tech writer Esther Schindler has a great deep dive <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://links.info.fortune.com/u/click?_t=5c2d88…> at Ars Technica into the history of computer user groups. *Back when the microcomputer industry was smaller, it was easy to get access to the movers-and-shakers—often before they moved or shook anything. User groups gave everyone the opportunity to learn about technology, often from the people who invented it.* *Harry McCracken attended Boston Computer Society meetings beginning in 1979, and he recalls its Q&A sessions with fondness. “The questions were so tough,” the longtime tech journalist reminisces. “There was no hero worship, just smart computer users asking sensible questions.”* *“Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Adobe were the headliners,” recalls a 1980s member of the Oklahoma City PC User Group. “They gave presentations that drew hundreds and provided wonderful giveaways of full versions of their software. You could always expect that the introduction of new versions of their products would be a big event, much like the way Samsung and Apple launch new hardware today.”* Stay sane, keep washing those hands, and practice social solidarity as well as distancing, Jonathan Jonathan Coopersmith Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4236 979.291.2925 (cell) 979.862.4314 (fax) Racial disparities in waiting to vote: https://theconversation.com/it-takes-a-long-time-to-vote-141267 To teach or not to teach: https://www.tact.org/post/to-teach-in-person-or-not-that-is-the-question *FAXED. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine* (Johns Hopkins University Press) is the co-recipient of the 2016 Business History Conference Hagley Prize for best book in business history.

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submissions to Annals of the History of Computing
by hemmendd＠union.edu 18 Aug '20

18 Aug '20

SIGCIS members, Con has asked me to serve as acting EIC of Annals for the rest of the year as he deals with some urgent matters. I see my main task as keeping the pipeline full for the coming year or more. We have several special issues under way, and expect two more proposals soon. Our queue of regular articles is small and I am writing now to ask if you have anything in progress or ready to publish that you might submit to Annals as a peer-reviewed article. A small queue means a short time to publication, as we like to hae two regular and two special issues each year. Please send us your work! Best wishes, David Hemmendinger hemmendd(a)union.edu Professor Emeritus http://athena.union.edu/~hemmendd Computer Science Dept. +1 518 346 4489 Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308 FAX: +1 518 388 6789 Acting Editor-in-chief, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

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Reminder: SIGCIS Community Values and Acceptable Use Policy
by Irish, Sharon Lee 17 Aug '20

17 Aug '20

Dear SIGCIS listserv members, We hope this message finds you healthy and coping as well as possible. You may recall that when we re-opened the SIGCIS listserv in September of 2017, we indicated that we would send out the Acceptable Use Policy and the Statement of Community Values on an occasional basis as reminders of our commitments. SIGCIS officers put considerable time and substantial thought into these documents and we’d like to share them with you again. The Statement of Community Values is on the About page of the sigcis.org site, https://www.sigcis.org/about_values The Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) is also on the sigcis.org site https://www.sigcis.org/aup; we will revisit these policies, as needed. We, the volunteer moderators, use this AUP as our guide to manage the listserv; any response to messages is post-facto. If you, dear members, want to call our attention to a post, you may do so by emailing us at members-owner(a)lists.sigcis.org<mailto:members-owner@lists.sigcis.org>. A description of the Moderator Responsibilities and Guidelines, as well as contact information for each of us, is posted at https://www.sigcis.org/listserv We would welcome more moderators, and invite you to send a note of interest or questions to any of us. Best wishes, Sharon Irish Bill McMillan Janet Toland Barbara Walker The current moderators

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Fran Allen lecture on STRETCH / HARVEST just released
by Dag Spicer 16 Aug '20

16 Aug '20

Hi everyone, Here is a great lecture from the Computer History Museum archives — just released — with Fran Allen discussing the Stretch/Harvest compiler at the Museum, November 8, 2000, on the occasion of her being made a CHM Fellow. She won the ACM Turing Award in 2006. Enjoy! https://youtu.be/BD035veZd-E Synopsis: In response to government requests, IBM Research designed a system for a very large data processing application, known as the HARVEST system, based on the Stretch supercomputer (IBM 7030), which was delivered to the National Security Agency in the early 1960s. The combined Stretch-HARVEST Project created a milieu for developing new technologies, new hardware architectures, and new software to meet the challenges of both systems. One of the guiding principles of the project was to make programming easier by the use of a compiler to generate code automatically from statements in the user's language. Frances "Fran" Allen was a member of the ALPHA language design team which created a very high level language featuring, among other things, the ability to create new alphabets beyond the system defined alphabets (e.g. English, decimal, integer, binary) and treat complex, heterogeneous data in high-level statements. In addition to an overview of Stretch-HARVEST, the talk will describe some of the lesser known aspects of the project the people and institutions involved, the political climate, and the shared knowledge, views, and value systems which were part of this interesting project at an interesting time in the history of computing. Catalog number: 102621818 Lot number: X4835.2009 Dag [cid:37DA9F70-22BF-4CE3-8817-E5AF13D99DD8@hsd1.ca.comcast.net.]

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Is it a myth that David Letterman had a Top Ten List about the Pentium bug?
by Ellen Spertus 14 Aug '20

14 Aug '20

According to the popular computer architecture textbook *Computer Organization and Design *by Turing Award winners John Hennessy and David Patterson: The Pentium floating-point divide bug even made the "Top 10 List" of the *David > Letterman Late Show* on television. > I have been unable to verify this. The bug was reported in October 1994 and remained in the news until early 1995. I could find nothing relevant in the Top Ten List Archive for late 1994 <http://www.mudslide.net/TopTen/lswd1994.html> or early 1995 <http://www.mudslide.net/TopTen/lswd1995.html>. In early January, there was the Top Ten Signs You Bought a Bad Computer <http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/top_ten/archive/ls_topten_archive1995…>, but it has no mention of Intel or math. I did find a Master's thesis <https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278276/m2/1/high_res_d/100…> that cites Jarrett in saying that "David Letterman included a Pentium™ joke in his nightly monologue": Jarrett, Jim. "A Postmortem on the Pentium Processor Crisis." Unpublished > manuscript prepared for lnteleads, 1994. > I cannot find this document, however, and Jim Jarrett passed away in 2012 <https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?n=james-jarrett…> . There is a satirical Top Ten list <http://www.polylith.com/~jerparks/jokes/Intel.shtml>: 9.9999973251 - Your old PC is too accurate. > 8.9999163362 - Provides really good alibi when the IRS calls. > 7.9999414610 - Attracted by Intel's new You don't need to know what's > inside ad campaign. > 6.9999831538 - It redefines computing -- and mathematics! > 5.9999835137 - You've always wondered what it would be like to be a > plaintiff. > 4.9999999021 - Current paperweight not big enough. > 3.9998245917 - Takes concept of floating point to a whole new level. > 2.9991523619 - You always round off to the nearest hundred anyway. > 1.9999103517 - Got a great deal from Jet Propulsion Laboratory! > > And the number one reason to buy a Pentium: > 0.9999999998 - It'll probably work! > The same page <http://www.polylith.com/~jerparks/jokes/Intel.shtml> includes this joke: "You know what goes great with those defective Pentium chips? > Defective Pentium salsa!" (David Letterman) > I conclude that David Letterman joked about the Pentium in a monologue (although I have only circumstantial evidence) not in a Top Ten List. This is my first foray into computing history. Please let me know if you have additional information, if my reasoning is unsound, or if I should do anything besides notifying the authors and publisher. (I'm acquainted with David Patterson but would not cold email John Hennessy.) Ellen Spertus Professor of Computer Science

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How Harvard CS department came into existence
by Dave Walden 14 Aug '20

14 Aug '20

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born

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CFP - ACM FAccT (formerly ACM FAT*)
by Abeba Birhane 12 Aug '20

12 Aug '20

Dear all, Hope you are keeping safe and well. We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2021 ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency -- FAccT (formerly known as ACM FAT*) is now open. We welcome scholarship in dialogue with fairness, accountability, and transparency in computational systems, including critical approaches that investigate core assumptions and propose alternative designs, practices, and policies. This year’s conference will take place in the context of a worldwide reckoning with racism and other forms of injustice, in society generally and within the field of computing in particular. Such questions are not only a matter of personal and professional concern, but also a perennial focus of FAccT scholarship. *In this light, we especially welcome attention to insufficiently addressed issues in computing* such as: How do algorithmic systems develop in relation to racism and anti-blackness? How should the field address the problems and opportunities of intersectional perspectives on fairness? What kinds of marginalization are relevant to the concerns of ACM FAccT? How can perspectives and tools from gender/LGBTQ studies, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, racial and ethnic studies, migration studies, work on disability and other relevant domains inform a broad perspective on how to frame and advance social justice in relation to design of computational systems? Submissions might include (but not limited to) the following areas: - *Algorithm Development* *e.g.* Fairness; Interpretable and explainable models; Data collection and curation - *Data and Algorithm Evaluation* *e.g.* Metrics; Audits; Evaluations - *Applications* *e.g.* NLP; Computer vision; Search engines; Recommender systems; Programming languages; Databases - *Human Factors* *e.g.* Human-computer interaction; Humans-in-the-loop; Information visualization; UX design; Community or participatory-research design - *Privacy and Security* *e.g.* Formal approaches; Privacy-preserving models; Usable privacy and security - *Law and Policy* *e.g.* Organizational governance; Data protection; Non-discrimination; Codes of ethics; Models from historically marginalized perspectives (*e.g.* Global Southern, feminist, communitarian, or Indigenous perspectives) - *Humanistic theory and critique* *e.g.* Interrogating foundational concepts; Bridging critical concepts across fields; Philosophical, moral and ethical analysis - *Social and organizational processes* *e.g.* Algorithms in organizations and institutions; Social, cultural, and historical shaping of algorithmic phenomena; algorithmic impacts on social phenomena - *Community-based approaches* *e.g.* Participatory algorithm design; Community designed and maintained systems; Activism-driven technological change - *Education* *e.g.* Pedagogical approaches, proposals, and experiences in areas of relevance to FAccT We welcome submissions on these topics from a broad set of expertise from a wide variety of disciplines, including computer science, statistics, the humanities, and law. More details can be found here: https://facctconference.org/2021/cfp.html Paper pre-registration: 30 September 2020 Paper submission: 7 October 2020 Notifications: 11 December 2020 Conference: early March 2021 All deadlines are at 11:59 PM anywhere on earth (AoE) on the given date. Questions? Contact the Program Co-chairs: program-chairs(a)facctconference.org. And stay tuned for updates by following @facctconference on Twitter. Please forward this call to other people or groups you think may be interested. Best wishes, Abeba -- Cognitive Science Ph.D. candidate Complex Software Lab, Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre School of Computer Science and Informatics University College Dublin, Ireland https://abebabirhane.wordpress.com/ t: @Abebab (she/her)

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In Memoriam - Fran Allen
by Brian Randell 11 Aug '20

11 Aug '20

Hi: With great sadness I pass on this announcement from today’s issue of ACM Tech News: > Frances E. Allen, First Female Recipient of ACM A.M. Turing Award, Dies at 88 > IBM Research Blog > August 5, 2020 > > Frances Allen, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to be awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, has died at 88. A pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Allen’s achievements in inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continue to straddle the leading edge of compiler research. She served as IBM’s language liaison with the U.S. National Security Agency, helping to design and construct the high-level Alpha code-breaking language, which could generate new alphabets beyond system-defined alphabets. Allen designed and built the machine-independent, language-independent optimizing component of the Experimental Compiler for IBM's Advanced Computing System. An ACM Fellow, Allen also was a fellow of IEEE and of the Computer History Museum, was inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame, and and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing. I have happy memories of working alongside, and being highly impressed by, Fran Allen first at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, and then with the ACS Project in California, in the mid-1960s. Many years later, as a member of the Alan Turing Award Committee, I had the privilege of being involved with her receiving the Alan Turing Award. Her work with John Cocke at Yorktown Heights on optimising compilers was truly ground-breaking, an important early stage of a brilliant 45-year career at IBM, very appropriately marked by her Turing Award. Let me encourage everyone who is not familiar with it to read the ACM Turing Award page about her - it is at https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm Kind regards 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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Frances Allen, Who Helped Hardware Understand Software, Dies at 88
by Brian Randell 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

Hi: The New York Times’ excellent obituary for Fran is at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/technology/frances-allen-dead.html Cheers Brian — 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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Fwd: [IP] Remembering Frances E. Allen | IBM Research Blog
by Brian Randell 08 Aug '20

08 Aug '20

Hi: A very nice tribute to Fran has just been posted to the IBM Research Blog > https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/08/remembering-frances-allen/ Cheers Brian — 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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