October 2021 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

2021 Mahoney Prize nominations
by Elizabeth Petrick 10 May '22

10 May '22

Hello everyone, It's time for the 2021 Mahoney Prize for outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. Articles published in 2018, 2019, or 2020 will be considered. Self-nominations and nominations of others are both welcome. Please email a copy of the article to members of the prize committee, listed here: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize Deadline is May 1, 2021. Best, Liz ------------- Elizabeth Petrick Associate Professor Department of History Rice University http://elizabethpetrick.com/

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NEW BOOK, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021)
by Jacob Gaboury 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

Some of you have very generously mentioned the book on the SIGCIS list already, but I thought it would be a good idea to officially announce the release of my book on the history of computer graphics from MIT Press. *Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics* <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-objects> examines the history of computer graphics from roughly 1950-1980, with a focus on the groundbreaking research program at the University of Utah. The book is based largely on archival holdings at Utah and elsewhere, and follows an "object-oriented" structure, with each chapter unpacking a particular technology that shaped the formation of the field of computer graphics, and which continues to shape the ways we use and interact with computational technologies today. SIGCIS has been a critical community for this project since the very beginning, and I am very excited to share this work with all of you. The book is also available with a 20% discount <https://go.mitpress.mit.edu/en-us/4s2021?utm_campaign=FY22_Exhibits_4S&utm_…> for the month of October using the code 4S2021! *Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics* *Jacob Gaboury* 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 133 b&w photos, 20 color plates Hardcover Aug 2021 | ISBN: 9780262045032 | $35.00 Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Culling Vision: Hidden Surface Algorithms and the Problem of Visibility Chapter 2: Random-Access Images: Interfacing Memory and the History of the Computer Screen Chapter 3: Model Objects: The Utah Teapot as Standard and Icon Chapter 4: Object Paradigms: On the Origins of Object Orientation Chapter 5: Procedure Crystallized: The Graphics Processing Unit and the Rise of Computer Graphics Coda: After Objects *“With Image Objects, Gaboury has established himself as the leading voice among a new generation of visual culture theorists. This is a landmark contribution to the fields of digital culture, media theory, and science and technology studies."* - Bernard Geoghegan, Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media, King's College London *How computer graphics transformed the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium, as seen through the histories of five technical objects.* Most of us think of computer graphics as a relatively recent invention, enabling the spectacular visual effects and lifelike simulations we see in current films, television shows, and digital games. In fact, computer graphics have been around as long as the modern computer itself, and played a fundamental role in the development of our contemporary culture of computing. In *Image Objects*, Jacob Gaboury offers a prehistory of computer graphics through an examination of five technical objects—an algorithm, an interface, an object standard, a programming paradigm, and a hardware platform—arguing that computer graphics transformed the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium. Gaboury explores early efforts to produce an algorithmic solution for the calculation of object visibility; considers the history of the computer screen and the random-access memory that first made interactive images possible; examines the standardization of graphical objects through the Utah teapot, the most famous graphical model in the history of the field; reviews the graphical origins of the object-oriented programming paradigm; and, finally, considers the development of the graphics processing unit as the catalyst that enabled an explosion in graphical computing at the end of the twentieth century. The development of computer graphics, Gaboury argues, signals a change not only in the way we make images but also in the way we mediate our world through the computer—and how we have come to reimagine that world as computational. -- Jacob Gaboury (he/him) Associate Professor of New Media History and Theory Dept. of Film & Media, University of California at Berkeley jacobgaboury.com/ <http://www.jacobgaboury.com/> *Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics* (MIT Press, 2021) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-objects

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"How Social Media's Giant Algorithm Shapes our Feeds."
by Ceruzzi, Paul 01 Nov '21

01 Nov '21

This headline came from today's Washington Post, in a long above-the-fold article about Facebook's policies in determining what users see when they "like" a post. The article does not define the word, but describes an algorithm as "...a system that decides on a post's position on the news feed based on predictions about each user's preferences and tendencies." That sounds to me like a complex piece of software, with perhaps hundreds of lines of code, that takes in a lot of variables and produces a potentially wide range of outputs. It conjures up an image of something sinister and menacing. Not what Knuth defined as an "algorithm" in Volume One of his Art of Computer Programming. His definition has been refined over the years, but it retains the notion of a well-defined, finite set of steps that produces an unambiguous result. Should we be bothered that the Post (and I assume other newspapers) are not using the term properly? Are people now going to think of an "algorithm" as something threatening, like "The Blob" in that famous Steve McQueen movie? Paul Ceruzzi Tom Haigh & Paul Ceruzzi, A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press 2021)

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What algorithms are and are not
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 30 Oct '21

30 Oct '21

Hello SIGCIS, A fascinating discussion. I'd like to pull a few points together and a few of my own. An algorithm is indeed a description of a step-by-step way of accomplishing something. It differs from program code in not being tied to a specific computer language, and leaving out implementational detail relevant to specific computing platforms. It differs from a specification in being about HOW to do something, not just about WHAT needs to be done. To answer Kimon's most recent point first. It is entirely reasonable to suggest that alphabetical ordering may, in Winner's terms, be a technology with politics. See, for example, Bowker and Star's book Sorting Things Out. And building that social system into computers magnifies its power and makes it harder to change. But we should not blame sort algorithms for this. There are many sort algorithms - early on sorting efficiently from tape was a hugely important practical problem and the Quicksort algorithm was seen as a major achievement. But they all produced the same results, differing in their efficiency with particular kinds of input, memory needs, and so on. In other words, all the sort algorithms had the same specification and did the same job, but they did it in different ways. In this case the potentially oppressive alphabetical order is not in the algorithm at all. It's built into the computer hardware as part of EBCDIC or ASCI, or more recently into the OS or a library as part of Unicode. So pointing the finger at Tony Hoare (creator of Quicksort) for any oppressive impact of alphabetical order would be misleading. In this case, separating out the algorithm from the rest of the "blob" helps. As Alexandre pointed out, when we talk about "the Facebook algorithm" this is grouping together the collective functioning of what must be hundreds or thousands of algorithms, implemented as programs, running on hardware and responding to vast amounts of data and many configurable parameters. So the issue is ignoring all the infrastructure, executable code, and materiality behind the system, and also missing the hugely complex interactions of all those pieces. In a way, it is privileging the history of abstract ideas over the history of technology. Another point: in the case of AI systems the problem may not be the algorithm at all, but the data used to train it. When Google makes a racist autocomplete or an AI chatbot starts talking like a Nazi the more direct cause is the racism of Internet users who type queries or post tweets. The backpropagation algorithm certainly has specific affordances which may make it irresponsible to use it in such circumstances, but again the situation is complicated and calling everything "the algorithm" obscures more than it reveals. Likewise, the devastating consequences of the system Facebook uses to rank items in its newsfeed surely has more to do with parameters set by Facebook managers and data scientists as it does with the algorithms crafted by programmers. There must be switches set to weight different characteristics, and the decision to set parameters that weight strong emotional reactions is likely not in the algorithm itself but in a matrix of weights processed by the algorithm. Just pragmatically, you wouldn't want to have to throw the code away and change the algorithm every time you want to try out a different weighting scheme. Of course Facebook does not want us to know anything about what is going on in its black box, so that's deliberate. I loved the point that very early publication of Google's PageRank algorithm helped to give the misconception that it continues to rely on a single algorithm. Another important point is that you can't understand everything an algorithm will do by reading it. The attempt to predict dynamic behavior from static code is one of the central concerns of computer science, but in many situations, particularly when multiple programs are interacting with each other and with data the results are unpredictable. Facebook surely has huge data science teams running constant experiments. I do not want to let programmers off the hook for their complicity in a truly reprehensible company, but we must also recognize that not all the emergent properties of code are legible to its creators. A final point. A couple of years ago I found myself in conversation with a media scholar who had just written a book about the history of algorithms and their nasty effects. One of his case studies was what he called "the Black-Scholes algorithm" (used to price derivatives). I pointed out that this is a formula, not an algorithm. A mathematical formula is, in the terms I gave in the first paragraph, a specification. It defines a relationship between several terms. To calculate the value of one of the terms when you have the others you need an algorithm: a step-by-step method. The business of coming up with a good algorithm to do that computation is not trivial. Apparently simple things like differential equations have given rise to huge fields devising what applied mathematicians call "methods" but computer scientists would call "algorithms." (That is particularly relevant here because Black-Scholes relies on solving a partial differential equation). Many work well under some circumstances but not others. They will even produce different answers, because numerical solutions are often approximate. Implementing those methods is also a complex process, particularly in code that is portable. The entire field of numerical analysis exists only because equations are not algorithms. Also the entire field of computational complexity. Problems of optimization are trivial to specify but enormously hard to solve. Public key encryption only works because equations are not algorithms and screening all possible solutions is infeasible (while verifying a solution is easy). I was, frankly, a little shocked that somebody who had written a book about algorithms would seek to erase that vital distinction between algorithms and equations. His response was that he has his own definition of algorithm and did not care what computer scientists thought an algorithm was. According to his definition, Black-Scholes was an algorithm. (I was reminded of Lewis Carrol: "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less'). My view is that algorithms matter hugely and can indeed embed social assumptions, but that we will never be able to understand how they matter if we call everything an algorithm. Code, infrastructures, equations, platforms, data, and infrastructures matter too. If we each invent our own definitions of what those things are then we will never be able to communicate with each other, or with the people who have the power to change them. Best wishes, Tom

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Job opening at Air & Space Museum
by Ceruzzi, Paul 29 Oct '21

29 Oct '21

Curator of Contemporary Spaceflight. I have long been bothered by the "silos" between space historians and historians of computing, who seemed to have little to say to one another. But lately, as we follow the exploits of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, that distinction is going away: https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/618049600 Paul Ceruzzi Curator Emeritus National Air and Space Museum

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Seeking book recommendations for teaching
by Shreeharsh Kelkar 29 Oct '21

29 Oct '21

Hi Troy, I've been teaching a course called "The Social Life of Computing" for about four years now and there are three textbooks that I've found really useful: William Aspray et al.'s classic "*Computer: The History of the Information Machine*" is still my go-to source. I often assign parts of it for students to read but it helps me bring in contextual information in the lectures. Thomas Haigh was kind enough to let me read a preprint of his new book with Paul Ceruzzi and while I didn't assign any of it to students, it helped me a lot as background reading. Finally, I also highly recommend Thomas Misa's *Leonardo to the Internet *which has only one chapter on computing proper but again, it was invaluable to me as a resource. Again, I didn't assign much to the students from the latter two but I could see myself doing that in future iterations. For readings, I tend to rely on magazine articles a lot more than academic texts. In that respect, I've often relied on articles from IEEE Spectrum and CHM. (I ask students to read additional texts for their papers and these are often academic articles). You can see some of this in my latest syllabus <https://shreeharshkelkar.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Syllabus-ISF100J-Sp…> for the course, if it helps. It lists both academic articles (often grouped under the "Of further interest" heading) and the more journalistic ones. Last, but not the least, I made the course asynchronous last spring and therefore had a chance to reinvent my lectures as a podcast. (My inspirations were two history podcasts that I particularly love: Mike Duncan's Revolutions <https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/>, a podcast on political revolutions, and Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This <http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/>, a podcast on Hollywood history.) I put up my lectures on SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.com/user-118533348/sets/the-social-life-of-computing. They are meant to be used, so if you find them useful, please use them and let me know! Hope some of this is useful. If you can share your syllabus when you have it, that would be wonderful. And of course, it goes without saying that this course is heavily indebted to the conversations I've been able to listen to here on SIGCIS. Best, Shreeharsh _______________ Shreeharsh Kelkar http://www.shreeharshkelkar.net On Sat, Oct 23, 2021 at 1:20 PM <members-request(a)lists.sigcis.org> wrote: > Send Members mailing list submissions to > members(a)lists.sigcis.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > members-request(a)lists.sigcis.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > members-owner(a)lists.sigcis.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Members digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Seeking book recommendations for teaching (Troy Astarte) > 2. Re: Book on Kl?ra D?n von Neumann (thomas.haigh(a)gmail.com) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 20:27:06 +0000 > From: Troy Astarte <t.k.astarte(a)swansea.ac.uk> > To: members <members(a)sigcis.org> > Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Seeking book recommendations for teaching > Message-ID: <B5BCCE1C-6C7E-48C3-9EE1-ADB92771E621(a)swansea.ac.uk> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Dear SIG:CIS, > > I have recently started a teaching role and have the opportunity to > develop taught content from scratch. I want to include a significant > influence from history of computing, history of technology, and STS?topics, > approaches, methods. I?m looking for recommendations of books and other > works to help in this: either for inclusion on reading lists, or to help me > prepare more effective material. For example, I would be very grateful for > a comprehensive and accessible book on the history of a particular > technology, or a monograph on diversifying curricula. No suggestions are > too obvious. Even if I already know them, others on-list may not. > > Thanks in advance! > > Best, > > Dr. Troy Kaighin Astarte (they/them) > > Lecturer, Computer Science > Swansea University > > For students: my office hours are Wednesday 1500?1700 and you can enter my > personal Zoom room during that time. > > >

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Leonardo to the Internet (3rd edition Feb 2022)
by Thomas Misa 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

Hopkins is publishing the third edition of *Leonardo to the Internet* in February, and there’s expanded computing history in several chapters. Chapter 7 sharpens the military’s influence on high-tech firms in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California as well as on the early internet. Chapter 8 on globalization treats the /dynamic web/ of the 1990s with Perl, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and putting databases online (crucial to e-commerce) while pointing out the subsidy extended to e-commerce in the US Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998, made permanent in 2015. Chapter 9 on systemic risk critically comments on the rush to put high-risk systems onto the insecure internet, paving the way (unwittingly) to cyberwarfare against communication networks, energy systems, even nuclear power plants. Chapter 10 /Dominance of the Digital/ is entirely new, a lengthy chapter (40 pages) that gives a complete historical assessment of Moore’s Law (1965-2016) as well as the troubling conflict evident today between the promise of a /democratic/ internet (echoes of John Perry Barlow) and the /authoritarian/ internet being built by many countries. The book is available for preorder in the usual places.

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The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya review – the life of John von Neumann
by Brian Randell 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

Hi: My attention has just been drawn to the review in The Guardian of " The Man from the Future" by Ananyo Bhattacharya. It starts: An expert on everything from game theory to Byzantine history, the inspiration for Dr Strangelove was as brilliant as he was dangerous. "A quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts,” wrote Albert Einstein to the queen of Belgium. It was November 1933 and Einstein had been in Princeton, New Jersey, for just a month having left Europe after the Nazis’ rise to power. The celebrated physicist wasn’t referring to the ordinary citizens of the famous university town but to some of his new colleagues. Einstein’s recruitment by the Institute for Advanced Study was like a modern-day star signing for a football club backed by a Russian oligarch. His presence there soon attracted a stellar collection of mathematicians. The brightest of these was a 30-year-old Hungarian. John von Neumann was a mathematical prodigy who published his first paper at 18. As far removed from the caricature of the bookish, socially awkward mathematician as possible, he was a charming, party-loving, hard-drinking raconteur who mastered ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, English and Hungarian as a child growing up in Budapest. He was also capable of chillingly cold calculation, and an attitude to human life in the context of the cold war that can seem breathtaking in its ruthlessness. Nevertheless, despite being the real-life model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, he helped usher in the computer age. There was certainly no doubt about his intellect. To entertain his friends, he would recite verbatim passages from books read years before. An unnamed historian, so the story goes, would only attend one of Von Neumann’s legendary parties if they didn’t discuss Byzantine history, since he wanted to maintain his reputation as the world’s foremost expert. <snip> Full story at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/13/the-man-from-the-future-by-an… 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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Linda Hall Library: Apply now for 2022-23 Fellowships!
by Benjamin Gross 26 Oct '21

26 Oct '21

Dear SIGCIS Friends: The Linda Hall Library<https://www.lindahall.org/> is now accepting applications for its 2022-23 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars in the history of science and related fields with financial support to explore the Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections. Fellows also participate in a dynamic intellectual community alongside in-house experts and scholars from other Kansas City cultural and educational institutions. The Linda Hall Library holds nearly half a million monographs and more than 43,000 journal titles documenting the history of science and technology from the 15th century to the present. Its collections are exceptionally strong in the engineering disciplines, chemistry, and physics. The Library also boasts extensive resources related to natural history, astronomy, earth science, environmental studies, aeronautics, life science, infrastructure studies, mathematics, and the history of the book. The Linda Hall Library is offering three types of fellowships during the 2022-23 academic year: – Residential fellowships (1-4 months) support scholars who travel to Kansas City to conduct research in the Library's collections. – The History of Science and Medicine fellowship (1 month) supports a doctoral student who travels to Kansas City to conduct research at the Linda Hall Library and the Clendening History of Medicine Library<https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/departments/history-and-p…> at the University of Kansas Medical Center. – Virtual fellowships (1-4 months) support scholars working remotely using resources from the Library’s digital collections. Virtual fellows receive personalized research assistance from reference staff and may request complimentary scans of Library resources in accordance with our in-house digitization policies. In each case, fellowship funding is offered at a rate of $3,000 per month for doctoral students and $4,200 per month for postdoctoral researchers. The Linda Hall Library is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive research environment and encourages members of any groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in academia to apply for fellowship support. Please share this announcement with graduate students, colleagues, or anyone else who might be interested in the Library’s fellowship program. All application materials are due no later than January 21, 2022. For further information, visit https://www.lindahall.org/fellowships/ or e-mail fellowships(a)lindahall.org<mailto:fellowships@lindahall.org>. Thank you! Ben Gross Benjamin Gross, PhD Vice President for Research and Scholarship Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology 5109 Cherry Street Kansas City, Missouri 64110 816.926.8718 grossb(a)lindahall.org<mailto:grossb@lindahall.org> www.lindahall.org<http://www.lindahall.org/>

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DARPA history
by Brian E Carpenter 24 Oct '21

24 Oct '21

This may be old news here, but over on the Internet History list, Jack Haverty has flagged the ARPANET section of the 1990 ADA report (see below for details). I see that there are chapters on several other interesting topics (and much more besides): INFORMATION PROCESSING XVIII. ILLIAC IV XIX. Project MAC: Computer Time Sharing XX. ARPANET XXI. Artificial Intelligence XXII. Morse Code Reader XX III. ACCAT (Advanced Command and Control Architectural Testbed) Regards Brian Carpenter -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: [ih] ARPANET history Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2021 15:27:23 -0700 From: Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> Reply-To: Jack Haverty <jack(a)3kitty.org> To: Internet History list <internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org> FYI, I stumbled across a government report written in 1990 but that I hadn't seen before now. It contains a summary of the creation and evolution of the ARPANET and the beginnings of the Internet. Where it talks about things that I personally experienced, it agrees with my recollections. So I tend to trust the other things it says that are new to me even today. I thought that internet-historians might be interested too. The report is non-technical, but highlights some of the reasons for the success of the project, leading to the Internet we have today, such as the way in which people moved around between organizations, political and managerial decisions within parts of the government, activities for moving the technology from research to operations, and other such non-technical drivers of the success of the Internet. See https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA239925.pdf -- Chapter XX (page 243) /Jack Haverty -- Internet-history mailing list Internet-history(a)elists.isoc.org https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

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