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Reminder: Things you post to this list are archived and public
by Thomas Haigh 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Dear SIGCIS members, SIGCIS recently received a request from Prof. Janet Browne at Harvard to take down from our "blog" two recent "posts" alleging plagiarism. She feels that they are no longer needed as the situation is "now resolved," with no evidence found of plagiarism in either case as everything was done in accordance with the genre norms of "highbrow journalism." I have explained to her that this is an umoderated listserv, not an edited blog, and that SIGCIS has no editorial role. We have never had such a request before, and the SIGCIS EC is currently exploring its policy implications. However I do want to give you a reminder that everything posted to members(a)sigcis.org goes immediately and without moderation to more than 350 people around the world, and that all messages are permanently archived and open to the public. This is in contrast to a blog, or a threaded discussion board where posts can be edited and deleted. So before you "reply all" just take a second to think about what you are doing and who might read it. After you click "send" it's going to be up there on the interweb forever. You will also notice additional text pointing out that opinions expressed are not those of SIGCIS appearing at the bottom of each new message. Best wishes, Tom

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Computing history in India
by dave.walden.family＠gmail.com 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

A few years ago Prof. V. Rajaraman wrote a history of computing in India as a member of tne IEEE Computer Society History Committee. I announced it to this list at the time. Now he has written down some more of his memories about Indian computing. I have posted a copy at > http://computer.org/comphistory/pubs/2014-09-rajaraman.pdf The original monograph is a little ways down the page at http://computer.org/comphistory/

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for upcoming SIGCIS meeting: tips on presenting
by Paul N. Edwards 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

All, as we prepare for the upcoming SIGCIS/SHOT meeting, I thought the following might be of use to this group. The unfortunate fact is that many historians are terrible presenters, due to an inherited tradition of read-aloud style talks. In the age of TED talks, SXSW, and Pecha Kucha, that style should be long dead, yet it lingers on like a zombie, feasting on the brains of graduate students (often infected by their professors). To try to change that culture, around 15 years ago I wrote a pamphlet on “How to Give an Academic Talk.” Having just endured yet another presenter who stared at the podium while reading aloud a paper he had written for publication — occasionally casting a wild-eyed glance at the upper left corner of the room, by way of pretending to actual communication with the audience —I updated that little pamphlet again, now on v5.2. Let’s build a better presentation culture. Most other fields have already done it. So can we, and historians of computing should be in the forefront. Best, Paul ___________________________ Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing) University of Michigan School of Information 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

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Isaacson thinks Jean Bartik contributed to the 1945 "First Draft" EDVAC design
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello everyone, I've had a chance to read carefully through chapters 2 and 3 on Isaacson, on the invention of the computer and the origin of programming. One striking thing is how detailed much of this narrative is, and how many obscure Annals papers he cites. So it is clear that he has done a lot of reading and digging into secondary sources. For a mass market book it's unusual even have endnotes, and certainly (to make sure that nobody confuses to two recent discussion threads) I see no reason for concern over plagiarism. He is interested in some very traditional, very detailed questions on the history of early electronic computing. In particular in assigning credit between the various inventors of early machines. Although he cites a lot of our work he presents his own interpretations of who did what, what was the true "first computer," etc. So there are many pages on ENIAC, the ABC, the "First Draft" and those other traditional topics. The book is more nuanced in some areas than the things he says in interviews, and much of it is clearly written and strikes me as accurate. It's precisely because he has spent so much time with our work, and presented his book with the apparatus of scholarly research, that I am startled to see that he got so many things wrong. I counted 32 things in those two chapters that struck me as errors or misleading assertions, from the claim that ENIAC was never used to calculate tables to the idea that its initial program run from December 1945 onwards (which he dates to October) disproved Teller's design for a hydrogen bomb. Most of those are minor things. Here's the big one. In returning to these old questions of invention and credit, Isaacson naturally has to address one of the thorniest questions of all: how did thinking on computer design evolve between January 1944, at which point Eckert and Mauchly were already speculating about post-ENIAC computer designs and storage mechanisms, and April 1945 when Goldstine's received from von Neumann the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." We know that von Neumann started to work with the ENIAC team in August 1944, and that the "First Draft" was the first statement of the key ideas behind modern computers. The extent to which von Neumann created those ideas versus stealing the existing work of the ENAIC team has been much debated. The problem historians face is that the participants spent the next few decades on opposing sides of a long and bitter lawsuit, making oral histories and memoirs more than usually problematic. Primary sources are very thin for that whole period - a few letters, the sketchy minutes of four meetings in early 1945, von Neumann's travel plans, and some technical disclosures by Eckert and Mauchly of ideas on memory technologies and a disk or drum calculator. A careful look at the meeting minutes tells one mostly about what had not been settled on (like the dog that didn't bark). They don't mention instruction sets, record disagreement on some basic architectural options, and are focused mostly on memory technology. This, at the least, keeps the door open for one to conclude that von Neumann designed the proposed EDVAC instruction on his own while away from the Moore School and that he had an important solo role in compressing a range of options under consideration during the Moore School meetings into a coherent architecture of radical simplicity. Isaacson described the Spring 1945 meetings between von Neumann and the ENIAC team in far more detail than any previous account. He does mention the minutes, which is impressive as they are rather obscure. However, his main source on what was discussed and how they were conducted is the recently published memoir of Jean Bartik. Isaacson uses some lengthy quotes from her to show that von Neumann led detailed discussion of a proposed instruction set but welcomed the input of others, including Bartik who made a technical point that he ultimately accepted. That fits Isaacson's interests in rescuing "forgotten" women and to celebrating the collaborative nature of innovation. The problem: Bartik was not at those meetings. She had just begun training as a human computer but was not yet part of the ENIAC team. Her quotations describe an entirely set of meetings, held in Princeton three years later with an almost entirely different group of people. Those meetings were to define an instruction set for ENAIC once it was converted to the EDVAC-mode of programming I like to call the "modern code paradigm." It's clear from her narrative that these meetings are taking place in 1947 so this is a very odd mistake to make. That's the biggest and strangest error I noticed, and I expect it will jump out at any reader with a reasonable knowledge of the history of 1940s computing. I also formed the distinct impression that Isaacson, despite spending quite a few pages on the "stored program concept" and the first stored program computer, does not really understand it (pardonable) or have his book read carefully by anyone who did (less pardonable). The traditional reading of "stored program" is that an externally programmed machine like the Harvard Mark I fetches and executes instructions one at a time from a paper tape or other external medium. A stored program computer like EDSAC or EDVAC loads the whole program into memory (i.e. stores it) before beginning execution, which allows jumps etc. within the code sequence. The phrase has been burdened with many other meanings, but that's the core. In a section headed "Stored Programs" Isaacson introduces the stored program idea by writing that "as early as the beginning of 1944, Mauchly and Eckert realized that there was a good way to make computers more easily reprogrammable: store the programs inside the computer's memory rather than load them in every time." In that framework a computer with a hard drive or ROM is "stored program," but a computer like EDSAC where the program is read into memory from paper tape before being run would not be. A separate statement on the Harvard Mark I also suggests that he imagines that computer loaded a program from tape rather than executing a individual instructions from tape: "Even though the paper tape was useful in reprogramming the computer it was necessary to switch tapes manually every time there was a call for a subroutine". Best wishes, Tom

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Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello everyone, I just came across Isaacson's Acknowledgements page, which gives an insight into how he could do a lot of reading yet still produce a book with so many glaring mistakes (at least in its treatment of ENIAC). He mentions interviewing about 50 famous and mostly tech-related people - the Bill Joys, Al Gores, and John Negropontes of the world. He mentions advice from some other people, mostly famous journalists. He mentions that "Raul Mehta at the University of Chicago and Danny Z. Wilson at Harvard read an early draft to fix and math or engineering mistakes." The other guy who read the whole draft and "made extensive comments" was Strobe Talbot of the Brookings Institute and former foreign policy official. Talbott provided some amazing comments, and Isaacson has "kept every set of his detailed notes as a testament to his wisdom and generosity." Isaacson also "crowdsourced" some parts of the book by posting them for comment on Medium, soliciting "comments and corrections from thousands of people I didn't know." These are now deleted, but apparently were the more recent parts - AOL, The Well, etc. He got hundreds of emails and found the process very useful. One notable absence from the list: anyone with specialist expertise in the history of computing. (John Hollar of the computer history museum is on the list as someone who gave advice, but Hollar's background is in the media business rather than history and he's the CEO rather than a curator). Isaacson mentions that he has used Talbott as a reader ever since his book on foreign policy, The Wise Men. Finding a subject matter expert to read that book was a good idea, but perhaps repeating the process in this new area would have been wise. Historians of computing are not hard to find, and Isaacson does make some use of the publications and oral histories produced by SIGCIS members. So it's interesting that he would take as his three main fact checkers a foreign policy insider, a high school prodigy (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/rahul-mehta/61/79b/86a unless there is some other Rahul Mehta connected to the U of Chicago), and a Harvard student journalist (http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/1209919/Daniel_Z._Wilson/) When even a guy who is writing a book full of old-school history of computing anecdotes about Babbage, Zuse, ENIAC, delay lines, who invented what, etc. doesn't think it's worth reaching out to us to anyone in the SIGCIS community to see if he got his facts straight that says something rather dispiriting about popular history, our collective success in winning recognition for our expertise, or both. Best wishes, Tom

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Reminder: SIGCIS has a "digest" function for one-a-day messages
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello SIGCIS Members, Usually our members list is quiet. Occasionally it jumps into life, and you might not want discussion of obscure topics to dominate your inbox. No need to unsubscribe. Our management system allows list mail to be dispatched in a once a day digest format. Just log in at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members (you should receive an email every month reminding you of your login details and subscription options) and change the format to digest. Best wishes, Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians & journalists/erasure & credit/Medina & Mills
by Sharon Traweek 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hi I am grateful to Nathan Ensmenger for bringing this horrible erasure of two colleagues' work by two others who should have learned better. [Both Morosov & Nasser seem to have active careers as journalists, so I presume we will see more erasures from them.] I was impressed by the example of the twitter campaign to get credit for Mara Mills from Atlantic; the same should be done for Eden Medina to get credit from the New Yorker. In the meantime see below for more information about the work of Eden Medina and Mara Mills. Cordially, Sharon Traweek, UCLA * Eden Medina [MIT PhD 2005; BS Princeton], Informatics and Computing, Indiana University http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/Display.php?Faculty_ID=69 http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/index.html Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile [MIT, 2011] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries * Mara Mills [PhD Harvard; MA/BA UCSC], Media, Culture, & Communication, NYU Access her publications etc at http://maramills.org/publications/ "...She is completing a book (On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering) on the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of "communication engineering" in early twentieth-century telephony; this concept and set of practices later gave rise to information theory, digital coding, and cybernetics. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers, with a focus on Talking Books and electronic reading machines. ..." http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Mara_Mills ________________________________________ From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [members-bounces(a)sigcis.org] on behalf of Nathan Ensmenger [nensmeng(a)indiana.edu] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2014 10:30 AM To: sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians and journalists It has been interesting to follow this discussion about the Issacson book (which I have not yet read) and the larger questions it raises about the relationship between the popular and academic history of computing. There is an aspect of this relationship that has come up several times in the past few weeks that I think it would be useful for all of us to be aware of, and it has to do with the misuse of academic scholarship by popular historians/journalists. The New Yorker has just published a piece by Evgeny Morosov on “The Socialist origins of Big Data,” which describes the Cybersyn project in 1970s Chile. As you might know, Project Cybersyn was the subject of my colleague Eden Medina’s prize-winning book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In fact, the Morozov article is essentially a retelling of Eden’s story — with an almost complete lack of attribution. There is a single sentence acknowledging her book, but the rest of the piece is presented as if it were Morozov’s own research. I hesitate to link to the piece, but here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine This is the second time in as many weeks that a major publication has plagiarized the work of academic historians of science and technology. The Atlantic recently published a piece on an extraordinary visit by Helen Keller with the MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner. A fascinating story — and one which was drawn entirely from the work of Mara Mills. The original article included only a single sentence about Mara, and then only in seeming support of the author’s conclusions. The fact that all of the original research was Mara’s went unmentioned. In response to a Twitter-based outcry, the Atlantic piece was substantially revised to recognize Mara’s essential contributions, although no acknowledgement of or apology for the original “mistake” has been made. Lest you think that either example of misappropriation was the result of a well-meaning but uninformed journalist, note the Morozov is currently a PhD student in the history of science at Harvard, and Latif Nasser, the author of the Atlantic piece, is a graduate of that program. What makes the Atlantic incident particularly egregious is that the Atlantic has been actively soliciting submissions from historians of science and technology. While that in theory is a good thing for our discipline, in practice it is clear that they are just as likely to steal your material as publish it. Many of us have had experience spending a lot of time and energy talking to journalists and then being eliminated from the resulting article. I had my work plagiarized by the Washington Post in an incident that ended up being the subject of a self-serving editorial “apology” by the WaPo ombudsman. (See “Who stole the Computer Girls? http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=289) It was a frustrating and very stressful experience. I no longer talk to journalists about my research. Two take-home lessons for us as academic historians: 1) No journalist has the ability to guarantee that you will be correctly attributed in an article. Editors can and will remove citations, references, and call-outs in the interest of making the article “more readable.” They will defend this practice as being legitimate, despite the fact that if one of our students submitted such an article, we would fail them immediately. 2) The only way to change this situation is to publicly call out the offenders. The Atlantic piece was only changed as a result of a Twitter outcry — and even then only after most readers had already seen the original unattributed piece and then moved on to other things. If you are active on social media, make your presence known. I say all of this somewhat reluctantly. I have always been interested in engaging with a broader public. Like Paul, I even worked on a Hollywood development project (think Mad Men in the late 1960s computer industry). But it is clear that there are dangers to doing so. I am not suggesting that Issacson is guilty of misappropriating sources. But I also think that as a community we need to engage critically with work’s like his, and in doing so, be careful to constantly acknowledge and highlight the contributions of scholarly historians. -Nathan — Nathan Ensmenger Associate Professor of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, Bloomington homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians and journalists
by Nathan Ensmenger 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

It has been interesting to follow this discussion about the Issacson book (which I have not yet read) and the larger questions it raises about the relationship between the popular and academic history of computing. There is an aspect of this relationship that has come up several times in the past few weeks that I think it would be useful for all of us to be aware of, and it has to do with the misuse of academic scholarship by popular historians/journalists. The New Yorker has just published a piece by Evgeny Morosov on “The Socialist origins of Big Data,” which describes the Cybersyn project in 1970s Chile. As you might know, Project Cybersyn was the subject of my colleague Eden Medina’s prize-winning book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In fact, the Morozov article is essentially a retelling of Eden’s story — with an almost complete lack of attribution. There is a single sentence acknowledging her book, but the rest of the piece is presented as if it were Morozov’s own research. I hesitate to link to the piece, but here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine This is the second time in as many weeks that a major publication has plagiarized the work of academic historians of science and technology. The Atlantic recently published a piece on an extraordinary visit by Helen Keller with the MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner. A fascinating story — and one which was drawn entirely from the work of Mara Mills. The original article included only a single sentence about Mara, and then only in seeming support of the author’s conclusions. The fact that all of the original research was Mara’s went unmentioned. In response to a Twitter-based outcry, the Atlantic piece was substantially revised to recognize Mara’s essential contributions, although no acknowledgement of or apology for the original “mistake” has been made. Lest you think that either example of misappropriation was the result of a well-meaning but uninformed journalist, note the Morozov is currently a PhD student in the history of science at Harvard, and Latif Nasser, the author of the Atlantic piece, is a graduate of that program. What makes the Atlantic incident particularly egregious is that the Atlantic has been actively soliciting submissions from historians of science and technology. While that in theory is a good thing for our discipline, in practice it is clear that they are just as likely to steal your material as publish it. Many of us have had experience spending a lot of time and energy talking to journalists and then being eliminated from the resulting article. I had my work plagiarized by the Washington Post in an incident that ended up being the subject of a self-serving editorial “apology” by the WaPo ombudsman. (See “Who stole the Computer Girls? http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=289) It was a frustrating and very stressful experience. I no longer talk to journalists about my research. Two take-home lessons for us as academic historians: 1) No journalist has the ability to guarantee that you will be correctly attributed in an article. Editors can and will remove citations, references, and call-outs in the interest of making the article “more readable.” They will defend this practice as being legitimate, despite the fact that if one of our students submitted such an article, we would fail them immediately. 2) The only way to change this situation is to publicly call out the offenders. The Atlantic piece was only changed as a result of a Twitter outcry — and even then only after most readers had already seen the original unattributed piece and then moved on to other things. If you are active on social media, make your presence known. I say all of this somewhat reluctantly. I have always been interested in engaging with a broader public. Like Paul, I even worked on a Hollywood development project (think Mad Men in the late 1960s computer industry). But it is clear that there are dangers to doing so. I am not suggesting that Issacson is guilty of misappropriating sources. But I also think that as a community we need to engage critically with work’s like his, and in doing so, be careful to constantly acknowledge and highlight the contributions of scholarly historians. -Nathan — Nathan Ensmenger Associate Professor of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, Bloomington homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/

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Evgeny
by David C. Brock 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

I find it hard to believe that Morosov did not read anything by Andy Pickering on S. Beer. Andy has written a few things on Beer, who is a major character in “The Cybernetic Brain.” I don’t know if Eden covers the Brian Eno-Beer connection in her book, but Andy certainly spends a good deal of time on it in his. Pickering’s name isn’t anywhere in Evgeny’s article. Probably because Andy’s whole book subverts the argument of the New Yorker article. +++++++++++++++ David C. Brock dcb(a)dcbrock.net Senior Research Fellow Chemical Heritage Foundation www.chemheritage.org Principal, D.C. Brock Consulting www.dcbrock.net 40 Russell Street, Greenfield, MA 01301 Mobile: 413-522-3578 Fax: 866-549-8597 Skype: dcbrock Twitter: @dcbrock

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Should we crowdsource an Isaacson fact check?
by Thomas Haigh 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hello Bernard (& SIGCIS) Thanks for the thoughtful response. It seems to be that there are two main ways we as a community might choose to respond to popular non-fiction work such as that presented by Dyson or Issacson. The first is to treat it as historical scholarship in need of expert review, checking its various claims and assessing the extent to which consists of statements which, while simplified, can be reconciled with expert consensus and primary sources. The other is to go to the meta level, and ask what the popularity of particular kinds of narrative tells us about the world we live in, perhaps taking a memory studies approach and charting the different ways in which ENIAC, for example, has been represented over time. Ive done both in the past, for example with respect to the Inventor of Email where I both maintain a page debunking his specific claims and wrote a column for CACM looking at broader lessons from the affair. Our ENIAC book include a chapter Remembering ENIAC looking at its posthumous career, and I will certainly be adding a short discussion of Isaacson into its last section on the 2000-onward era we characterize as The ENIAC of Women. I just purchased the Kindle version of Isaacsons book and am already noting a number of factual errors small and large. Some of these are a result of necessary simplification performed without finesse (e.g. a rather incoherent treatment of the stored program concept) but many are flat out carelessness where being accurate would not have made the text any longer or harder to understand. For example statements that ENIAC was designed to calculate missile (rather than shell) trajectories, that the Army no longer intended to calculate firing tables after the end of the war, use of Bartik quotes about 1947 meetings with von Neumann to characterize his 1944 meetings with the ENIAC team before she even came to the Moore School, etc. At one point he claims that ENIAC was one of the first two stored program computers along with the Manchester Baby. Thats trueish, though our conclusion was that this points out the limitations of stored program as a category. However next two consecutive sentences are completely incoherent, in crediting it both with program storage only in read only memory (true) and a functioning delay line memory in April 1947 (a total fantasy): a read only memory, which meant it was hard to modify programs while they were running. In addition, its mercury delay line memory was sluggish and required prevision engineering. A paragraph or two earlier he calls the mathematician Richard Clippinger and physicist Nick Metropolis engineers. In many other places he relies on claims made in oral histories without looking to see if historians have been able to reconcile the details quoted with other sources. Now to combine these two perspectives, its probably the job of someone like Isaacson to write popular history that is wildly inaccurate in many details and the job of scholarly historians to pedantically point out errors and be largely ignored. Meanwhile he will win all the fame and media attention we secretly believe should be ours, but which our fusty attachment to accurate detail and distain for the narrative expectations of popular history will forever deny us. Its not that we want to come at Isaacson with pitchforks and flaming torches to demand that his book be pulped, and it will surely increase general interest in our field. But the thought of students or researchers citing some of these details is scary, and his book does have the outward appearance of a serious contribution it has footnotes, a surprising amount of technical terminology, etc. Errors here will be disseminated widely. So there might be some benefit in putting up on the SIGCIS site a crowd sourced fact check to document clear cut errors in the text, using quoted primary or authoritative secondary sources to document the truth. (Reactionary as I do feel to appropriate momentarily the concepts of truth and authority). Then if, for example, a SIGCIS member finds an odd assertion sourced from Isaacson in a student paper being graded he or she could point to the SIGCIS page as evidence that ENIAC did not have a delay line memory, that Hopper did not serve as the technical lead in coordinating the creation of COBOL, that a large part of ENIACs existence was spent calculating firing tables, etc. Note to enthusiasts: this does not include grading Isaacson on his fidelity to one or another school of thought on the first computer, etc. So, does anyone with an interest in such things want to volunteer to edit such a page? That would primarily involve check submissions from SIGCIS members for inclusion and making decisions on what counts as a clear factual error vs. a personal interpretation. Best wishes, Tom From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 4:43 PM To: members(a)sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book 2 Dear All, I've been thinking about these kinds of histories, quarrels, and computer historiographies in recent months, esp. in the light of the "debate" around Shiva Ayyadurai and the invention of email. I'm interested in these histories, claims, and claimants for the origins and development of info technologies. They are stimulating and telling ("symptomatic" one might say) for the reason that "computer historiography" is not to my mind an impartial, neutral recounting of a series of rote facts, but rather itself a vibrant actor within the history of computational innovation. The Shiva case shows this pretty well, because the "historiography" is in some way coextensive with individuals staking claims that shape their ability to act in the field in the present (i.e. Shiva has patents, a start-up company, etc, so I think his belated discovery of his "invention" speaks to his present-day ambitions; his enlisting of The Smithsonian etc. to back up his claims is an fascinating case of an actor-network theoretical aligning of interests in action). Same goes for the Isaacson books, because they also involve efforts to ally, interest, and orient readers around certain conceptions of where and how invention happens. These frames and theories of innovation converge with other agendas (figuring out how private markets shaped the PC revolution; granting women greater representation in computational histories; writing a history of computing focused on its ability to stimulate our passions rather than just crunch numbers). These kinds of frames and agendas relate specifically to the struggles surrounding innovation and education in the present; that they should bear on popular histories shouldn't be so surprising, nor that they would come to bear upon how the Smithsonian or TIME magazine decides to acknowledge innovation. As for the kinds of cases surrounding the "ENIAC girls" invoked in a previous mail: Even despite the condescending instances of tokenism invoked by Tom, I think that when push comes to shove, actually distinguishing the "real" or "authentic" innovation from the cultural hype proves tricky (this isn't meant as a counter-argument--Tom's commented on these same problems elsewhere). As works by Ensmenger and Jen Light and others note, the distinctions between invention and innovation, hardware and software, engineers and mere programmers, scientific and technical labor, etc, themselves rest upon a set of (often naive and shortsighted) cultural assumptions over what's the "real" work of computing. Ensmenger in particular shows that these cultural assumptions have profound consequences at the very heart of technological development: There's a decent argument that early computer scientists entirely dismissed programming as a kind of subaltern variety of labor, contributing both to the wartime assignment of this work to women, and the industry-crippling software crisis that followed. This makes the attempt to sift though debating historical causes and factors enmeshed, from the outset, in debates over cultural theory, gender, notions of material history and cultural labor, and so on (Schaffer makes a similar point in Babbage's Intelligence). The attempt to identify a baseline for the "real history" of a technology and its development never "escapes" cultural agendas, for example, re-examining the under-representation of women in computing, which can be credibly cited as a determining factor in the technological (mis-)development in the field. So as I see it, the work of historiography is really about these ongoing battles and quarrels in our midst, each of which deploys alternate values and horizons for making sense of informatics--a process that necessarily will continue to evolve and unsettle, without much resolution, so long as our field remains vibrant and relevant. Isaacson is an actor in this field, much as we are, even as von Neumann was, even if there are (as Tom correctly urges us to recognize) different roles of vastly different import. Moreover, I think readers approach histories like Isaacson's with the ability to recognize that the claims are sort of puffed up. For example, I don't think many readers of Standage's history of the telegraph take as literally true his claim that it was "the Victorian internet" nor his other book's claims that the 17th c. Chess-Playing Turk gave rise to IBM computing machines. Readers turn to these accounts for fun, diverting accounts that mix trivia, drama, and fragments of technical knowledge, as well as orientation in the varied kinds of forces that play out in the history of a technology. These histories, in turn, were often convened in response to a given topical event (anniversary, marketing event, product launch, someone's death). Readers recognize that, too. I wrote about this awhile back in the IEEE Annals, in an article titled "The Historiographic Conception of Information," a kind of reflection on the status of historiography within computing. As I put it there, in discussing popular accounts of Claude Shannon on the occasion of his death, I wrote: Computer history does not appear before the public as a...natural and unmediated accounting of clearcut facts. Instead, a historically specific organization of experts, research, resources, and interpretive frames emerges in response to present and presumably historical events. This is not the meddling intervention of outside interests and biases upon the neutral labor of historiography; rather, these are the basic conditions for writing computer history. These conditions appearance prompts questions about how a retiring mathematician [Claude Shannon], skeptical about his personal acclaim, emerged as a recognizable and heroic subject of popular interest. I guess I'm not above taking some delight in our field's status as a kind of joyful cultural science whose interest and relevance is deeply tied up with its ability to bisect pop culture, current events, and institutional struggles. And if our field attracts shallow excitement and fantastic tale telling, I'm not above welcoming this, our imaginative fecundity, however suspect its offspring may seem. Best, Bernard On 10/5/14 9:47 PM, Chuck House wrote: personal opinion, based on the Steve Jobs book and my interview with Isaacson after his talk at the Computer History Museum, this will be a relatively shallow treatment by a gifted captivating writer On Oct 5, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh(a)computer.org> wrote: Hello everyone, I haven't read Isaacson's book yet, but have been looking at some reviews with interest. It sounds from the review that Andy links to that the book gets better as it goes on. On the historical part, Wisnioski notes in his polite and generally favorable review that "Isaacson diligently attends to this syllabus, but it curbs his trademark enthusiasm, and many of his anecdotes are well-worn." What I've seen in other places makes me question the diligence of Isaacson's attention in the earlier chapters, like that of Jane Smiley in her attempt at a popular history of early computing a few years ago. According to a profile in the New York Times the book starts and ends with Ada Lovelace. Isaacson credits her to the extent of observing that <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson -how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson- how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0 Ada Lovelace defined the digital age, Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book. If it wasnt for Ada Lovelace, theres a chance that none of this would even exist, Mr. Isaacson added as he waved his hand in the air, gesturing as if to encompass all of Silicon Valley and the techies sitting around us. Given that Babbages project was itself apparently unknown to computer pioneers of the 1940s such as Aiken, Eckert, Atanasoff and Mauchly at the time they conceptualized and designed their machines this claim seems to me quite impossible to justify, however profound Lovelaces contribution to that project was. He also has a chapter on the Women of ENIAC. That has been put up as an text and audiobook extract as a teaser prior to the launch of the book. <http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/> http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIACs changing role in collective memory: for about fifteen years now it has been remembered primarily as a machine programmed by women. Even within the scholarly literature our discussion of the place of the initial cohort of six operators has sometimes mischaracterized the work they were hired to do and exaggerated their contributions to the development of thinking about what ENIAC could be used to do and how it might be configured to accomplish those tasks. Thats something Ive become aware of in returning to primary sources for my forthcoming book ENIAC in Action with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book Recoding Gender makes a definite contribution towards clarifying these issues. In contrast, drawing almost entirely on oral histories and memoir, Isaacson is for the most part just summarizing the consensus when he implies that Jean Jennings and her colleagues made fundamental innovations by, for example, realizing that the master programmer could be used to do the exact task it was designed and built to perform: looping nested subroutines. It seems that the book is held together with a Gladwellian argument about the collective and incremental nature of innovation, which is certainly preferable to the lone genius view of history. However the ending of the ENIAC extract makes me question how tightly though through this argument is: he asserts that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women. Thats either a very radical STS argument that a computer is only created in use, or a sign that he did not spend much time thinking about what creating a computer involves. Now of course Lovelace, the Women of ENIAC, Hopper, and a few others are of interest to a lot of people because of their instrumental value as the source of parables useful in the rebranding of computing as a field created in large part by women. Thats a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacsons book will sell maybe 1,000 times more than anything that any of us are ever likely to write. However it would be nice if there was a way to achieve this without pretending that a causal chain makes Ada Lovelace essential to the birth of the digital age or Jennings and her colleagues essential to the creation of ENIAC. Is there a necessary tradeoff between historical accuracy and inspirational value, as with the story about young George Washington and the cherry tree? I hope not. Best wishes, Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members> http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members -- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

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