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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book
by Thomas Haigh 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Thanks Janet, I noticed that the same NPR segment has him claiming that "Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later." Swade, Bromley, Randell, Cohen, and as far as I know all serious historians who have looked for a substantive influence of Babbage on the conception or design of ENAIC, EDVAC, EDSAC, or the Harvard Mark 1 have concluded that there was none. Aiken did seize rhetorically on Babbage as a precursor whose lineage he was taking up, but as Cohen notes in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, he became aware of Babbage only after proposing to build his computer and did not learn of Lovelace's work or appreciate the importance of conditional branching for some years later. After a very careful examination (p.61-72) Cohen concluded that "Aiken was generally ignorant of Babbage's machines" at this point, having seen only brief accounts, and including "summary (and somewhat erroneous) statements about Babbage's machines" in his 1937 proposal. Thus "Babbage did not play a major role in the development of Aiken's ideas." Instead "Aiken praised Babbage to enhance his own stature." He also quotes Hopper as saying that she was unaware of Lovelace's work "until ten of fifteen years later." Likewise, the NPR segment (not sure if this is Isaacson himself) says that "Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers." I believe that only two of the initial six (Jennings/Bartik in 1948 and Snyder/Holberton in 1947) followed Eckert and Mauchly. It's like the bit in his book on Jobs where he startled me (and, Google confirms, many other people) by writing that the magneto optical drive in the NeXT was not good as main storage because its latency was too LOW. I don't expect Isaacson to know what latency is, but wouldn't it have been better to pay for a close reading by someone who understands tech well enough to know a faster response is a good thing for a disk drive used as virtual memory? The Jobs book was rushed when its subject died, which perhaps cut short the editing process, but he claims that this new book was under development for a decade. On the other hand, Paul's comment on the movie potential of the story makes me see this in the broader context of Isaacson as an elite member of the news-entertainment complex. To make a true story fit within the genre expectations of a movie there are all kinds of liberties taken with the truth -- minor characters consolidated, timelines simplified, motives simplified, links between scenes invented. To a lesser extent that narrative streamlining is perhaps what Isaacson is doing here to tie his vignettes together by inventing a connection from Lovelace to ENIAC and by greatly simplifying the connections from the ENIAC operations team to Hopper to COBOL. The headline NPR "The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" also wondering how famous someone can be and still be forgotten. Would it be reasonable to set two documentary films, a number of major honors, and an NY Times obit as threshold to indicate that Bartik and her colleagues were already rescued from obscurity years before Isaacson arrived? How about Ada Lovelace's multiple full length biographies, appearance in various novels, and Ada Lovelace Day? Lovelace is surely more famous than any Turing Award winner or anyone building a computer in the 1940s apart from Turing and possibly von Neumann. Google's Ngram viewer shows her overtaking Eckert, Zuse, Mauchly, Aiken, Atanasoff or Wilkes by 1992 and staying ahead of them ever since. https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=Ada+Lovelace%2CJoh n+Mauchly%2CPresper+Eckert%2CHoward+Aiken%2CMaurice+Wilkes%2CKonrad+Zuse%2Cj ohn+atanasoff&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1990&year_end=2008 Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Janet Abbate Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 9:06 AM To: members Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book In the NPR segment, Isaacson claims that Grace Hopper invented COBOL. "He could find out that's not true just by looking at Wikipedia," I thought.... then looked at the "COBOL" entry and found Grace Hopper plastered all over it. Time for some editing. Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS _______________________________________________ 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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Isaacson's book
by Thomas Haigh 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

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 "Ada Lovelace defined the digital age," Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book.. "If it wasn't for Ada Lovelace, there's 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 Babbage's 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 Lovelace's 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/ This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIAC's 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. That's something I've 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". That's 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. That's a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacson's 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

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Burt Grad on Hopper and CODASYL
by Thomas Haigh 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

[Relayed from Burt Grad] As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details of the creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM had designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the language available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and was superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN compilers in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too strong and therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support COBOL, in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies. I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to what I heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team), about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression that the other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not willing to have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scientific language. There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in many interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get now that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not left detailed records of the committee deliberations. Burt Grad --part1_bb374.55830386.41641bf2_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content=3D"text/html; charset=3DUS-ASCII" http-equiv=3DContent-Type> <META name=3DGENERATOR content=3D"MSHTML 11.00.9600.17280"></HEAD> <BODY id=3Drole_body style=3D"FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; COLOR:= #000000"=20 bottomMargin=3D7 leftMargin=3D7 rightMargin=3D7 topMargin=3D7><FONT id=3Dr= ole_document=20 color=3D#000000 size=3D2 face=3DArial> <DIV>As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details= of the=20 creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing= =20 Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM ha= d=20 designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the lan= guage=20 available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with= =20 FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and wa= s=20 superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN com= pilers=20 in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too stro= ng and=20 therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support= COBOL,=20 in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to= what I=20 heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team= ),=20 about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression th= at the=20 other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not will= ing to=20 have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scient= ific=20 language.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL=20 was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in ma= ny=20 interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer=20 History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that= =20 provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get= now=20 that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not= left=20 detailed records of the committee deliberations. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Burt Grad </DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML> --part1_bb374.55830386.41641bf2_boundary-- --===============3271587676444744596== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline _______________________________________________ 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 --===============3271587676444744596==--

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A particular woman in computing
by McMillan, William W 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

The recent discussion of women in computing prompts me to ask if anyone who's done work in this area has run into mention of a former colleague, Marge Ratner. I knew Marge in the late 1970s at Case Tech when I was a grad student at CWRU, employed at the computing center. She was on the technical staff and was probably in her late 50s then. She worked among the early crew at Case in the 1950s: Ray Nelson, George Haynam, Fred Way, a very young Don Knuth, and others. Haynam (later my department head at Eastern Michigan U.) knew Marge well. Besides whatever disadvantages Marge had due to her gender, she also dealt with the effects of cerebral palsy (or so I believe), making her speech less than crystal-clear and her gait less than nimble. Marge was a cheerful, humble, hard-working, snuff-taking geek of the old school. I haven't been able to find anything about her through Internet searches. Thanks for any info you have! Bill

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Women in computing - NPR interviews
by Janet Abbate 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

If anyone's interested, I just did a couple of interviews with NPR reporters on the subject of women in computing. One should air on Monday (Oct 6) during Morning Edition, in a piece by Laura Sydell. (No idea if I'll get more than a soundbite.) The other is part of a podcast by Steve Henn for Planet Money (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/) not sure when that will be posted. So, why the interest in this topic all of a sudden? Turns out that Walter Isaacson, who wrote the best-selling bio of Steve Jobs, has a book coming out in a few days called "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution." I haven't had a chance to see it yet--any SIGCIS folks get an advance copy?--but evidently he devotes some attention to women in computing. Below is a link to an excerpt that was published in Fortune; the source list at the end shows he is aware of our collective work. http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ On a related note, I see that Kathy Kleiman finally finished her film on the ENIAC women (a few months ago), which had been in the works for years. If anyone has seen that, a review posted to this list would be welcome. Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

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From Tilly Blyth: Lovelace 200th [Re: Women in computing - NPRinterviews]
by Thomas Haigh 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

[For some reason this was flagged as an uncaught bounce rather than a response in need of moderation, so I am forwarding it on Tilly's behalf]. Tom From: Blyth Tilly [mailto:Tilly.Blyth@sciencemuseum.ac.uk] Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2014 2:21 PM To: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] Lovelace 200th [Re: Women in computing - NPRinterviews] Hi all We will be doing a small exhibition around the bicentenary next year to celebrate this event, including the display of the original parts of Babbage's Analytical Engine and engineering diagrams. This will coincide with ALD 2015. best wishes, Tilly Keeper of Technologies and Engineering Science Museum, London

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Charles W. Bachman, 2014 recipient of National Medal of Technology and Innovation
by Andrew Russell 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

Hello again everyone - On Friday the White House announced 8 new recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Among the recipients was Charles W. Bachman, a database and networking pioneer who won the Turing Award in 1973. Bachman’s accolades have come primarily as recognition for his contributions to database technology, a subject that the historian Tom Haigh described in a 2011 biography published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing <http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/BachmanBio.pdf>. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Haigh’s biography: “Bachman’s career was long, varied, and distinguished. He ran a chemical plant, created a capital accounting system, headed an early data processing group, pioneered the application of computers to manufacturing control, led efforts to standardize database and computer communication concepts, won the highest honor in computer science, and founded a publicly traded company. Innovation is a collaborative process, but by creating IDS and advocating forcefully for the concepts behind it Bachman did more than any other person to invent the DBMS [database management system] as we know it today. "Through all of this he retained an engineer’s zest for the elegant solution of difficult problems and faith in the power of careful analysis and the systems approach to make the world a better place. As he wrote in a note at the end of our oral history transcript, ‘My work has been my play.’” For those who want to learn more about Bachman and his career: - Haigh’s extensive oral history interview with Bachman from 2004 is available from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1141882. - I also interviewed Bachman in 2011, since I was keen to know more about his experience with computer communication systems and especially his Chairmanship of ISO’s subcommittee on Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) from 1977-1982. The transcript is available at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Charles_Bachman. - I wrote about Bachman’s role in a 2013 IEEE Spectrum article “The Internet that Wasn’t” <http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt> and in my 2014 book “Open Standards and the Digital Age” <http://www.arussell.org/open> - 55 boxes of Bachman’s papers are available at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, collection number CBI 125: http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa;cc=umfa;rgn=ma…. - And, Bachman has a page on wikipedia which could be improved and updated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bachman Congratulations Charlie - and thank you! Andy --------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D. Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies Associate Professor, History College of Arts & Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, New Jersey 07030 t. 201-216-5400 || f. 201-216-8245 arussell(a)stevens.edu || @RussellProf www.stevens.edu/cal/sts || www.arussell.org

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CHM Update: New CP/M History
by Dag Spicer 02 Oct '14

02 Oct '14

A new blog post today about the history of CP/M, as well as a major public release of CP/M source code: http://www.computerhistory.org/_static/atchm/early-digital-research-cpm-sou… Enjoy! Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Twitter: @ComputerHistory

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Lucy Suchman at University of Pittsburgh, November 6, 3:00 pm
by Acker, Amelia 01 Oct '14

01 Oct '14

The Sara Fine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh is pleased to announce that Lucy Suchman will be speaking on November 6 at 3 pm. Please join us if you will be in the Pittsburgh area. More about Lucy and her talk below. Apologies for cross posting. Please circulate widely. Sensing War at the Interface This talk sets out the motivating questions and initial analytic framing of my research in progress on the problem of 'situational awareness' within contemporary forms of (particularly U.S.) warfare. My focus is on the interfaces that configure war fighters to achieve 'recognition' of relevant subjects and objects, including the discriminations of us and them that are prerequisites for defensible killing. I'm interested more specifically in the logics and material practices of remotely-controlled weapon systems (particularly armed drones and weaponized robots), and military training simulations. These configurations reveal the complex relations of mediation and embodiment, distance and proximity, vulnerability and impunity that comprise contemporary warfare, as the virtual is infused with real figurations with their own material effects, and the real environments of war fighting are increasingly virtual. The primary empirical basis for this research is the archive of Flatworld, an immersive training environment developed between 2001 and 2008 as the flagship project of the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. I read the project through a frame inspired by Judith Butler's theoretical analysis of figuration's generative agencies, to try to articulate further the training simulation's discursive and material effects. Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and Co-Director of Lancaster's Centre for Science Studies. Before taking up her present post she was a Principal Scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where she spent twenty years as a researcher. Her research includes ethnographic studies of everyday practices of technology design and use, and critical engagement with projects in the design of humanlike machines, informed by feminist science and technology studies. She is the author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007) and Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1984), both published by Cambridge University Press. In 2002 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Sciences, in 2010 the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) Lifetime Research Award, and in 2014 the J.D. Bernal Prize for Distinguished Contribution to the Field from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the field of human-computer interaction to contemporary warfighting, including the figurations that inform immersive simulations, and problems of 'situational awareness' in remotely-controlled weapon systems. ? Amelia Acker Assistant Professor School of Information Sciences University of Pittsburgh 612 Information Science Building 135 North Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15260

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Alan Turin and economics
by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo 01 Oct '14

01 Oct '14

This might be of interest to some best Bernardo Bangor University (Wales) Alan Turing - A Forbidden Fruit, its Serendipitous Fall and a Poisoned Bite Date: 2014 By: K.Vela Velupillai URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:trn:utwpas:1407&r=his Abstract I summarise some of the various ways in which the Turing birth centennial has been commemorated, paying homage to a few of his remarkable hints on how to ‘see further’. The third section is an outline of what I call the five classic contributions by Turing, those which embody what Max Newman in his early (1955) Royal Society Biographical Memoir (Cooper-van Leeuven, pp. 5-12) referred to as their ‘unity of purpose’ (ibid., p. 7). The concluding section is written with my economist’s ‘hat’ firmly placed on my aged head – wondering why so much confusion and misconceptions surround many of the claimed applications of computability (and Brouwerian constructivity) in applied and pure economic theory

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