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New CHM Lecture Online! - Marina von Neumann Whitman
by Dag Spicer 14 May '13

14 May '13

Dear SIGCIS Friends, Here is a great new lecture from CHM that is now online. Enjoy! Dag Published on May 13, 2013 [Recorded: April 29, 2013] "How did a young Hungarian immigrant and his daughter both become leading advisors to Presidents of the United States? This richly detailed memoir not only illuminates Marina von Neumann Whitman's ground-breaking life, but sheds long-awaited new light on her father, bringing us as close as we may ever get to the autobiography that John von Neumann never had the chance to write." —George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines, Project Orion, and Turing's Cathedral One of the five Hungarian scientific geniuses dubbed "the Martians" by their colleagues, John von Neumann is often hailed as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and even as the greatest scientist after Einstein. He was a key figure in the Manhattan Project; the inventor of game theory; the pioneer developer of the modern stored-program electronic computer; and an adviser to the top echelons of the American military establishment. In The Martian's Daughter, Marina von Neumann Whitman reveals intimate details about the famed scientist and explores how the cosmopolitan environment in which she was immersed, the demanding expectations of her parents, and her own struggles to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life parent shaped her life and work. Join Museum CEO John Hollar as he moderates a conversation with Whitman about her life with her father and her remarkable rise to become the first or highest-ranking woman in a variety of areas he unfortunately did not live to see. -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd Mountain View, CA 94043 650.810.1035 direct 650.810.1055 fax Follow Us: CHM Blog I Facebook I Twitter I YouTube

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1986 computer shoe
by M. Hicks 13 May '13

13 May '13

Thought this might be interesting--or at least amusing--to folks on this list: a computerized running shoe I saw this weekend at Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum. It reminded me of all the current self-improvement consumer technologies we have now like Fitbit, etc., and what a long lineage they have. (Alex Bochannek tells me they also have a pair of these at CHM.) Pics attached. Marie ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net | mhicks1(a)iit.edu | @histoftech

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CFP 8th GIGANET Symposium
by John Paul Laprise 13 May '13

13 May '13

Please circulate: CALL FOR PAPERS 8th Annual Symposium 21 October 2013 Bali, Indonesia Deadline for abstract submission: July 1 2013 The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) is seeking research submissions about Internet Governance to be presented at its Eighth Annual Symposium, held on 21 October 2013, one day before the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Bali, Indonesia. GigaNet is a scholarly community that promotes the development of Internet Governance as a recognized, interdisciplinary field of study and facilitates informed dialogue on policy issues and related matters between scholars and governments, international organizations, the private sector and civil society. http://giga-net.org/ Since 2006, GigaNet has organized an Annual Symposium to showcase research about Internet Governance, bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and fields. As in previous years, the symposium will provide room to discuss current and future questions as well as the challenges encountered and results achieved in global Internet governance. Conference themes GigaNet is interested in receiving abstracts related to Internet Governance themes, especially those containing innovative approaches and/or emerging research areas. This year, we are especially encouraging submissions on two interwoven themes: * Cybersecurity, cybersurveillance, cyberespionage and cyberwarfare and * State and non-state actor efforts to control the Internet The program committee welcomes proposals on any other topics related to global Internet governance. This year, one panel will be especially devoted to emerging scholars in the field. We define emerging scholars as doctoral students working on an approved proposal through scholars who have received their PhD within the past three years. Accepted papers from senior scholars will be presented and discussed in a roundtable format involving business, government and technical community representatives, while emerging scholars will present their work in a more traditional academic panel. In both cases, presenters should expect to have conversations about their work with people from a wide range of stakeholder groups. Submissions Interested scholars should submit abstracts of their research paper at the Easy Chair platform: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=giganet2013 The deadline for submission is July 1, 2013! Paper proposals should be submitted following these requirements: ? An abstract of 800-1000 words, in English, where it is mandatory to describe the main research goal(s) and the methodological background of the paper ? A short bio note focused on institutional affiliations, advanced degrees, scholarly publications and work in the field of Internet Governance and related issues (for example ICTs). Please include a link to a more detailed CV. ? Authors of accepted abstracts must submit their final papers by 30 September 2013. Those unable to do so will be removed from the program. Process and publication The Program Committee will evaluate submitted abstracts and inform proposal authors of acceptance decisions by email before 29 July 2013. Accepted submissions and final papers will be published on the GigaNet website. An online publication with selected papers on the main challenges of Internet Governance is also planned for the Bali IGF. Registration The GigaNet Annual Symposium is free of charge. However, registration will be required to gain entry to the event venue. Please continue visiting our website for further information about registration, venue and accommodation. If you have any question related to the submission or the symposium activities, please e-mail the Program Committee Chair: j-laprise(a)northwestern.edu<mailto:j-laprise@northwestern.edu>. Best regards, John Laprise, Ph.D. Visiting Fellow Oxford Internet Institute<http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/> Oxford University<http://www.ox.ac.uk/> Assistant Professor of Communication in Residence Northwestern University in Qatar<http://www.qatar.northwestern.edu/> Northwestern University<http://www.northwestern.edu/>

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] PC history
by Elizabeth Petrick 10 May '13

10 May '13

Hi everyone, I wanted to pipe in here and introduce myself as someone newly doing work on the use of computer technology. I've just finished my PhD at UC San Diego, with a dissertation titled "Fulfilling the Promise of the Personal Computer: The Development of Accessible Computer Technologies, 1970-1998." In it, I discuss the history of personal computer technology for people with disabilities and its relationship with civil rights and disability activism. Best, Elizabeth Petrick

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New CHM Lecture - Cheryl Sandberg
by Dag Spicer 10 May '13

10 May '13

Dear SIGCIS Friends, Here is an exciting new lecture from the Computer History Museum Published on May 9, 2013 [Recorded: May 8, 2013] For the past five years, I've sat at a desk next to Sheryl and I've learned something from her almost every day. She has a remarkable intelligence that can cut through complex processes and find solutions to the hardest problems. Lean In combines Sheryl's ability to synthesize information with her understanding of how to get the best out of people. The book is smart and honest and funny. Her words will help all readers—especially men—to become better and more effective leaders. - Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women's voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women's progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential. Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TEDTalk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to "sit at the table," seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto. Join Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt as he moderates what is certain to be a fascinating conversation with Sandberg about women, leadership and so much more. This event is part of the Museum's acclaimed Revolutionaries speaker series, featuring renowned innovators, business and technology leaders, and authors in enthralling conversations often with leading journalists. Our audiences learn about the process of innovation, its risks and rewards, and failure that led to ultimate success. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WWumJF1dEY&list=UUHDr4RtxwA1KqKGwxgdK4Vg Dag Senior Curator CHM

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SIGCIS syllabus repository
by Andrew Russell 09 May '13

09 May '13

Dear colleagues - In an effort to maintain and refresh the SIGCIS Syllabus Repository, I would like to invite you to visit the Repository at http://www.sigcis.org/syllabi and to contribute any syllabi that touch on our SIG's scope - Computers, Information, and Society. I hope this reminder is a timely one for those of you who teach, since you may be (a) putting the finishing touches on the semester, (b) planning your book orders (and hence syllabi) for next semester, and/or (c) trying to find productive ways to avoid reckoning with the piles of papers and exams on your desk ;-) If you want to share your syllabus, please send a copy, preferably packaged as a single .pdf file, to secretary(a)sigcis.org together with a message giving SIGICS permission to post it on this page. If your syllabus exists on the web at a stable url, please include that as well as (or instead of) a .pdf. Even if you don't have anything new to contribute or you don't teach in these areas, it is certainly worth the time to peruse our Repository and to appreciate the breadth and depth of the topics our members are teaching! Thanks, Andy --------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D. Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies Assistant 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 http://www.stevens.edu/cal/sts http://www.arussell.org

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Last Call for Papers HaPoC 2013 (Deadline May 15)
by Maarten.Bullynck＠kuttaka.org 09 May '13

09 May '13

Dear SIGCIS members, I would like you to remind you of our call for papers for HaPoC 2013. The deadline for contributions, May 15th, is within less than a week. To upload your contributions, please visit: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hapoc2 For more information on the conference: http://hapoc2013.sciencesconf.org with best regards, Maarten Bullynck & Jean-Baptiste Joinet ************************************************************************************************* Call for Papers Conf. History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC 2013, 28-31 October, Paris) ************************************************************************************************* CALL FOR PAPERS, 2nd International CONFERENCE on the HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTING (HaPoC 2013) Extended Submission Deadline: 15th May 2013 ! 28th - 31st October 2013 Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. with a special session on "Computing and the Arts" at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs http://hapoc2013.sciencesconf.org The 2nd International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC 2013) will take place from the 28th to the 31st of October 2013 at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (France). The birth of the computing and its sciences has often been the topic of philosophical and historical reflection. The HaPoC-conferences have decided to bring together the historical and the philosophical viewpoints. They want to create an environment for a true interdisciplinary convergence around computer science, reenforcing research on the science(s) of computing and its history and stimulating a theoretical dialogue between these domains. To furter this dialogue HaPoC has chosen to have no parallel sessions. Our invited speakers are: Janet Abbate; Bernard Chazelle; S. Barry Cooper; Walter Dean; Nathan Ensmenger; Jean-Yves Girard; Margit Rosen and Franck Varenne. HaPoC 2013 is the follow-up conference to HaPoC 2011 (Gent, Belgium). Please check out the website of HaPoC 2013 for more information on the conference: http://hapoc2013.sciencesconf.org For HaPoC 2013 we welcome contributions from logicians, philosophers and historians of computing as well as from philosophically aware computer scientists and mathematicians. Topics include but are not limited to: 1. Approaches to the notion of computing a. History and Philosophy of Computability b. History and Philosophy of Computation c. History and Philosophy of Programming d. History and Philosophy of the Computer 2. Applications and uses of Computing a. History and Epistemology of the use of Computing in the sciences b. Computing and the Arts : historical and conceptual issues c. Social, ethical and paedagogical aspects of Computing We cordially invite researchers working in a field relevant to the main topics of the conference to submit a short abstract of approximately 200 words and an extended abstract of at most a 1000 words (references included) to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hapoc2 Abstracts must be written in English and anonymized. Please note that the format of uploaded files must be .pdf or .doc. The submission deadline is: May 15th, 2013 (extended!) Notification of acceptance: July 1st, 2013 Best regards, the organisers, Maarten Bullynck (Paris 8 & SPHERE) Jean-Baptiste Joinet (Lyon 3, IRPhil & CIRPHLES)

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My review of Turng's Cathedral, by George Dyson
by Thomas Haigh 08 May '13

08 May '13

Hello everyone, The list has been a little quiet lately, so here is the text of my recently published review of George Dysons high profile book. It was published in SIAM News, which I realize not many of you read, and after a short gap their material goes to full text access for non-subscribers so I feel OK reproducing it at this point. If any of you recently published items of interest, particularly outside the venues at which SIGCIS members might usually encounter them (such as Annals) then please dont be shy about sharing them with the community. (Links are better than attachments, particularly large ones). Tom >From http://www.siam.org/news/news.php?id=2054 <http://www.siam.org/news/> SIAM NEWS An Unconventional History of the Early IAS Computer March 21, 2013 http://www.siam.org/images/news/2054.jpg Why does Alan Turing (19121954) peer out from narrow slits in the dust jacket of a book about John von Neumanns computer? Book Review Thomas Haigh Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. By George Dyson, Pantheon Books, New York, 2012, 432 pages, $29.95. Turing's Cathedral is an unconventional, surprisingly personal history. It centers on an early electronic computer, constructed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton by a team led by John von Neumann. Planning for the machine began in 1946, and it was fully operational by 1952. It performed pioneering simulations of weather patterns, nuclear explosions, and what would later be called artificial life before being scrapped in 1958. Dyson knits many straggling narrative threads into this core story. He sketches the cast of characters involved with the machine and with IAS, including Klara von Neumann (John's second wife), Vladimir Zworykin of RCA (who tried and failed to provide memory tubes for the machine), legendary mathematician Kurt Gödel, visiting British computer pioneer Andrew Booth, and such Los Alamos scientists as Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam. Dyson expands these sketches to explore other work of his characters during the era; some of his story's threads originate in the prehistory of IAS, while others extend forward into a science fiction future of intelligent machines. Why does mathematician, computer pioneer, code breaker, and posthumous gay icon Alan Turing (19121954) peer out from narrow slits in the dust jacket of a book about John von Neumann's computer? Dyson never explains his title directly. Perhaps it has something to do with the frenzy surrounding the Turing centennial in 2012. Publishers do like to sell books, and poor old von Neumann has faded almost completely from popular memory, while Turing's cultural prominence only rises. Turing does eventually appear in chapter 13, toward the end of the book, and a little later we unexpectedly discover that the titular cathedral is Google's corporate headquarters. Dyson (son of the physicist Freeman Dyson) brings these characters to life more effectively than any other writer on the history of early computing. He begins by recalling a childhood spent roaming the halls of IAS to chat with its staff, and later mentions playing games with parts of the scrapped computer. His affection for both is palpable. The human characters are drawn with confidence. Thanks to his perseverance and personal connections, Dyson was able to track down and interview most of the surviving participants, including the reclusive Julian Bigelow, the leading engineer on the project; with well-chosen and often poignant quotations, he has encapsulated their motivations and struggles. He also obtained access to important papers from Klara von Neumann, which are still held in the basement of von Neumann's daughter Marina von Neumann Whitman. Dyson reconstructs Klara's story in compelling detail, rescuing an important contribution to early computing that was merely noted in passing by earlier authors. (Disclaimer: He has been kind enough to pass some of these papers along to me for my own research.) The computer is similarly humanized. Dyson highlights the huge engineering challenges that faced all computer projects of the 1940s, and makes effective use of the machine's log book to dramatize the constant battle involved in keeping it running with tolerable reliability. One fortunate result of his efforts is that the computer project archives at IAS, where he spent time as a fellow researching the book, have been properly organized and made available to the public. The tone and structure of Turing's Cathedral reminded me less of conventional history and more of the kind of nonfiction that bridges travel and science writing, practiced in different forms by such writers as Bill Bryson and John McPhee. Readers are collected at the beginning of a journey and deposited at the end, but in between their guide ventures down some unexpected byways, throws in long passages on tangentially related topics, and builds up to some personal musings on the meaning of life. If the author has a knack for weaving scraps together, and a voice that entertains rather than grates, the reader will leave the ride happier and wiser. I found Dyson's zesty prose engaging but would have preferred a tighter focus. Readers are tested early, as the world of early computing sketched in the first chapter abruptly vanishes. Von Neumann reappears eventually, but not before Dyson has led us though the entire history of Princeton, from the Lenape clans to the building of a permanent home for IAS. I particularly welcome Dyson's explorations of the machine's applications to various areas of science, in particular its close relation with Los Alamos and the nuclear weapons program. Discussion of early machines has too often focused on their design and construction, at the expense of the work for which they were constructed. Dyson's book enjoys a far higher profile than any other recent work on the history of computing, publicized with a spate of media appearances and reviewed, seemingly, in every newspaper and magazine that still employs book reviewers. Many of its readers will know nothing of the history of computing, and will be immersed in a fascinating and richly depicted slice of history. Yet, as a professionally trained historian, I very much hope that Dyson's idiosyncratic work will serve more often as an introduction to scholarly writing on the topic than as a substitute for it. His insistence on the IAS computer and its "fully electronic random access storage matrix" as "as close to a point source" for the origin of the "digital universe" as "any approximation can get" reflects an urge to explain a particular episode as the singular origin of something vast. Pinpointing beginnings is a primal driver of storytelling---consider the Book of Genesis. But historians have spent decades trying to move beyond partisan advocacy for one or another great man as the true inventor of the computer. Looking for a point source leads to history as viewed through a fisheye lens. When discussing the influence of von Neumann on computing, historians traditionally focus on the 1945 "First Draft Report on the EDVAC" circulated under his name. His personal responsibility for many of the ideas set forth in the document has frequently been disputed, but its huge influence on the computer projects initiated over the next few years has not. Historians who have looked more closely at the era also credit an early description of the planned design for the IAS computer, circulated in 1946, and its early revisions as an important influence on many of these projects. The physical, functional computer was much less influential, in part because engineering delays resulted in its completion only after at least one of the machines modeled on its detailed design was already operational. One of Dyson's idiosyncrasies is to write as if these three achievements could not be separated, commenting relatively little on the 1945 "First Draft." He places the full burden of universe-changing historical importance on the physical IAS computer, which ran its first program in 1951, rather than on ideas that many others had already embraced, and indeed extended, years earlier. Dyson boosts the historical importance of the IAS computer by omitting or downplaying information on developments elsewhere before or during 1951, with the exception of a tiny 1948 prototype computer at the University of Manchester from which von Neumann's team took the memory technology. Dyson's evidence is truthful, but startlingly incomplete. For example, while he concedes in his introduction that "the IAS machine was not the first computer," he never mentions EDSAC, operational at the University of Cambridge in 1949, which historians have almost universally recognized as the first useful computer built on the model described by von Neumann in 1945. It was also in 1949 that the Manchester team got its memory technology working in a full-scale computer. In 1951 UNIVAC provided the first commercially manufactured computer to the U.S. Census Bureau, while in the U.K. J. Lyons and Company, best known for its chain of teashops, completed its own computer and applied it to business automation. Other computers were already operational in the Soviet Union and Australia. All those milestones pass unmentioned by Dyson. Dyson asks in conclusion, "How did the von Neumann vector manage to outdistance all the other groups trying to build a practical implementation of Turing's Universal Machine in 1946?" Even an attentive reader might assume that this "outdistancing" involved winning a race rather than losing it by several years. Dyson's implication that the various teams of computer builders inspired by von Neumann's proposed design all saw themselves as trying to implement the computational model described by Turing in his now-celebrated 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" is also likely to raise howls of protest from historians who have looked at early computing. This disengagement with the historical literature limits the scholarly contribution of the book in other ways. For example, William Aspray's impeccably researched John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing is acknowledged in the foreword but never cited in the body of the book; when the two diverge, it is hard to know whether Dyson considered Aspray's interpretation and rejected it on new evidence. Here is one example: In 1972 Nick Metropolis, a collaborator of von Neumann's and a pioneer writer on computer history, gave a well-known paper, "A Trilogy of Errors in the History of Computing." One of these common errors was calling von Neumann's computer "MANIAC." Metropolis insisted that this was not, and never had been, its name and that "MANIAC" should be reserved for the computer he had built at Los Alamos patterned after von Neumann's design. Aspray, and others who subsequently discussed the computer, therefore called it simply the "IAS computer." Alone among its cohort, it is denied a short, unique acronym. To Dyson, however, it is MANIAC throughout. This might be right. He may have learned the truth from new documents or from his oral histories. Perhaps the machine was known within von Neumann's team as MANIAC until someone realized that this glibness would not help their already rocky relationship with the pure scientists of IAS. Dyson does write that the name was "removed" by 1954. Perhaps Metropolis had a selective memory. But because Dyson ignored the existing consensus, rather than acknowledging it and justifying his challenge, he is unlikely to overturn it. Dyson sometimes makes effective use of technical details to convey the world of early machines, as in his opening claim that in 1953 the world held just 53 KB of operational "high speed random access memory" (by which he means cathode ray tube storage), 5 KB of which were at IAS. At other points his reliance on metaphor rather than detailed explanation can be frustrating. Dyson puts great importance on the transition of computer memory from the one-dimensional tape in the conceptual Turing machine to the "two-dimensional" storage matrix found in a computer memory tube. Yet the physical tube existed in three dimensions, while its storage was treated by the programmer as a single series of numbered locations. The relevant shift was from sequential to random access, not from one- to two-dimensional storage. The book is generously footnoted, and Dyson has supplemented his oral history interviews and newly discovered sources with visits to several existing archives. Yet his use of these sources is a little erratic. I am currently researching the Monte Carlo calculations performed by von Neumann's group on ENIAC in 1948 and had made copies of several documents cited by Dyson. Within his three pages on this topic and their footnotes I discovered eight distinct errors, mostly transcription problems in quotations, such as "16 cycles" for "160 cycles," omission of words in quoted passages without ellipsis, and the attribution of details from a 1949 letter to an episode in 1948. To Dyson's credit, he has made efforts to correct these in the forthcoming paperback edition. Those minor errors do not undermine the substance of his story, but their density makes me reluctant to rely on details elsewhere in the book without external confirmation. The best way to decide whether you would enjoy Turing's Cathedral may be to check the reader comments at Amazon.com. Scores currently have bimodal distribution, with five- and two-star reviews the most numerous. Try to figure out which score might predict your reaction. The two-star reviews come from people frustrated by the book's insular perspective, insistence on the IAS computer as the singular origin point of modern computing, relaxed sense of chronology, lengthy digressions, and philosophical musings on the "digital universe." His fans praise Dyson's lively and elegant prose, eye for interesting details, and boldness in building what he himself calls a "creation myth" for the modern world. Both judgments are amply supported by the text. Thomas Haigh (thaigh(a)computer.org) is an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin---Milwaukee

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IT Historical Listing Museums and Archives
by Info ＠ IT History Society 08 May '13

08 May '13

The IT History Society is pleased to add to its many databases, a listing of international information technology museums and archives - http://ithistory.org/museums/museums.php IT History Society One Blackfield Drive Suite 331 Tiburon, CA 94920 (415) 435-2263 Fax (415) 983-2472 info(a)ITHistory.org www.ITHistory.org Ensuring the Future by Preserving the Past

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CBI Archivist elected head of Rare Books and Manuscripts Section
by Thomas J. Misa 08 May '13

08 May '13

We are pleased to announce that CBI's Archivist, R. Arvid Nelsen, has been elected as Vice-Chair -- and hence Chair-Elect -- of the ALA-affiliated Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. The news is officially released here <http://www.new.rbms.info/?q=node/98> RBMS has for fifty years played a leading international role in the "care and keeping" of printed materials of all types. Recently, RBMS is taking an increasingly active role in digital archiving practices and policies. CBI as well as the history of computing community benefits greatly from this exposure and visibility. <http://www.new.rbms.info/?q=node/5> Our hearty congrats to Arvid! Best, Tom

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