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Software Crisis redux
by Janet Abbate 20 Apr '12

20 Apr '12

Did anyone see the piece in the latest issue of IEEE Computer on "Software Crisis 2.0"? (April 2012, 89-91). While historians of computing have been moving away from the idea that the "software crisis" was a real phenomenon (see, e.g., Tom Haigh's essays on this), the computer scientist who wrote this article refers to the crisis as "well-documented" and "confirmed." Not only that, he claims there is a new software crisis upon us, fueled by information overload and demands for ubiquitous computing. Am I right that there is a gap in perception here between practitioners and historians? Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor Science & Technology in Society Virginia Tech

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cyber jedis
by Taylor-Smith, Ella 18 Apr '12

18 Apr '12

Hi This is perhaps a little present-tense for this list, but I the guardian is running an interesting series of articles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/battle-for-the-internet In particular, I thought that you'd be interested in the term "cyber jedi" -seemingly used withou comment in this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/16/militarisation-of-cyberspa… (It seems to me that the term cyberspace was out of fashion after the turn of the century and has recently become current again -just an impression though) -Ella Ella Taylor-Smith Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation Edinburgh Napier University 10 Colinton Road Edinburgh, EH10 5DT Telephone: +44 (0) 131 455 2392 Email: e.taylor-smith(a)napier.ac.uk http://www.iidi.napier.ac.uk/e.taylor-smith @EllaTasm http://www.facebook.com/OnlineAmbition @OnlineAmbition Edinburgh Napier University is one of Scotland's top universities for graduate employability. 93.2% of graduates are in work or further study within six months of leaving. The university is also proud winner of the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education 2009, awarded for innovative housing construction for environmental benefit and quality of life. This message is intended for the addressee(s) only and should not be read, copied or disclosed to anyone else outwith the University without the permission of the sender. It is your responsibility to ensure that this message and any attachments are scanned for viruses or other defects. Edinburgh Napier University does not accept liability for any loss or damage which may result from this email or any attachment, or for errors or omissions arising after it was sent. Email is not a secure medium. Email entering the University's system is subject to routine monitoring and filtering by the University. Edinburgh Napier University is a registered Scottish charity. Registration number SC018373

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Latest on Email Invention incl. my article
by Thomas Haigh 17 Apr '12

17 Apr '12

Hello SIGCIS members, You may remember some flurries of interest a while ago in the "Inventor of Email" saga. The happy outcome was that the Washington Post had asked me to write an article outlining the actual history of email and putting the claims of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai in context. That never took place, but the article is now published in the blog section of the SIGCIS website as www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai. Thanks to all those who contributed, and I'm sorry if this won't have the visibility and impact we'd anticipated with the promised Post website publication. For myself I am glad to be done with this and hope the article can still help to put the record straight. A number of people have asked me what happened to the article. There's an outline of the whole confusing saga in a letter I wrote to the Washington Post ombudsman, www.sigcis.org/node/330. Basically I don't know. The article was accepted, but just before publication something killed the planned series of four articles on the episode (including one by Noam Chomsky!!) The only one of the four to be published, by Dave Crocker, is a useful capsule history of Internet email but was published without reference to Ayyadurai and attracted just two comments. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/a-history-of-e-mail-co llaboration-innovation-and-the-birth-of-a-system/2012/03/19/gIQAOeFEPS_story .html Ayyadurai's public relations firm is, at least as of a couple of weeks ago, still trying to interest journalists in his story so perhaps we can anticipate more press coverage to come. Personally I am glad to be done with this. Other news from the world of email invention: . Another journalist featured Ayyadurai as inventor of email, even after the Post's retraction. Callie Crossley on WGBH ran a full interview segment: http://www.wgbh.org/programs/The-Callie-Crossley-Show-855/episodes/Mon-31212 Innovation-Hour-USPS-Goes-Electric-36918. . Gizmodo ran a lengthy debunking. The quoting of one word insults from anonymous sources is not really fair, and you could argue that putting "crazy" and "man" a few words apart in the title is prejudicial. But overall it does a good job of investigating. http://gizmodo.com/5888702/corruption-lies-and-death-threats-the-crazy-story -of-the-man-who-pretended-to-invent-email . Dave Crocker has set up a website and associated discussion list to try to preserve the actual history of email. www.emailhistory.org. . Ayyadurai's book "The EMAIL Revolution: How to Build Brands and Create Real Connections," is available for preorder on Amazon for just $16.47. Publisher is Allworth (rather than Norton as suggested by Gizmodo). Interesting subtitle there. http://www.amazon.com/The-EMAIL-Revolution-Brands-Connections/dp/1581159803 Best wishes, Tom Haigh SIGCIS Chair, www.sigcis.org www.tomandmaria.com/tom

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IT History Society Appoints New Board Member - Dr. Randy Katz
by Info ＠ IT History Society 16 Apr '12

16 Apr '12

Randy Howard Katz, UC Berkeley Professor of Computer Sciences and Noted Information Technology Scientist, Joins the IT History Society Board San Francisco, CA (PrBuzz) April 11, 2012 - Randy H. Katz, University of California, Berkeley United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a noted information technology scientist, joins the <http://www.ithistory.org/> IT History Society's (www.IThistory.org) board of directors. "Randy Katz is a well known computer scientist and professor. His contributions as a Board member and Trustee of the IT History Society will expand our reach", said Jeffery Stein, Chairman; "Randy's experience bringing the White House onto the Internet, his developing RAID technology for file systems, his many courses and teachings at one of America's top universities, and his many other accomplishments will strengthen ITHS even more". "I am honored to be associated with the Society dedicated as it is to saving the history of this crucial field of technology, largely created within our own lifetimes," said Randy Katz, UMC Distinguished Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley. The IT History Society with its many new databases is becoming the 'table of contents' of where the history of information technology is located. In addition, the Society wants to encourage information technology companies to preserve their histories and show companies the return on investment derived by keeping their histories alive. The Society's membership includes nearly 700 historians and archivists, as well as institutions such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, INTEL, The Internet Archive, Center for Technology Innovation, Charles Babbage Institute, Computer History Museum, IEEE History Center, Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, McKesson, U.K. National Archive for the History of Computing, ACM History Committee, FedEx, Agilent, British Library, Applied Materials, Caltech, Computer Conservation Society, Deutsches Museum, Deltek, Microsoft, MIT, the Smithsonian Institution, and Symantec. Membership in the Society is complimentary due to the generous donations from the computer industry. The IT History Society supports the collaboration of like-minded institutions and individuals in expanding the reach of historical and archival activities. At the same time ITHS focuses on communicating to the private sector the value of preserving their history and heritage for future generations. The IT History Society continually promotes the value of preservation of information technology corporate history with its many databases and acting as a gateway for the location of historical information as a teaching and research aid for colleges, universities and researchers in both the public and private sectors. Another key resource is the IT Honor Roll Database <http://ithistory.org/honor_roll/honor-roll-random.php> http://ithistory.org/honor_roll/honor-roll-random.php The Honor Roll includes individuals who have made a noteworthy contribution to the information technology industry. The IT History Society Historical Resource Sites comprises over 1,600 historical information technology sites that are indexed by the Society for use by educators, students, and researchers. <http://www.ithistory.org/resource_sites/resource-sites.php> http://www.ithistory.org/resource_sites/resource-sites.php An added database is the hardware database of all information technology hardware ever manufactured. The library consists of over 2,000 entries growing by over 100 per day. The database is located on the web at <http://ithistory.org/hardware/hardware-name.php> http://ithistory.org/hardware/hardware-name.php About ITHS The IT History Society exists to enhance and expand works concerning the history of Information Technology and to demonstrate the value of IT history for the understanding and improvement of our present and future world. IT History Society One Blackfield Drive - Suite 331 Tiburon, CA 94920 (415) 435-2263 <mailto:info@ITHistory.org> info(a)ITHistory.org <http://www.ithistory.org/> www.ITHistory.org Sm logo dropEnsuring the Future by Preserving the Past <http://www.twitter.com/ithistoryorg> twitter <http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/It-History-Society/143799552346273> find-us-on-facebook <https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=RRE7C2 JV47KKJ> btn_donate_LG

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CfP Turing in Context II
by Liesbeth De Mol 12 Apr '12

12 Apr '12

Dear all, as some of you might have noticed I am actively involved with the organization of a number of meetings and conferences which, I hope, are interesting to you. In October I co-organize another such meeting called Turing in context II (the first Turing in context I was held at King's college in Cambridge and was an event for a general academic public with invited speakers only). The idea of this meeting is to consider Turing's work in context. We aim at gaining a deeper understanding of Turing's legacy by bringing together historians, philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and computer scientists who work on topics that are relevant to one of the many fields Turing has contributed to. The focus of this meeting is not Turing's work per se, but rather the work of others before, during and after Turing's life up to today. Below you can find the call for papers and I hope that you will be interested to submit an abstract for this meeting. very best wishes, Liesbeth. CALL FOR PAPERS "Turing in context II" Historical and Contemporary Research in Logic, Computing Machinery and AI www.computing-conference.ugent.be/tic2 10-12 October, 2012 Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brussels, Belgium In the spirit of Alan Turing's interdisciplinary research, an international meeting will be held at the Royal Flemish Academy for the Sciences and Arts, exploring recent research into the many directions brought together in his work. This meeting is the second Turing in Context event during the 2012 Turing centennial. The first was held at King's College, Cambridge, 18-19 February 2012. It was an outreach event for the general academic public with invited speakers only. Turing in Context II is a research meeting meant for experts in the fields touched by Turing's contributions to science. TOPICS of the meeting include but are not restricted to: * history and theory of symbolic and physical machines * human and artificial intelligence * logic, computability and complexity We cordially invite contributions in all fields relating to the work and legacy of Alan Turing, both current research continuing Turing's ideas, and historical and philosophical reflections on them. Researchers from areas that Turing worked in but are not listed above, such as pattern formation and cryptography are explicitly encouraged to submit as well. Submissions should be 200-500 words abstracts and should be submitted to EasyChair via the following link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tic2 Authors of accepted papers will later be invited to send an extended abstract (max. 6 pages) to be reviewed by the programme committee for publication in a volume of the Academy Proceedings Series. A volume of full papers might follow after the conference. TIMETABLE: Deadline Submission of Abstracts: July 20, 2012 Notification of Acceptance: August 20, 2012 Conference: October 10-12, 2012 KEYNOTES: S. Barry Cooper, "Turing Machines, Embodied Information, and Higher Type Computability" Leo Corry, Turing and the Computational Tradition in Pure Mathematics: The Case of the Riemann Zeta-Function Daniel Dennett, "Turing's gradualist vision: making minds from proto-minds" Marie Hicks, The Imitation Game Writ Large: Thinking about gender, labor, and sexuality in making machines useful. Maurice Margenstern, Universality everywhere and beyond, an epic of computer science Elvira Mayordomo, From Computability to Information Theory Alexandra Shlapentokh, Definability and decidability over function fields of positive characteristic Rineke Verbrugge, Cognitive systems in interaction PROGRAMME COMMITTEE: Bill Aspray (University of Texas) Tony Beavers (University of Evansville) Liesbeth De Mol (Ghent University) Luc De Raedt (Leuven University) Pablo Gervas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Antonina Kolokolova (University of Toronto) Benedikt Loewe (University of Amsterdam) David McCarty (Indiana University Bloomington) Erik Myin (Antwerp University) Giuseppe Primiero (Ghent University) Wilfried Sieg (Carnegie Mellon University) Mariya Soskova (Sofia University) Jean-Paul van Bendegem (Free University of Brussels) Bart van Kerkhove (Hasselt University) ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Liesbeth De Mol, Benedikt Loewe, Giuseppe Primiero, Jean-Paul van Bendegem, Dagmar Provijn The meeting is sponsored by the Royal Flemish Academy of the Sciences and the Arts and the Belgian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science

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CFP Grad Stud conference "InfoSocial" - Northwestern, Deadline April 15
by Thomas Haigh 11 Apr '12

11 Apr '12

Hello SIGCIS members, I just came across this during an assault on the material I've allowed to pile up in my inbox over the past few weeks. We're getting close to the APRIL 15 deadline, but note that "History and Information," "Networks and the Information Society" and "Open source and innovation" are included as bullet items for topics. The Comms school at Northwestern includes several scholars with STS and history backgrounds. Could be fun. Northwestern is in the Chicago suburbs, accessible by train. Details at http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/programs/phd_media_technology_soci ety/infosocial/ Tom

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Wedgewood Museum and Archives
by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo 11 Apr '12

11 Apr '12

Colleagues Together with some colleagues, I am drafting a letter to The Guardian concerning the imminent threat to the Wedgwood collections. If anyone would like to consider signing the letter, please let Peter Scott know (p.m.scott(a)reading.ac.uk) Cheers, Bernardo OPEN LETTER We the undersigned wish to express our concern regarding the threat to the preservation of the Wedgwood Museum and Archive ? as an integrated collection maintained within the UK. The threatened sale could result in the collection being broken up, passing into private hands, or going overseas. Each of these outcomes would be a disaster for Britain?s industrial and artistic heritage. The Wedgwood Museum & Archive preserves the design, production, organisational, and social histories of one of the world?s leading ceramics manufacturers. It represents a flagship collection for the history of British consumer goods industries; a testimony to one of the most brilliant designers, technologists, and industrial artists of the eighteenth century; and a key part of Britain?s industrial and artistic heritage. Yet, in contrast to the high priority and profile given to campaigns to save various paintings for the nation, this important collection appears to be relatively neglected by a national art establishment which seems more interested in individual high priced works by overseas painters than in saving the artistic legacy of both Josiah Wedgwood and the numerous individual artists and craftsmen who worked for Wedgewood from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. For a country which prides itself as leading the world in creative industries and in producing high quality art for a broad market, this seems to be an unfortunate set of priorities. -- Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, FRHistS Athro Hanes Busnes ac Rheolaeth Bancio / Professor of Business History and Bank Management Ysgol Busnes Bangor Business School Prifysgol Bangor University Gwynedd LL57 2DG (Cymru / Wales) b.batiz-lazo [at] bangor.ac.uk Twitter @BatizLazo ffon / phone : +44 (0) 1248 388349 Home page: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/business/staff/bernardo_batiz-lazo.en.php Working papers: http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba14.html Blog: http://www.nephis.org

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New CHM video: Bell Labs
by Dag Spicer 10 Apr '12

10 Apr '12

Friends, CHM has posted a lecture video from our recent program: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and Great Age of American Innovation with New York Times Magazine writer John Gertner. Watch the program here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e90sw6-qxmE&feature=digest_sat Info on the lecture: [Recorded: March 28, 2012] Bell Laboratories, which thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, was the most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this sylvan campus in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred of whom had PhDs. Thirteen would go on to win Nobel prizes. It was a citadel of science and scholarship as well as a hotbed of creative thinking. It was, in effect, a factory of ideas whose workings have remained largely hidden until now. New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner unveils the unique magic of Bell Labs through the eyes and actions of its scientists. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries, and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time (and on the company's dime), riding unicycles through the corridors, or pioneering the principles that propel today's technology. In these pages, we learn how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more. Even more important, Gertner reveals the forces that set off this explosion of creativity. Bell Labs combined the best aspects of the academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds, creating a culture and even an architecture that forced employees in different fields to work together, in virtually complete intellectual freedom, with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations. In Gertner's portrait, we come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to Bell Labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work. Join author Jon Gertner for a fascinating conversation with KQED's Dave Iverson about the people and history of Bell Labs, and the ways it fostered a culture of innovation and ideas. Best wishes, Dag

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Message from Atsushi Akera re Stored Program
by Thomas Haigh 06 Apr '12

06 Apr '12

[Looks like the list is having a bad week - there's some kind of issue with our Go Daddy domain registration that sometimes interacts with certain ISPs to bounce mail with a message from "mailstore1.secureserver.net" that the address is rejected. If anyone has expertise in this area and can help us solve the problem that would be appreciated. In that case the messages never make it to our listserv manager. Anyway, Atsushi asked me to forward this - see below for my reply]. From: Atsushi Akera [mailto:akeraa@rpi.edu] Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 5:47 AM To: 'David Alan Grier'; 'Thomas Haigh' Cc: members(a)sigcis.org Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Hi David, Hi Tom, Just in this context, the term "program" is used extensively in the context of ENIAC. It's been a while since I've gone through the records, and I didn't go back to check it. But as I recall, Mauchly was among those who brought the terminology of 'program' based on his amateur radio experience. I assume this was referring in general terms to a sequence of activities, similar to a conference program or a program for an organized luncheon. You would know this part better, but I think the other conventional term from the period would have been "plan of calculation," based on the work of human computers. The reference to "instruction tables" (in considering Paul's post) strikes me as something that could come out of the fact that there was contemplation of using the ENIAC function tables to store instructions. (This would require tracking the dates & influence, however. It's just a guess for now) Meanwhile the term "storage" would have of course gone back to Babbage (mill and store), but gained significant currency once everyone developed an interest in mercury delay lines as a possible storage device. What's perhaps interesting in all this is that technological and material artifacts, as manifestations of both human and machine computation practices, were heavily influencing the terminology people used to understand the early process of computation. New language of course has to be assembled in order to sort through and understand new technological phenomena (electronic computing), and we see during this period various efforts to combine past terminology into a workable description of the new technology-followed by some process whereby consensus emerges around those terms. I think it's useful to think of "stored program" in that context-and when that particular articulation became important for the practitioners. As I recall, stored programs weren't all that important in the early years. Von Neumann's single bit used to designate instruction from data was more from the point of view of efficient storage of the two types of information, not from any notions about stored programs related to computabilitiy. Even when the term came into existence, it may not have had this kind of reference either. perhaps worth keeping in mind. Best wishes! - Atsushi From: Thomas Haigh [mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Thomas Haigh Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 6:39 PM To: 'Atsushi Akera' Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Thanks Atsushi, I think von Neumann might have felt the need to flag data vs. code as he planned delay line storage at this point and was concerned with interleaving them for efficient access. Possibly he recognized the danger of accidentally overwriting code, and saw this as a kind of memory protection feature as later implemented on multitasking systems to protect programs from each other. Although the general organization of the 1945 EDVAC instruction set does not betray a concern with the convenience of programming. The point about Babbage and the "store" is something I'd been wondering about myself, and it's interesting to see that you have the same idea. As I look more at the 1945-48 documents, it does seem that the idea of storing programs and data in the same memory was quickly recognized as one of the key advantages of EDVAC-type machines but mostly on the grounds of efficiency, simplicity and flexibility rather than the potential for self modification. E.g. Eckert in the Moore School lectures volume says the big advantage is that storage can be allocated as needed for a particular application. After all, ENIAC has already shown that you could do things like conditional branching and indexing through an array without needing to modify stored program code. I agree with the bigger point about the importance of categories and terminology. It's interesting that with all the endless discussion of "stored program" nobody ever seems to have tried to find out where the term comes from. Tom From: Atsushi Akera [mailto:akeraa@rpi.edu] Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:35 PM To: 'Thomas Haigh' Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Agreed. By the way, I tried to send the message to the group, but it bounced. Not sure why. Please feel free to forward if you can. Also keep in mind that with circulating storage, there's no way to slow down what's coming out of the memory. So the instruction/data bit can be used as an efficient way to implement (in engineering) where information goes in a machine. - Atsushi (p.s. if you encounter problems with RPI's spam filter, please send the message to my alternate email account: <mailto:atsushi_akera@hotmail.com> atsushi_akera(a)hotmail.com, preferably with a quick note to this account indicating that you sent a message there since otherwise I don't check that account regularly. - Thanks!) _________________________________________________________ Atsushi Akera Associate Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies Director, First Year Studies Program--Sage 5206 Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 8th Street Troy, NY 12180 USA ph: 518.279.9708/fx:518.276-2659/e:akeraa@rpi.edu /w: http://www.rpi.edu/~akeraa

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Message from Len Shustek re Stored Program
by Thomas Haigh 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

[Len is also having posting problems with the list. While I'm here, to address his final point, self modification of code goes much earlier than Wilkes, Wheeler & Gill. The instruction set described original 1945 EDVAC Report would have relied on code modification during execution for looping, conditional branching, or indexing through a matrix. However this capability was confined to address modification rather than unrestricted instruction modification. This restriction was relaxed in subsequent work by von Neumann's group and, as mentioned earlier, in Turing's 1946 description of the ACE design. Designers of early stored program computers added conditional branch instructions and indirect addressing capabilities such as Manchester's famous index register to sharply reduce the need for self modifying code. There's a clear description of this in Priestley's Science of Operations, particularly pages 164- 172.] Tom, I'm not sure why the first appearance of the precise bigram "stored program" is so significant. There were certainly very early near-misses, such as this from the 1947 Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann "Preliminary Discussion" paper: "It is evident that the machine must be capable of storing in some manner not only the digital information needed... but also the instructions which govern the actual routine to be performed. ... Hence there must be some organ capable of storing these program orders." Even earlier is this from the 1945 "Description of the ENIAC and Comments on Electronic Digital Computing Machines". It is farther from the precise linguistic target, but exactly on point conceptually: "This requirement as to instruction speed can be met in a direct and simple fashion by storing instructions (in numerical code, so to speak) in memory elements or registers of the same type as those used to store the numerical data." If your focus is on the ability of programs to modify themselves, I don't know whether there is a reference earlier than the one in Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill that Allan Olley pointed out. The significance of that ability is interesting to ponder. Doron Swade has done some research in this area, and in his article in the December 2009 "EDSAC at 60" issue of The Computer Journal he says of the expert opinions he received, "whether the primary benefit was one of principle or practice was frustratingly blurred." -- Len Shustek

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