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ACM history question
by Evan Koblentz 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

I'm trying to learn more about the March 1950 ACM conference held at Rutgers University. Specifically, I'm looking for a list of who attended. Susan @ CBI sent me many pages of documentation about the conference. It focuses on the agenda, lectures, and exhibits, which is terrific. It says 370 people attended. I hope to find out who they were. My goal is to find out if any of the attendees were from the Signal Corps Radar Lab -- that's the one here in NJ which is now our computer museum. Are there other sources I might find of data about this conference? (Rutgers itself does not have much.)

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introduction, and restoring an IBM MT/ST
by Matthew Kirschenbaum 28 Feb '12

28 Feb '12

Hello all, Thanks to Tom Haigh for letting me know about this list. A quick introduction: I'm working on a book under contract to Harvard UP that is a literary history of word processing. The project had a cycle of press attention a little while back, including this piece in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processi… More info is also available at the Tumblr blog listed in my sig. On a general note, I'd be interested in hearing from any list members with tips or anecdotes regarding writers (popular and highbrow alike) who were early adopters of computers and word processors. I'm also writing with a more specific request. I've recently acquired an IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter) from eBay. This is the first product explicitly marketed by IBM as a "word processor." It worked by storing keystrokes from the typewriter on magnetic tape, thereby making them available for electronic revision and automatic printing. Retail c. 1964 was $10,000! The novelist Len Deighton leased one from IBM in the late 1960s and thus could be said to be the first writer to use a "word processor," even though the technology is not what we would today recognize as a word processing program. Anyway, the particular model I've acquired appears to be in reasonably good condition and I think there's a more than fair shot of restoring it to working order with some expert help. Ideally then I'd like to make contact with retired IBM personnel who designed or serviced the system. Any assistance in terms of getting the word out in relevant channels would be much appreciated. I have a great deal of documentation (manuals, workbooks, circuit diagrams) for it as well. This thing is a beast, ~200 lbs., so not easily moved from my office at the University of Maryland. Does the listserv accept attachments? If so, I'm happy to post a couple of JPEGs. Best, Matt -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland 301-405-8505 or 301-314-7111 (fax) http://mkirschenbaum.net and @mkirschenbaum on Twitter The Track Changes project: http://trackchangesbook.tumblr.com/ I am on leave, Aug. 2011-12; please refer to my personal leave policies: http://mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/during-my-fellowship/

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WP Ombudsman on "Email Inventor" & My Response
by Thomas Haigh 27 Feb '12

27 Feb '12

Hello everyone, I just posted this to the SIGCIS site. I wasn't going to spend any more time on this story, but then when I read the Post's Ombudsman's column over the weekend I just couldn't restrain myself. Tom ------------------------- Over the weekend the Washington Post delivered its response to a storm of protest over last week's story claiming that the Smithsonian had "honored" V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai as the "inventor of email." This came in the form of the "Reader Meter" column written by Patrick B. Pexton' the Post's Ombudsman. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/omblog/post/reader-meter-who-really-inve nted-e-mail/2012/02/24/gIQAHZugYR_blog.html. His column does offer a general implication that something about the story would, in an ideal world, have been done differently. However he does not concede any specific error, and concludes that "Kolawole did the due diligence for the story, and she responded to the readers within a reasonable time frame. That's all an editor can do." Pexton does not choose to defend Ayyadurai's relatively specific (and easily debunked) claim that his was the first system to include from, to, cc, bcc and subject fields. Instead, in the manner of a drowning man clutching as straws, he falls back on what, to him, appears to be proof that Ayyadurai must have invented something important: We do know that the guy who copyrighted the terms "email" and "e-mail" and who developed and copyrighted some of the computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use is an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. And he did some of his e-mail work when he was 14, 15 and 16 years old, as a New Jersey high school student. The Smithsonian decided to honor him in February, and take all of the documentation of his youthful work.. There are three important claims in there. All of them are false. 1) Ayyadurai "copyrighted the terms 'email' and 'e-mail'." 2) Ayyadurai created "some of the computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" 3) That Smithsonian decided to honor him in February. Let's take them in that order. Has Ayyadurai copyrighted the terms 'email' and 'e-mail'. No. In fact nobody who knew the first thing about copyright could possibly believe that he did. Copyright grants exclusive rights over the reproduction of a creative work to its author for a fixed period. The author may chose to grant requests for its reproduction, often in return for money. So, if the word "email" was copyrighted then I wouldn't be able to reproduce it. Nobody could write it or say it without getting Ayyadurai's permission. Maybe he'd want ten cents every time. Maybe he'd grant permission only to people who agreed not to challenge his claims. (There is a tradition of fair use, but that isn't usually taken to allow reproduction of the whole work, so maybe we could use the letters "e" and "l"). Of course the only thing you'd achieve by copyrighting a new word is making sure that it never caught on. This is why the law does not allow anyone to copyright individual words, terms, or even titles. Ever notice that multiple, unconnected books have the same title? Perfectly legal. What Ayyadurai has copyright on is the code of a computer system he submitted to the copyright office in 1984 and a user manual from 1982. This would support a claim that he was the author of this program and its manual. It does absolutely nothing to support any claim that this was the first email program. The appropriate form of intellectual property protection for a word or short phrase would be a trademark, registered with the USPTO. That would reflect a judgment that the phrase had not previously been registered and would provide exclusive commercial use. Ayyadurai does not have a trademark on the word email. The open question is whether Ayyadurai was the first to contract "electronic mail" down to "e-mail" to name his program rather than just to "mail" as on most systems. That's actually an interesting little footnote-worthy detail that has been rather obscured by his claims to have invented email. Did Ayyadurai create "computer code and underpinnings of the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" Consider the evidence presented on one of his many websites, http://www.inventorofemail.com/. Presented in loving detail are copyright slips for his user manual and computer code, an entry for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and a program booklet page suggesting that he was one of many students that year to receive some kind of honorable mention. Finally there is a short 1980 inside page story from the West Essex Tribune, mentioning his "design and implementation of [an] electronic mail system." It makes no description of any particular novel feature of the system, but does call it sophisticated and useful. Finally, part of a sentence is devoted to Ayyadurai in a story on incoming students in MIT's Tech Talk in 1981. This falls so far short of supporting a claim that his code "underpins the modern versions of e-mail that we all use" that it's hard to know where to start. Let's say that there are two main problems. (1) The underpinnings for modern email had already been created elsewhere by 1980. It's not just APRPANET email, the direct precursor of today's Internet based protocols. The concept had been widely distributed to the public in books like Toeffler's The Third Wave (1980) and Hiltz and Turoff's Network Nation (1978). Electronic mail had been the main subject of articles published in magazines like Business Week since at least 1975. That was when office automation companies (IBM, DEC, Xerox, etc) began to promote electronic mail as a key feature of their current and future products. Email systems were offered by commercial timesharing providers, and widely used inside large technology companies. The Xerox PARC email system included a recognizably modern GUI client program. Email was being built into Unix as a standard feature. (2) Ayyadurai does not seem to have published any papers describing his work or distributed its code to others. There is no obvious direct path from being one of 12 children in New Jersey to receive an honorable mention in a science competition that year to laying the underpinnings for all email software in use today. There would have to be a number of steps in between where the ideas in the system are widely reported and everyone working on developing email decides to drop what they were doing previously and copy them. A short profile in a small local newspaper doesn't quite do that. So the onus would really be on him to show exactly how a system that nobody ever heard of (except loyal readers of the West Essex Tribute or office workers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey) came to lay the foundation for all subsequent work on email. Did the Smithsonian decide to honor Ayyadurai in February, and take all of the documentation of his youthful work. No. It's clear that the Smithsonian did accept a box or two of materials from him for its archive. In as much as it honored him it was by accepting this donation and not, as Pexton suggests, through some separate activity. It did not present an award, host a gala dinner, or do any of the other things that come to mind when someone is being honored. The Smithsonian recently issued a release clarifying the reasons for the acquisition. http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29 <http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29&newskey=1465> &newskey=1465. This notes In accepting these objects, the museum did not claim that Ayyadurai was "the inventor of email," as some press accounts have alleged. Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call "email," predates the work of Ayyadurai. The statement basically says that it is interesting to preserve material about a small, obscure and unknown email system as a complement to the big government funded and commercial efforts we were already aware of. It also mentions relevance for historians interested in computer education during the era. An Aside Pexton's opening suggests that the truth as inherently unknowable so that there's no point actually trying to find it out, which is funny as it's generally humanities scholars who get accused of postmodern disregard for empirical truth, moral relativism or nihilism: Who invented e-mail? Crikey, I don't know. Maybe Al Gore. But to properly determine who did what in the multi-year, organic development of electronic messaging would take a fleet of patent lawyers months and years to sort out. If only, one is tempted to speculate, society had somehow produced a group of people whose work was to investing months and months, sometimes even years, sorting through tangled claims and masses of contradictory sources to produce a coherent and well supported narratives about the past. We could call them "historians." They could write books and articles, and then people who needed to find out about the past could read them without needing to hire patent lawyers. Seeing this kind of thing published in the Washington Post is really shameful. (Gee, I hope nobody copyrighted that word). Pexton reads more like a defense lawyer for a journalist than a representative of the reader. It's like the efforts of lobbyists to create spurious uncertainty over the health risks of tobacco or existence of climate change. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who could plausibly claim to have achieved some kind of significant incremental "first" in the development of email. Untangling that would be a lot of work. On the other hand there are billions of people who clearly didn't invent email. Finding this out about someone is pretty easy. Unfortunately for Pexton and the Washington Post, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is one of the billions of people who didn't invent email. No hedges or qualifiers needed.

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CFP: SHOT 2012 Conference, 4-7 Oct in Copenhagen. Deadline 31 March.
by Thomas Haigh 23 Feb '12

23 Feb '12

Hello SIGCIS members, The dance of the heavens and progress of the Earth have brought us once again to that special time of year: the SHOT annual meeting call. Well, technically the "pre-call," as so far there's been a limited announcement with a promise of details to follow "By 13 February 2012." Below this message are pasted the current details from the SHOT website at <http://www.historyoftechnology.org/shot2012cfp.html> http://www.historyoftechnology.org/shot2012cfp.html. Note: this is NOT the call for the annual SIGCIS workshop, which usually takes place on the final Sunday of the conference. Our call will follow and will have a much later deadline. SIGCIS generally organizes one to three panel proposals for the main SHOT conference, and individual members sometimes also use the email list to put together panel proposals with SIG sponsorship. These proposals are reviewed like any others by the SHOT program committee. Sponsorship doesn't guarantee acceptance, but working with the SIG raises the chance of your paper being part of a coherent, relevant, and polished proposal. If you are interested in being part of such a panel please send me an informal expression of interest with a brief description of your possible contribution. I then try to find common themes to develop in the topics that could tie them together into a coherent looking proposal, and work with the authors to refine the individual abstracts to meet the expectations of historians of technology. SIGCIS members are also encouraged to develop their own panel proposals. These can also be sponsored by the SIG. Feel free to reply to the list ( <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members(a)sigcis.org) to find additional panel members. Certain things are common for history conferences but can confuse those from other disciplines. SHOT isn't usually as explicit about some things in its call as it could be. What you need to know: . Panels generally run for 90 minutes and consist of three panelists, a commentator, and a chair. Speakers get about 20 minutes each, with 10 for the commentator, 10-15 for questions, and the rest wasted. Most people now use PowerPoint. Many historians still read papers word for word. Some panels are proposed as a whole. Others are assembled by the program committee from papers submitted individually. . Reviewing is based on a one page abstract and one page cv, and thus is obviously not double blind. Usually about 1/3 of submissions are rejected, but you will never know why as you do not receive comments from the reviewers. Selection is done by the program committee members themselves, with program balance and session coherence a concern. Therefore the odds of being accepted are generally higher as part of a coherent panel than as an individual paper. . The full paper is never reviewed or published, but you are still expected to write out some version of it for the commentator to read prior to the meeting. The commentator is supposed to weave together useful common threads in the papers, add context where missing, and make suggestions on possible improvements. This role is known as a "discussant" in some disciplines. SHOT commentators generally err on the side of niceness, particularly versus some discussion I've seen in business schools. . All the chair does is to introduce the speakers, moderate the question period, and make sure that everything runs to time. It's a good way to get yourself onto the program if you don't have any new work to present. . Only one paper submission per person per year is allowed. SHOT discourages people from speaking two years running, but that rule does not apply this year because this is an "overseas" (i.e. not the USA) meeting. . Connecting your paper or panel to an official conference theme is helpful, but not usually essential. The East/West Cold War theme should be an easy one for many of us to address. . SHOT usually has travel money from the NSF and other sources to help graduate student presenters and those "between jobs." This is applied for separately after acceptance of your paper. Best wishes, Tom Haigh SHOT CALL FOR PAPERS, on SHOT WEBSITE AS OF FEB 16, 2012 Call For Papers: SHOT 2012: 4-7 October Copenhagen, Denmark Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2012 The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark from 4-7 October at the Copenhagen Business School. The Program Committee invites paper and panel proposals on any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or sessions, as well as works-in-progress from researchers at all levels (including graduate students, chaired professors, and independent scholars). It welcomes proposals from those new to SHOT, regardless of discipline. Multinational, international, and cross-institutional sessions are particularly encouraged. We especially encourage proposals from non-Western and Eastern-European scholars. Since this is a non-North American meeting, the Program Committee will permit scholars who presented at the 2011 Cleveland meeting to give papers in Copenhagen. It is SHOT's policy to relax its rule about not presenting papers at two consecutive meetings in order to attract as many people as possible to meetings outside of North America. For the 2012 meeting the Program Committee continues to welcome unconventional sessions; that is, session formats that diverge in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. These might include round-table sessions, workshop-style sessions with papers that are pre-circulated electronically, or "author meets critics" sessions. We also welcome poster proposals for presentation in poster sessions. THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS 31 MARCH 2012. DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012. SHOT 2012 SPECIAL THEMES While paper and session proposals on all topics are welcome, the Program Committee is especially interested in proposals that engage the following themes: I. Technology, sustainability, and environment. SHOT has a long history of analyzing how technologies have interfered with or shaped nature and our social or cultural environments. The search for sustainable technology solutions has recently become a main preoccupation of engineers, designers and tinkerers all over the world and is high on the political agenda too. Possible themes to address are: . Questions of scale: onsite, small- and community-scale technology as challenges for large-scale and centralized models of technology design, both in rural and new urban environments . Smart design: ecodesign and sustainable industrial or product design as evidence of smart solutions for an accountable handling of technology . Natural infrastructures: infrastructures as "natural" environments and nature (air, water, soil) as co-producers of large-scale infrastructures . More with less: new technologies and the search for efficiency in energy consumption or technologies of power saving in housing, transport, and communication II. Technology, East-West relations, and the Cold War. During the Cold War, Europe was one of the central laboratories for experimentation with ideological and political regimes, which deeply affected traditional paths of knowledge and technology transfer in Europe. While the history of the Cold War has mainly been told as a history of discontinuity and fragmentation, we would especially welcome papers and sections dealing with examples of successful co-operation or "hidden continuities" in inter-European technology transfer during the 20th century. General areas to be explored are: . Changing times: continuities and discontinuities in the transfers of knowledge and technology between Eastern and Western Europe and the rest of the world from the mid-19th century to the present . Negotiating identities: spaces and places of co-operation or confrontation before, during, and after the Cold War . Blurred boundaries: spill-over effects and holes in the Iron Curtain . Trading zone: Europe as symbolic battlefield and diplomatic playground for world hegemony . Chilling effects: Technologies at war & wartime technology . Secret stories: technologies of intelligence and espionage and their staging in popular media (comics, films, magazines, television & radio) . Competing Modernities: the uses of technology in a variety of economic development and modernization schemes Evaluation Criteria The Program Committee's highest priority in evaluating paper and panel proposals is scholarly excellence. General ground rules SHOT rules exclude multiple submissions (i.e., submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session). However, scholars may both propose a paper and serve as a commentator or session chair. Proposals for individual papers must include 1. a one-page abstract (maximum 600 words) 2. a one-page curriculum vitae, including current postal and e-mail addresses Proposals for complete sessions must include 1. a description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overall theme (300 words max) 2. the names and paper titles of the presenters 3. for each presenter, a one-page summary (maximum 600 words) of the paper's topic, argument(s), and evidence used 4. for the commentator, chair, and each presenter: one-page c.v., with postal and e-mail addresses * Please note that in general we discourage panels with more than three papers. **Please indicate if a proposal is sponsored by one of SHOT's special interest groups. DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012 For more information please see the Society's <http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html> Annual Meeting Webpage. For general questions about the Society, please email SHOT Secretary <mailto:shotsecy@virginia.edu> Bernie Carlson <mailto:shotsecy@virginia.edu> .

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Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine
by Thomas Haigh 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

Hello everyone, Did you know that email was invented in 1978 by a 14 year old called V.A. Shiva Ayyadura? The shocking news was broken recently by the Washington Post in what I think was a print story http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/MEPMRJ/NSC4SB/ZCNCKZ/FVLP7K/7278IF/50 /h Time Magazine's website has a blogger who reported the same story on "The Man Who Invented Email." http://techland.time.com/2011/11/15/the-man-who-invented-email/ For most SIGCIS members this story probably does not pass the "sniff test" but to save you looking anything up: There are two obvious senses in which something could be the "first email system." 1) The first "mail" system to let a user write a message to another user of the same computer system, who could read it when he/she next logged in. This was a step beyond earlier chat/talk capabilities that only allowed instant display of messages. Mail features became common on the timesharing computers of the late 1960s. MIT is a strong contender for the first place where this happened. A series of NY Times blog stories suggested that MIT CTSS in 1965 might have been the first system to include such a mail feature. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail -with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mai l-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/> This seems plausible, though I would not be stunned to learn of an earlier use. 2) The first system to send a message to someone using a DIFFERENT computer, via a network. This appears to have been on the ARPANET in 1971, with initial implementation by Ray Tomlinson. Janet Abbate's book Inventing the Internet includes a solid treatment of this, making clear that "network mail" became the "killer application" for ARPANET even though remote logins had been the application for which it was originally designed. Craig Partridge gave more technical detail and covered later developments in "The Technical Development of Internet Email" published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30:2, April-June 2008:3-29. I looked at the commercialization of email in "Protocols for Profit: Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in The Internet and American Business, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008: 105-158. (http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf) The Washington Post article is unclear of what Ayyadura is supposed to have done . A "clarification" now says that "Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called "email," establishing him as the creator of the "computer program for [an] electronic mail system" with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office." A caption on the story notes that "He holds the copyright to both EMIAL and the term E-mail" which of course is meaningless. They seem to be confusing copyright protection with patent protection, and implying that he would only have copyright on a program he created if it was the first of its kind. I could write a program called "OPERATING SYSTEM" tomorrow and hold the copyright, but it wouldn't mean I invented operating systems. Wouldn't mean I could trademark the term either, which could also be what they are confusing copyright with. I have to admit that I'm forming an uneasy fascination with V.A. Shiva Ayyadura's website. It's full of new age/cybernetic waffle and extravagant self promotion. He bills himself as "Founder, Chairman and President of the Institute for Integrative Systems" in a video promoting "Turmeric: Wonder Herb of India." There's a "featured article" on "The Theatrics of Healing." He is also "world's foremost authority on integrating systems of medicine." The description on his publications page http://www.vashiva.com/publications.asp of his book "The EMAIL Revolution" is the old placeholder text: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...." His list of "Chapters in Books" includes his 1990 masters thesis, a paper at "Document Analysis Conference" in 1994 "submitted for publication" and items described only as "Chapter in Communications Arts" and "Chapter on Electrodynamics, Dynamics,". Meanwhile his page on himself as "the inventor of EMAIL" (http://www.vashiva.com/inventing_email.asp) includes two headings of "First US Copyright for EMAIL, 1982" one above a copyright certificate and once above a 2004 patent for an automated reply system. The kindest thing one can say is that he does consistently capitalize EMAIL, allowing for a legalistic defense that he only means to claim to have invented a program called "EMAIL" rather than the idea of electronic mail. On the other hand his poster "The History of EMAIL" http://www.vashiva.com/innovation/email/vashiva-inventor-of-email.asp clearly lays claim to creation of the entire electronic mail concept. Little people graphics show the growth of email users from 2 in 1979 to 3.1 billion today. His 1982 copyright registration looms as a major event. Van Vleck, Tomlinson, etc. appear only as "Pre-EMIAL Innovators." He appears to claim that everything prior to his system was just "text messaging" and that he was the first to have fields for "to," "from," etc. which is also clearly false. Here's an incoherent Q and A from the Time "interview." Ray Tomlinson is often credited as the inventor of email. Is he credited correctly, in your opinion, or should he be credited for something else? Shiva: I think that's the thing that's sort of resulted in this confusion. Since '94, people have always said something's going to kill e-mail-and the latest was text messaging, right? Ray and Tom Van Vleck really did text messaging. In fact, in one of Tom's early communications he says his boss wouldn't let him do electronic letters internally, which is actually the mail piece of it. So they were more focused from a messaging standpoint: How do you get a message from point A to point B to manipulate another machine at that more core level? What shocks me is that real newspapers could print this kind of thing. Obviously journalists are too busy to read the historical literature. Even calling a historian might take an hour or two to arrange. But are they even incapable of using Wikipedia and Google? Why is the Washington Post employing as the "editor of ideas@innovations" http://www.washingtonpost.com/emi-kolawole/2011/03/02/AB6t4sM_page.html someone who doesn't know the difference between patent, trademark and copyright? Did all the real journalists get downsized? Should we look forward to "William Shatner: the Inventor of Television." Anyway, it does make me sad about the gap between all the great historical work that has been done by our community and the complete lack of use made of it by the media in this case. Despite a mass of criticism on the comments thread and presumably in emails from readers the Washington Post has done no more that append it's its defensive and absurd "clarification." Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine
by Dave Walden 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

>Note, I think he copyrighted a program named email (I don't think he >could copyright the word email). I suppose one could name a program >"email" for an adventure game or for any other application. The name >"email" seems not to proof so much about this being email and what >came before isn't email. Plus we all know "email existed way back >in the time-sharing systems before the ARPANET email, please we know >that many earlier email systems than this new guy's had To, From, >Subject, etc., fields. -- home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537 home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 503-757-3137 email address: dave(a)walden-family.com; website: <http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/>http://www.walden-family.com/bbn/

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George Dyson on Early Computing
by Dag Spicer 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

A great interview between George Dyson and WIRED's Kevin Kelley: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/all/1 Note: Dyson will be speaking at CHM on to launch his new book Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. CHM will be recording this lecture and making it available on YouTube shortly after the event. Dag -- Dag Spicer | Senior Curator | Computer History Museum Editorial Board | Annals of the History of Computing 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. | Mountain View CA 94043 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 | Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing Visit in person or online! http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/ Twitter: @ComputerHistory FB: facebook.com/computerhistory

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine
by Evan Koblentz 22 Feb '12

22 Feb '12

>> Newspapers exist to gather eyeballs for advertisers. The absurdity and self-promotion of this ‘inventor’ served the purpose of attracting attention and ‘buzz’, which seems to have been the point all along from the newspaper’s point of view. Al, I like you and respect your work, but it's ridiculous to say that all papers (and therefore, their journalists) "exist to gather eyeballs for advertisers" and to create "buzz" ... especially in the context of the Washington Post! I've been a reporter for 15 years and certainly NEVER wrote anything to cater to an advertiser or for the sake of what you call "buzz", nor have most of my colleagues (at least not the ones who lasted in this field.)

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John Sculley interview and transcript - now at CHM!
by Dag Spicer 18 Feb '12

18 Feb '12

Dear SIGCIS Friends, I'm delighted to report that the Computer History Museum has acquired a recent interview with ex-Apple CEO John Sculley. (You may have seen a recent post from Jeffrey Stein about it). The recorded audio interview is now in the Museum's permanent collection as is a full transcript made available to CHM by The Mac Observer. The audio interview, in two parts, is here: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102706059 [mp3] The transcript, also in two parts, is here: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/500003269 [pdf] These are permanent URLs. We thank historian David Greelish for this remarkable interview and hope you will find it of interest. Warm regards, Dag -- Dag Spicer | Senior Curator | Computer History Museum Editorial Board | Annals of the History of Computing 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. | Mountain View CA 94043 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 | Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing Visit in person or online! http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/ Twitter: @ComputerHistory FB: facebook.com/computerhistory

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Jeff Yost's book on The IBM Century
by Dave Walden 18 Feb '12

18 Feb '12

A while back I believe someone (Haigh?, Misa?) mentioned Jeff's new book on this list. I don't know where the book is being reviewed in scholarly settings; however, I have posted a review at Amazon; see <http://tinyurl.com/6qm47fc>http://tinyurl.com/6qm47fc Best wishes, Dave -- home address: 12 Linden Rd., E. Sandwich, MA 02537 home ph=508-888-7655; cell ph = 508-280-0446 email address: dave(a)walden-family.com; website(s): http://www.walden-family.com/

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