Dear Chuck, your message made me think of another item some of you might enjoy.

I was a phd student at Brandeis doing a huge model of a planetary nebula which took three hours on the "big" ibm machine at MIT (1964) I could only get access once a week at midnight on friday or saturday night. But also becoming the graduate student at Brandeis doing programs for the physics professors at Brandeis, i was at mit quite a bit for seminars and such. One amusing story that set a future tradition in softwareD development was when the big IBM batch multiprogramming operational system was when it developed a bug where if someone left off the special end card that had to be added to your fortran deck, it would wipe the memory of the system and cause a need for a restart. It was report as a standard bug to IBM but a month later it happened again and someone at mit phone ibm and complained about the bug again and asked why didn't they fix it. The chap at ibm said to go look at a recent page in the current volume of fixes of which there were many. They did and found: "As an added advantage if you wish to clear memory in the computer leave off the end card from Fortran program."

This became common practice in a lot of complicated software systems where bugs were redefined as features!

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Chuck House <housec1839@gmail.com> wrote:

Re your last 'throw-away' line, Murray, my sentiments exactly.

Jennifer Light gave a terrific talk at last fall's SIGCIS meeting, describing 'our world' as about 400 professional computer historians, arrayed in five non-intersecting (somewhat disdainful) circles whilst all about us the practitioners are dying and taking their wonderful unrecorded stories with them.

When you're in the fray, say writing GE 225 BASIC, and being fired, you're not focused on recording the story. And you likely don't view it as having any historical significance.
The problem later on is "If not you, who? And if not now, when?"

Practitioners, at the least, have to become more aware, more motivated, and more involved in 'our collective history' even if it is only their small spot in the sun.
Not easy to imagine

Best, Chuck

From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 6:30 PM
To: "Ceruzzi, Paul" <CeruzziP@si.edu>
Cc: "members@sigcis.org" <members@sigcis.org>
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Too many of these early events are unrecorded.

please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com do not use @njit.edu address

Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Information Systems, NJIT
homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff