It would be fun if he did! SHOT as a whole used to have more attendance at its meetings from enthusiast historians (I remember a group of radar historians, for example) and museum people. In fact SHOT was centered on museums and material culture in its early days. As SHOT has matured and the history of technology had professionalized (to use the term loosely) as a scholarly field there's been much more of a standardization on the techniques and world view associated with Ph.D. historians working in universities. On balance that's a good thing for the field, but it does come at a cost. So that's why I'm pleased that the SIGCIS workshops are providing a welcoming venue for people from museums, institutes, schools of information and communication, etc. who are interested in engaging in a scholarly way with IT history. On the other hand there's a whole world of collectors, enthusiasts, restorers, retrogamers, old timers and the like out there who love old computers but are not necessarily interested in scholarly history. Some of them have the resources to pursue their passion on a larger scale than others. Evan Koblentz has been our informal liaison in this area. Clearly we would like to expose this broad audience to scholarly work on the history of computing. Many of those active in computing societies have probably come across Annals, which could maybe be a "gateway drug" for those so inclined. The SIGCIS online resources may also help. On the other hand the retrocomputing community will always have its own distinctive interests, centered more on machines and technical documentation than historical research papers. On an institutional level, SIGCIS has benefited enormously from the support of Len Shustek of the Computer History Museum in finding donors willing to support the CHM book prize and CHM travel awards. I'm hopeful that this points to the potential for more collaboration in the future. We don't realistically aspire to do independent fundraising outside the scholarly community as there are already at least three groups working to target such donors (CHM, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the IT History Society). SIGCIS works with all three. Of these the IT History Society is intended to serve in large part as a means of bring together historical projects in need of support with donors interested in supporting them. I'm pleased to say that we have received $200 from ITHS toward travel support for this year's meeting. ITHS did establish a list of "projects seeking funding" some years ago (see http://ithistory.org/projects/overview.php) though it's not clear that any funding has happened as a result. There were also plans for a regular meeting series to bring the communities together. http://ithistory.org/events/events-past.php. It's clear that the scholarly history of computing community and the professional societies of computing have drifted further apart in recent decades. Back in the 1970s AFIPS spent a great deal of money to sponsor the first history of computing activities, there were "pioneer days" at the Joint Computer Conferences, and Annals was organized by eminent computer people. The Charles Babbage Foundation raised a lot of money on behalf of what became CBI from the computer industry. These connections are not dead -- the ACM History Committee has been doing good work since 2004, including support for its archive, and of course IEEE Computer Society took over the publication of Annals and has proved a great home for it. But as I've looked recently at materials from 30 years ago it's striking how much deeper the connections used to be. So to get back to your suggestion: we'd love to welcome Paul Allen or anyone else interested in the history of computing to our workshop. We've particularly love to welcome people with the resources to sponsor our activities -- though Paul Allen probably gets asked for money a thousand times a day. But there's a broader question of how to bridge the interests of scholars, donors, and enthusiasts which is a challenge not just for SIGCIS but for the history of computing community as a whole. Any thoughts on contributions SIGCIS could make in this area are welcome. Tom -----Original Message----- From: Coopersmith, Jonathan [mailto:j-coopersmith@neo.tamu.edu] Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:23 PM To: Thomas Haigh Cc: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum Maybe we should invite Mr. Allen to attend or send one of his people. Or even sponsor a session? Jonathan ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> To: members@sigcis.org Sent: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:25:03 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Paul Allen's Personal Museum An interesting story at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576516552161014410.ht ml It states that Paul Allen has commissioned a kilt-wearing grizzly graduate student to roam the globe tracking down rare machines of a physical size impractical for lesser collectors, such as a PDP-7 and IBM 70XX series machines. They're being restored for a personal museum. I hadn't heard of Ian King, but apparently he's a computing veteran working on an historical Ph.D. in the University of Washington Information School. The museum is online at http://www.pdpplanet.com/. The more machines that get preserved the better, and it certainly does more good for history than most billionaire hobbies. Perhaps this will evolve into a sustainably endowed public museum, or the machines will eventually be donated elsewhere. Yet when I see something like this is does make me ponder the widening disconnect between the growing community of scholars working on many aspects of the history of computing with minimal financial support and the comparatively huge amounts of money being spent/given by billionaires to support preservation with no involvement from Ph.D. historians. Maybe it's inevitable that the interests of the two groups would evolve in different directions. It's also true that academic priorities may have moved further than necessary from micro-level practice and materiality over the past few decades. This might be one of the topics for discussion at the forthcoming SIGCIS workshop, where I'm pleased to say that the panelists include people from the Smithsonian, Henry Ford Museum, Charles Babbage Institute, and Computer History Museum as well as academics from a variety of disciplines. http://www.sigcis.org/workshop11 Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members -- Jonathan CoopersmithAssociate Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4326 979.845.7151 979.862.4314 fax http://aggiegaijin.blogspot.com/ ; Secretary Section L, History & Philosophy of ScienceAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)www.aaas.org