Hello Bernard (& SIGCIS) Thanks for the thoughtful response. It seems to be that there are two main ways we as a community might choose to respond to popular non-fiction work such as that presented by Dyson or Issacson. The first is to treat it as historical scholarship in need of expert review, checking its various claims and assessing the extent to which consists of statements which, while simplified, can be reconciled with expert consensus and primary sources. The other is to go to the meta level, and ask what the popularity of particular kinds of narrative tells us about the world we live in, perhaps taking a memory studies approach and charting the different ways in which ENIAC, for example, has been represented over time. Ive done both in the past, for example with respect to the Inventor of Email where I both maintain a page debunking his specific claims and wrote a column for CACM looking at broader lessons from the affair. Our ENIAC book include a chapter Remembering ENIAC looking at its posthumous career, and I will certainly be adding a short discussion of Isaacson into its last section on the 2000-onward era we characterize as The ENIAC of Women. I just purchased the Kindle version of Isaacsons book and am already noting a number of factual errors small and large. Some of these are a result of necessary simplification performed without finesse (e.g. a rather incoherent treatment of the stored program concept) but many are flat out carelessness where being accurate would not have made the text any longer or harder to understand. For example statements that ENIAC was designed to calculate missile (rather than shell) trajectories, that the Army no longer intended to calculate firing tables after the end of the war, use of Bartik quotes about 1947 meetings with von Neumann to characterize his 1944 meetings with the ENIAC team before she even came to the Moore School, etc. At one point he claims that ENIAC was one of the first two stored program computers along with the Manchester Baby. Thats trueish, though our conclusion was that this points out the limitations of stored program as a category. However next two consecutive sentences are completely incoherent, in crediting it both with program storage only in read only memory (true) and a functioning delay line memory in April 1947 (a total fantasy): a read only memory, which meant it was hard to modify programs while they were running. In addition, its mercury delay line memory was sluggish and required prevision engineering. A paragraph or two earlier he calls the mathematician Richard Clippinger and physicist Nick Metropolis engineers. In many other places he relies on claims made in oral histories without looking to see if historians have been able to reconcile the details quoted with other sources. Now to combine these two perspectives, its probably the job of someone like Isaacson to write popular history that is wildly inaccurate in many details and the job of scholarly historians to pedantically point out errors and be largely ignored. Meanwhile he will win all the fame and media attention we secretly believe should be ours, but which our fusty attachment to accurate detail and distain for the narrative expectations of popular history will forever deny us. Its not that we want to come at Isaacson with pitchforks and flaming torches to demand that his book be pulped, and it will surely increase general interest in our field. But the thought of students or researchers citing some of these details is scary, and his book does have the outward appearance of a serious contribution it has footnotes, a surprising amount of technical terminology, etc. Errors here will be disseminated widely. So there might be some benefit in putting up on the SIGCIS site a crowd sourced fact check to document clear cut errors in the text, using quoted primary or authoritative secondary sources to document the truth. (Reactionary as I do feel to appropriate momentarily the concepts of truth and authority). Then if, for example, a SIGCIS member finds an odd assertion sourced from Isaacson in a student paper being graded he or she could point to the SIGCIS page as evidence that ENIAC did not have a delay line memory, that Hopper did not serve as the technical lead in coordinating the creation of COBOL, that a large part of ENIACs existence was spent calculating firing tables, etc. Note to enthusiasts: this does not include grading Isaacson on his fidelity to one or another school of thought on the first computer, etc. So, does anyone with an interest in such things want to volunteer to edit such a page? That would primarily involve check submissions from SIGCIS members for inclusion and making decisions on what counts as a clear factual error vs. a personal interpretation. Best wishes, Tom From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 4:43 PM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book 2 Dear All, I've been thinking about these kinds of histories, quarrels, and computer historiographies in recent months, esp. in the light of the "debate" around Shiva Ayyadurai and the invention of email. I'm interested in these histories, claims, and claimants for the origins and development of info technologies. They are stimulating and telling ("symptomatic" one might say) for the reason that "computer historiography" is not to my mind an impartial, neutral recounting of a series of rote facts, but rather itself a vibrant actor within the history of computational innovation. The Shiva case shows this pretty well, because the "historiography" is in some way coextensive with individuals staking claims that shape their ability to act in the field in the present (i.e. Shiva has patents, a start-up company, etc, so I think his belated discovery of his "invention" speaks to his present-day ambitions; his enlisting of The Smithsonian etc. to back up his claims is an fascinating case of an actor-network theoretical aligning of interests in action). Same goes for the Isaacson books, because they also involve efforts to ally, interest, and orient readers around certain conceptions of where and how invention happens. These frames and theories of innovation converge with other agendas (figuring out how private markets shaped the PC revolution; granting women greater representation in computational histories; writing a history of computing focused on its ability to stimulate our passions rather than just crunch numbers). These kinds of frames and agendas relate specifically to the struggles surrounding innovation and education in the present; that they should bear on popular histories shouldn't be so surprising, nor that they would come to bear upon how the Smithsonian or TIME magazine decides to acknowledge innovation. As for the kinds of cases surrounding the "ENIAC girls" invoked in a previous mail: Even despite the condescending instances of tokenism invoked by Tom, I think that when push comes to shove, actually distinguishing the "real" or "authentic" innovation from the cultural hype proves tricky (this isn't meant as a counter-argument--Tom's commented on these same problems elsewhere). As works by Ensmenger and Jen Light and others note, the distinctions between invention and innovation, hardware and software, engineers and mere programmers, scientific and technical labor, etc, themselves rest upon a set of (often naive and shortsighted) cultural assumptions over what's the "real" work of computing. Ensmenger in particular shows that these cultural assumptions have profound consequences at the very heart of technological development: There's a decent argument that early computer scientists entirely dismissed programming as a kind of subaltern variety of labor, contributing both to the wartime assignment of this work to women, and the industry-crippling software crisis that followed. This makes the attempt to sift though debating historical causes and factors enmeshed, from the outset, in debates over cultural theory, gender, notions of material history and cultural labor, and so on (Schaffer makes a similar point in Babbage's Intelligence). The attempt to identify a baseline for the "real history" of a technology and its development never "escapes" cultural agendas, for example, re-examining the under-representation of women in computing, which can be credibly cited as a determining factor in the technological (mis-)development in the field. So as I see it, the work of historiography is really about these ongoing battles and quarrels in our midst, each of which deploys alternate values and horizons for making sense of informatics--a process that necessarily will continue to evolve and unsettle, without much resolution, so long as our field remains vibrant and relevant. Isaacson is an actor in this field, much as we are, even as von Neumann was, even if there are (as Tom correctly urges us to recognize) different roles of vastly different import. Moreover, I think readers approach histories like Isaacson's with the ability to recognize that the claims are sort of puffed up. For example, I don't think many readers of Standage's history of the telegraph take as literally true his claim that it was "the Victorian internet" nor his other book's claims that the 17th c. Chess-Playing Turk gave rise to IBM computing machines. Readers turn to these accounts for fun, diverting accounts that mix trivia, drama, and fragments of technical knowledge, as well as orientation in the varied kinds of forces that play out in the history of a technology. These histories, in turn, were often convened in response to a given topical event (anniversary, marketing event, product launch, someone's death). Readers recognize that, too. I wrote about this awhile back in the IEEE Annals, in an article titled "The Historiographic Conception of Information," a kind of reflection on the status of historiography within computing. As I put it there, in discussing popular accounts of Claude Shannon on the occasion of his death, I wrote: Computer history does not appear before the public as a...natural and unmediated accounting of clearcut facts. Instead, a historically specific organization of experts, research, resources, and interpretive frames emerges in response to present and presumably historical events. This is not the meddling intervention of outside interests and biases upon the neutral labor of historiography; rather, these are the basic conditions for writing computer history. These conditions appearance prompts questions about how a retiring mathematician [Claude Shannon], skeptical about his personal acclaim, emerged as a recognizable and heroic subject of popular interest. I guess I'm not above taking some delight in our field's status as a kind of joyful cultural science whose interest and relevance is deeply tied up with its ability to bisect pop culture, current events, and institutional struggles. And if our field attracts shallow excitement and fantastic tale telling, I'm not above welcoming this, our imaginative fecundity, however suspect its offspring may seem. Best, Bernard On 10/5/14 9:47 PM, Chuck House wrote: personal opinion, based on the Steve Jobs book and my interview with Isaacson after his talk at the Computer History Museum, this will be a relatively shallow treatment by a gifted captivating writer On Oct 5, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote: Hello everyone, I haven't read Isaacson's book yet, but have been looking at some reviews with interest. It sounds from the review that Andy links to that the book gets better as it goes on. On the historical part, Wisnioski notes in his polite and generally favorable review that "Isaacson diligently attends to this syllabus, but it curbs his trademark enthusiasm, and many of his anecdotes are well-worn." What I've seen in other places makes me question the diligence of Isaacson's attention in the earlier chapters, like that of Jane Smiley in her attempt at a popular history of early computing a few years ago. According to a profile in the New York Times the book starts and ends with Ada Lovelace. Isaacson credits her to the extent of observing that <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson -how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson- how-women-shaped-technology.html?_r=0 Ada Lovelace defined the digital age, Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book . If it wasnt for Ada Lovelace, theres a chance that none of this would even exist, Mr. Isaacson added as he waved his hand in the air, gesturing as if to encompass all of Silicon Valley and the techies sitting around us. Given that Babbages project was itself apparently unknown to computer pioneers of the 1940s such as Aiken, Eckert, Atanasoff and Mauchly at the time they conceptualized and designed their machines this claim seems to me quite impossible to justify, however profound Lovelaces contribution to that project was. He also has a chapter on the Women of ENIAC. That has been put up as an text and audiobook extract as a teaser prior to the launch of the book. <http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/> http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIACs changing role in collective memory: for about fifteen years now it has been remembered primarily as a machine programmed by women. Even within the scholarly literature our discussion of the place of the initial cohort of six operators has sometimes mischaracterized the work they were hired to do and exaggerated their contributions to the development of thinking about what ENIAC could be used to do and how it might be configured to accomplish those tasks. Thats something Ive become aware of in returning to primary sources for my forthcoming book ENIAC in Action with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book Recoding Gender makes a definite contribution towards clarifying these issues. In contrast, drawing almost entirely on oral histories and memoir, Isaacson is for the most part just summarizing the consensus when he implies that Jean Jennings and her colleagues made fundamental innovations by, for example, realizing that the master programmer could be used to do the exact task it was designed and built to perform: looping nested subroutines. It seems that the book is held together with a Gladwellian argument about the collective and incremental nature of innovation, which is certainly preferable to the lone genius view of history. However the ending of the ENIAC extract makes me question how tightly though through this argument is: he asserts that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women. Thats either a very radical STS argument that a computer is only created in use, or a sign that he did not spend much time thinking about what creating a computer involves. Now of course Lovelace, the Women of ENIAC, Hopper, and a few others are of interest to a lot of people because of their instrumental value as the source of parables useful in the rebranding of computing as a field created in large part by women. Thats a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacsons book will sell maybe 1,000 times more than anything that any of us are ever likely to write. However it would be nice if there was a way to achieve this without pretending that a causal chain makes Ada Lovelace essential to the birth of the digital age or Jennings and her colleagues essential to the creation of ENIAC. Is there a necessary tradeoff between historical accuracy and inspirational value, as with the story about young George Washington and the cherry tree? I hope not. Best wishes, Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from <mailto:members@sigcis.org> members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at <http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/> http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at <http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members> http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members _______________________________________________ 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 -- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com