I enjoyed very much the discussion, thanks. I think we would agree that the history of computer science as academic discipline is basically undeveloped. So just an idea: invite Knuth & maybe other prominent computer scientists to one of the SIGCIS Workshops to discuss with them ways of writing the history of computer science? David Nofre On 05/15/2014 10:37 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:
Dag has a point, in that computer science offers few rewards to computer scientists for the writing of history. However it is also true that computer science offers few rewards to Ph.D. historians for the writing of history. We therefore focus instead on writing work that impresses our doctoral committees, might get us hired in disciplines and departments that actually do sometimes hire historians, might get us published in journals that count for our tenure committees, and so on through our careers.
Thus it's not entirely clear why Knuth would expect historians to listen to his urgings to produce technical history useful to computer scientists when computer scientists themselves are not, as a community, willing to produce, reward, or pay for work of that kind.
Tom
-----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Dag Spicer Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 2:51 PM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Members Digest, Vol 47, Issue 11
One of the serious issues Don hinted at was an insight from the sociology of science: there is no academic reward mechanism for people in technical fields to be writing histories. Quite the opposite in fact. I think it was Robert Merton who noted that histories written by technical people are often greeted with suspicion by fellow practitioners as something that is not to be done during one's academic career, which is nominally about creating new knowledge, rather than reviewing the past. Typically, such synoptic disciplinary histories that *are* written are by people who are Emeritus, a point at which they have nothing to fear academically.
So I wouldn't bother trying to "change Don." He's merely pointing out the way things are in the Academy.
Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055
On May 15, 2014, at 10:40 AM, members-request@sigcis.org<mailto:members-request@sigcis.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Donald Knuth (William McMillan)
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Message: 1 Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 13:39:52 -0400 From: William McMillan <wmcmillan@emich.edu> To: sigcis <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Donald Knuth Message-ID: <CAHwTMcnhK7mt-nJk-8jF8bu8E6iD+GyjAgdT=mymqz4pM7NNtQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Isn't the key idea that Knuth is getting at the distinction between technical histories and other kinds such as social and business histories?
One can appreciate all of these, but if a course in a computer science or engineering degree program is to be turned over to history -- when the number of technical requirements is already almost more than a program can bear -- then that history course should probably support the technical content of the program. If the course is fulfilling general education or other requirements then its content would not surprisingly be humanities or business oriented, and a dearth of heavy-duty technical topics would not be a problem.
Many of us who teach in computer science programs would love to see textbooks and more papers on the technical history of computing so that we could use them in our programs. Of course, the social, personal, and other aspects of history should not (and probably could not) be avoided, but we would need much more substantial and even coverage of the technical aspects of computing systems than we see in most current historical work.
- Bill
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu> wrote:
I completely agree with Tom's analysis. A few additional questions re. Knuth?s abstract:
- Who is the ?we? in Knuth?s ?let?s?? - In what way has history ever been ?useful? to computer scientists? It would be interesting to hear Knuth?s views on this - useful in education? Personal interest? Celebration? Credit (reputation)? - Finally, for what audience do people write internalist history today? Who publishes it, and who actually reads it? Could someone create some statistics, for example, on the number of downloads of Annals articles, divided along some rough criterion between internal and external history?
In my view, as in Tom?s, there?s still a great deal of internalist history going on. A lot of it is at the level of raw materials - oral histories collected by ACM (I did a couple of these myself a few years back), collecting of documents and other archival materials, etc.
The Computer History Museum ? probably the single best-funded institution in our field ? generally takes an internalist approach, though it does try to build a bridge to external history. It would be interesting to get some data on CHM visitors? backgrounds. I imagine it?s unbelievably hard to create compelling museum exhibits on the history of key ideas in algorithms, computer architecture, software engineering, etc. Is CHM visited by computer scientists in search of their field?s past?
Knuth?s idea that ?we only get a scorecard? is downright offensive. Aside from journalistic corporate histories, I can?t think of much professional history that fits this description ? certainly few people on this mailing list write that kind of thing. This makes me suspect that Knuth does not have much of a sense of the difference between journalism and professional historiography, nor of this SIG as a community. Can we educate him?
P
On May 14, 2014, at 12:19 , Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:
Hmm. I can't find an online video for it anywhere, which is an increasingly common practice for invited talks. We might try to get Knuth to write up the talk for Annals if he wants to make his case to the history of computing community.
Here is the abstract:
*Talk* Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science *Abstract * For many years the history of computer science was presented in a way that was useful to computer scientists. But nowadays almost all technical content is excised; historians are concentrating rather on issues like how computer scientists have been able to get funding for their projects, and/or how much their work has influenced Wall Street. We no longer are told what ideas were actually discovered, nor how they were discovered, nor why they are great ideas. We only get a scorecard.
Similar trends are occurring with respect to other sciences. Historians generally no prefer "external history" to "internal history", so that they can write stories that appeal to readers with almost no expertise.
Historians of mathematics have thankfully been resisting such temptations. In this talk the speaker will explain why he is so grateful for the continued excellence of papers on mathematical history, and he will make a plea for historians of computer science to get back on track.
Annals liked to feature a quote from Knuth in its promotional materials, and of course he was involved in documenting the very early history of systems software back at the Los Alamos conference in 1976. So I suspect he is unhappy with the demographic transition that has taken place in the history of computing from eminent computer pioneers to younger, Ph.D. historians as the most active producers of historical work. This has naturally been accompanied with a shift in methods, questions, framing, etc. from an internalist approach centered on questions of interest to computer scientists to an externalist approach centered on questions of interest to one or another tribe of Ph.D. historians.
It?s natural for Knuth to regret this, but it?s not clear to me that this is a zero sum game. His abstract reads as if there is a fixed pool of historians whose attention has unfortunately been diverted from substance to fluff. It seems that the first generation of digital computing pioneers had an interest in technical history, stoked in part by the legacy of the ENIAC patent wars. Wilkes, Eckert, Mauchly, Zuse, Goldstine, Metropolis, the IBM team of Bashe, Pugh, et al, Malinovsky, Burks, Randell, Ware, Sammet, the LEO team, and many of their peers are/were active produces and consumers of technically and/or institutionally oriented history. All had begun to work in computing by 1957, which seems to be about when Knuth himself first programmed. While many more people entered computing after 1957 than before it seems that subsequent cohorts have been much less likely to develop an interest in history. There are exceptions of course. Dave Walden, for example, is one of the most active members of the Annals board. Several ACM SIGs launched historical projects, following the three successful history events on the History of Programming Languages organized by SIGPLAN over the decades. ACM and IEEE CS both have history committees. Articles are written to celebrate the anniversaries of departments, technologies, etc. Just today we heard on this list of a project on the history of BSD. But overall it seems that the relative eclipse of technical, internal history of computer science and technology has a lot to do with a loss of interest in history among the people best equipped to write it. Neither have computer science departments embraced the history of computer science as an important area of teaching or research. As far as I know, no computer science program in the US has ever hired a faculty member specifically as a historian of computing ? which is different from the history of law, medicine, communications, and to some extent business where the disciplines in question have sometimes deliberately hired faculty members to teach and research history. Instead history has been an interest people have developed late in their careers, if at all.
Knuth probably appreciates the efforts of De Mol, Bullynck, and their colleagues to establish the Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing and the associated series of events over the past few years. This reflects an engagement with the history of mathematics, which as Knuth notes maintained a more traditional approach to the history of science. So it seems that there is scope for many historical traditions to thrive side by side.
My other point is that ?the history of computer science? is a problematic category in this respect. Much technical history of computing is on the 1940s and early 1950s, before the emergence of computer science. The bulk of recent effort has been on Turing. Even my current work with Priestley & Rope on the history of ENIAC, which goes deep into technical analysis of early code, architecture, flow diagramming techniques, concepts, etc. is really about the history of computing practice and computing technology rather than the history of computer science. Furthermore relatively little externalist work on the history of computing is about computer *science*. Mahoney wrote about computer science, and there has been recent work on the history of Algol from the efforts of the SOFT-EU project, history of software engineering, and history of formal methods. Also coverage of the history of ARPA funding in the books by Norberg & O?Neill and Abbate, and a couple of articles on NSF support for computer science by Aspray. That?s a rather small proportion of everything written on the history of computing over the past twenty years. So in as much as the history of computer science is written at all, which is not nearly as much as it should be, the dominant approach is still internalist and technical.
This might be an interesting topic for one of my ?Historical Reflections? columns in Communications of the ACM. So if you send your thoughts to the list these could help to shape it.
Best wishes,
Tom
-----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org<members-bounces@sigcis.org>] On Behalf Of Ceruzzi, Paul Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 9:18 AM To: 'members@sigcis.org' Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Donald Knuth
I heard that Donald Knuth gave a Kailath Lecture at Stanford last week on "Let's not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science." Did any of you attend this lecture? Is there a transcript available? I've seen the abstract and it appears to be of great relevance.
Thanks
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