Thanks Janet, I noticed that the same NPR segment has him claiming that "Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later." Swade, Bromley, Randell, Cohen, and as far as I know all serious historians who have looked for a substantive influence of Babbage on the conception or design of ENAIC, EDVAC, EDSAC, or the Harvard Mark 1 have concluded that there was none. Aiken did seize rhetorically on Babbage as a precursor whose lineage he was taking up, but as Cohen notes in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, he became aware of Babbage only after proposing to build his computer and did not learn of Lovelace's work or appreciate the importance of conditional branching for some years later. After a very careful examination (p.61-72) Cohen concluded that "Aiken was generally ignorant of Babbage's machines" at this point, having seen only brief accounts, and including "summary (and somewhat erroneous) statements about Babbage's machines" in his 1937 proposal. Thus "Babbage did not play a major role in the development of Aiken's ideas." Instead "Aiken praised Babbage to enhance his own stature." He also quotes Hopper as saying that she was unaware of Lovelace's work "until ten of fifteen years later." Likewise, the NPR segment (not sure if this is Isaacson himself) says that "Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers." I believe that only two of the initial six (Jennings/Bartik in 1948 and Snyder/Holberton in 1947) followed Eckert and Mauchly. It's like the bit in his book on Jobs where he startled me (and, Google confirms, many other people) by writing that the magneto optical drive in the NeXT was not good as main storage because its latency was too LOW. I don't expect Isaacson to know what latency is, but wouldn't it have been better to pay for a close reading by someone who understands tech well enough to know a faster response is a good thing for a disk drive used as virtual memory? The Jobs book was rushed when its subject died, which perhaps cut short the editing process, but he claims that this new book was under development for a decade. On the other hand, Paul's comment on the movie potential of the story makes me see this in the broader context of Isaacson as an elite member of the news-entertainment complex. To make a true story fit within the genre expectations of a movie there are all kinds of liberties taken with the truth -- minor characters consolidated, timelines simplified, motives simplified, links between scenes invented. To a lesser extent that narrative streamlining is perhaps what Isaacson is doing here to tie his vignettes together by inventing a connection from Lovelace to ENIAC and by greatly simplifying the connections from the ENIAC operations team to Hopper to COBOL. The headline NPR "The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" also wondering how famous someone can be and still be forgotten. Would it be reasonable to set two documentary films, a number of major honors, and an NY Times obit as threshold to indicate that Bartik and her colleagues were already rescued from obscurity years before Isaacson arrived? How about Ada Lovelace's multiple full length biographies, appearance in various novels, and Ada Lovelace Day? Lovelace is surely more famous than any Turing Award winner or anyone building a computer in the 1940s apart from Turing and possibly von Neumann. Google's Ngram viewer shows her overtaking Eckert, Zuse, Mauchly, Aiken, Atanasoff or Wilkes by 1992 and staying ahead of them ever since. https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=Ada+Lovelace%2CJoh n+Mauchly%2CPresper+Eckert%2CHoward+Aiken%2CMaurice+Wilkes%2CKonrad+Zuse%2Cj ohn+atanasoff&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1990&year_end=2008 Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Janet Abbate Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 9:06 AM To: members Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Isaacson's book In the NPR segment, Isaacson claims that Grace Hopper invented COBOL. "He could find out that's not true just by looking at Wikipedia," I thought.... then looked at the "COBOL" entry and found Grace Hopper plastered all over it. Time for some editing. Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS _______________________________________________ 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