My review of the Daylight-Knuth booklet (mentioned in my previous message) suggests some of what Knuth was unhappy about in the discussion in that booklet. See the second column of journal page 72 (4th page of the PDF) at http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2014/01/man2014010069.pdf Reading the booklet, it seemed less about history by practitioners versus by historians than about including technical content or not. Not quoted in my review, but stated by Knuth in the booklet is his belief that Campbell-Kelly advises his student to "concentrate on contexts, and to write for a non-technical audience, rather than to also give some depth." The booklet's entire discussion of this is on pages 74 through 77. Knuth states that he wants breadth and depth in science history (which he asserts is still the case in math history).

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] 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

Paul E. Ceruzzi, Chairman Division of Space History, MRC 311 National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution PO Box 37012 Washington, DC 20013-7012 202-633-2414 http://airandspace.si.edu/staff/paul-ceruzzi _______________________________________________ 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 _______________________________________________ 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 athttp://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

___________________________ Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing) University of Michigan School of Information 3439 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

Some great inputs here One might be tempted to label Knuth as a scalawag or miscreant, given the discussion herein. Don is indeed quite a character, as many of you know. I have intermittently had dinner with Don, including last week as a small fete for Carver Mead’s 80th birthday, a dinner at our home twenty-two years ago to engage sponsors of the second Computer Bowl for the Boston version of the Computer History Museum fundraiser, and the night we assembled all of the Turing Award winners at the Computer History Museum four years ago around the ACM Annual Banquet in San Francisco. At our home 22 years ago, Don was lamenting almost exactly this same point of view, in the midst of a conversation by several mega-millionaires (there weren’t mega billionaires yet) who got their winnings and went off to sail the globe or play golf with nubile youngsters, and then found that history was passing them by, and they seemingly couldn’t get ‘back on the train.' He told them that three of us in the room (including me, so I thought it wonderful, natch) were the lucky ones because we hadn’t been seduced by the gold and glitter. I reminded him of that long-ago conversation at the Turing fete, and he said, “I don’t remember that conversation, but I do remember spending time with your wife…” Last week was the reverse—he remembered the conversation but not my wife. Ah well. There is, I think most of us might agree, more than a germ of truth in Knuth's bleat. Teaching a seminar three years ago at Carnegie-Mellon's computer science department to more than a hundred students and maybe twelve faculty at both campuses, I found three people who had heard of Herb Simon, one of whom thought he had been important for something at CMU. I was flabbergasted. Alan Newell wasn’t a name known to anyone in the meetings. This was preposterous, but unfortunately true. Dan Kevles taught the history of physics at a pretty first-rate physics school some years back, but to my perspective he was never ‘accepted’ by the physicists there. And Feynman used to teach “everything" from a practitioner’s historical perspective. Cogswell College, where I was a 'turnaround guy’ for a couple of years, subsequently hired both a CEO and a Provost who had never heard of Moore’s Law; one said, “Well, you can’t know everything.” She also didn’t know, or care, about Ed Catmull, Pixar, or U of Utah’s legacy in computer graphics, let alone who Ivan Sutherland might be. This college, essentially re-galvanized in the 1980s by PDI (Pacific Data Images, now known as Dreamworks). The college, winners of 57 computer animation awards during my two years there, was voted in Beijing the #2 computer animation school in the world. But the owners, and the leaders, see little value in teaching even the rudiments of the history of their singular expertise. Worse, they dismissed the one first-rank historian on their staff as a cost-cutting measure. Not rare, I think. Is Don able to be educated on this topic? Probably to some degree, but it won’t be easy to convince him that survey books—e.g. Aspray and Campbell-Kelly’s work—is technical enough, or complete enough, to qualify, even though it is not one of the lamentable corporate puff-pieces. And the works on TeK are simply not going to reach any readership whatsoever, even if included in every CS curriculum. Chuck House On May 15, 2014, at 7:59 AM, Paul Fishwick <pxf130430@utdallas.edu> wrote:

Tom notes:

...

Neither have computer science departments embraced the history of computer science as an important area of teaching or research.

And Paul asks

In what way has history ever been “useful” to computer scientists?

I am saddened that history and culture of computing are, indeed, not adequately covered in computer science programs with which I am familiar. I am a computer scientist, not a historian. However, I don’t think I could do my research in model representation effectively without reading the history of modeling, computing, engineering, and technology. I am presenting a paper this coming week (ACM SIGSIM) on “computing as model-based empirical science.” This hypothesis would not be possible without historical context, especially in the area of analog computing. Analog computing has good coverage in the history of computing, but is noticeably absent from computer science curricula (the topic split off into systems engineering).

I am not sure I follow the thread on Knuth’s lecture, but am anxious to find out more.

-p

Paul Fishwick, PhD Chair, ACM SIGSIM Distinguished Chair of Arts & Technology and Professor of Computer Science Director, Creative Automata Laboratory The University of Texas at Dallas Arts & Technology 800 West Campbell Road, AT10 Richardson, TX 75080-3021 Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick Blog: creative-automata.com

_______________________________________________ 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

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

Paul E. Ceruzzi, Chairman Division of Space History, MRC 311 National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution PO Box 37012 Washington, DC 20013-7012 202-633-2414 http://airandspace.si.edu/staff/paul-ceruzzi _______________________________________________ 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 _______________________________________________ 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 athttp://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

___________________________

Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> and History<http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming<http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/vastmachine/index.html> (MIT Press, 2010)

Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/> (and better than nothing)

University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 3439 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

_______________________________________________ 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