Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Introducing myself
Dear Colleagues, It is a great pleasure for me to join Sigcis. I hope I can make a contribution to your research. Several eminent historians have drawn attention to major gaps in the history of computing. Much of computing technology was developed in Europe, but its originators are not recognized even in their home country. Since Europe has no computer industry, historians have not been interested. On February 24, 2003, the New York Times published an article titled: Herbert F. Mataré. An Inventor of the Transistor Has His Moment. Fifty-five years after the fact, this was the first time Mataré was given credit for his work. In 1986, the Boston Computer Museum held a contest to determine who invented the microcomputer. The Micral created by François Gernelle was recognized as the first commercially distributed microcomputer. . Both Mataré and Gernelle have provided me with ample documentation and information about their work. My forthcoming book The Silicon Revolution explores this unmapped area of history. It constitutes a documented analysis and a coherent narrative of the development of computing in the United States, Europe and Asia. Please see:/http://www.avandor.net IEEE paper The French Transistor. NY Times: Herbert F. Mataré. An Inventor of the Transistor Has His Moment. Armand Van Dormael 33A Drève de la Meute 1410 Waterloo Belgium Tel/fax +32 2 354 96 63 a.vandormael@skynet.be
All - I'm getting ready to teach an undergrad course (juniors and seniors) on "History of Computers and the Internet" for the first time in 7 years. I'm looking for suggestions on three things: 1) A recent book on the history of personal computers that's well- written and exciting for undergrads. I used to use Fire in the Valley, but that's very dated now. 2) On history of the Internet, I've been using Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet for years. It's a great book but somewhat inaccessible for undergrads, and now a bit dated. 3) Books or articles -- again, exciting for undergrads -- on history of the WWW. Please, not Tim Berners-Lee's awesomely self-centered memoir. Thanks for any and all. - Paul ————————————————— Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/
Hi Paul, I again recommend as an accessible and still mostly timely book documenting the history of usenet and the internet, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben. In addition to the print edition distributed by Wiley and Sons, there is the online edition at http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/. The book is still being read especially as netizens exercise their voice and power in countries like China, S. Korea, Egypt, and Indonesia. Good luck with your history course. Take care. Jay On Wed, 6 May 2009, Paul Edwards wrote:
All -
I'm getting ready to teach an undergrad course (juniors and seniors) on "History of Computers and the Internet" for the first time in 7 years.
I'm looking for suggestions on three things:
1) A recent book on the history of personal computers that's well-written and exciting for undergrads. I used to use Fire in the Valley, but that's very dated now.
2) On history of the Internet, I've been using Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet for years. It's a great book but somewhat inaccessible for undergrads, and now a bit dated.
3) Books or articles -- again, exciting for undergrads -- on history of the WWW. Please, not Tim Berners-Lee's awesomely self-centered memoir.
Thanks for any and all.
- Paul ����������������� Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information
School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/
Hi Paul, Good questions all - I'll be interested in the response. Henry Lowood has some nice stuff at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/lowood.html, though I suspect you know this already. Doug Engelbart's demo is on the web. I could set up a skype session with Regis McKenna, who knows SV backwards. There was a Nova or BBC series which I heard good reports on, but I forget the details. Exciting is hard to come by in general though. Laura de Nardis' excellent new work on internet names will not be accessible enough I fear. There's also The Wealth of Networks, though I'm not too attuned to the analysis - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page. take care, geof Paul Edwards wrote:
All -
I'm getting ready to teach an undergrad course (juniors and seniors) on "History of Computers and the Internet" for the first time in 7 years.
I'm looking for suggestions on three things:
1) A recent book on the history of personal computers that's well-written and exciting for undergrads. I used to use Fire in the Valley, but that's very dated now.
2) On history of the Internet, I've been using Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet for years. It's a great book but somewhat inaccessible for undergrads, and now a bit dated.
3) Books or articles -- again, exciting for undergrads -- on history of the WWW. Please, not Tim Berners-Lee's awesomely self-centered memoir.
Thanks for any and all.
- Paul ————————————————— Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information
School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/ <http://www.si.umich.edu/%7Epne/>
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Hello Paul and others, Good questions. You may find our online syllabus repository to be of interest in course planning. Joe November is currently updating and improving it. http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/12 Please consider contributing your own syllabus when it is ready. On the PC front there is little to report, which is odd. There's so much that could be written about user groups, dealerships, popular discourse, reconstruction of personal computers for different cultural spaces, gender, technology transfer, etc. Mostly it hasn't been written. However I would recommend Lindsay's chapter on the TRS-80 ("From the Shadows") in the Oudshoorn & Pinch volume How Users Matter. Frank Veraart in the Netherlands and Tom Lean in Manchester have, if I remember correctly, recently completed dissertations on personal computing topics. I do not know if they've published anything suitable in English. (Don't be shy to speak up guys). For a sweeping popular summary of the PC story I'd go with Cringely's Accidental Empires (or chapters from it) over Fire in the Valley, as it's more entertaining but actually very insightful with respect to platform competition, architecture lock in, etc. You'll just have to turn the datedness into a teachable feature and make it do double duty as a primary source. For the Internet, you should definitely check out the new Aspray & Ceruzzi edited MIT Press book The Internet and American Business. http://www.amazon.com/Internet-American-Business-History-Computing/dp/026201 2405. Mostly the book looks at the Internet in use in various fields, with a star studded cast of history of computing contributors. Momentarily eschewing modesty, my own chapter from this book "Protocols for Profit: Web and Email Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" could fit your requirements. It retells the history of web and email technologies from a business history meets STS perspective. I tried to focus particularly on ways in which the legacy of the pre commercial Internet shaped browser and email development in the commercial era. I don't have any special sources and relied on published accounts, mostly newspaper articles, for the actual facts. A draft is online at http://tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf. My other chapter, "The Web's Missing Links" looked at the web navigation business (search engines, directories, and portals) from a similar perspective. http://tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/WebsMissingLinksDRAFT.pdf. However I do encourage you to get the whole book. Don't discount Janet's book. You might not want to assign the whole thing, but I found that the chapter on email and applications stands nicely on its own. Also From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey C. Bowker Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 4:36 PM To: Paul Edwards Cc: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Introducing myself Hi Paul, Good questions all - I'll be interested in the response. Henry Lowood has some nice stuff at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/lowood.html, though I suspect you know this already. Doug Engelbart's demo is on the web. I could set up a skype session with Regis McKenna, who knows SV backwards. There was a Nova or BBC series which I heard good reports on, but I forget the details. Exciting is hard to come by in general though. Laura de Nardis' excellent new work on internet names will not be accessible enough I fear. There's also The Wealth of Networks, though I'm not too attuned to the analysis - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Main_Page. take care, geof Paul Edwards wrote: All - I'm getting ready to teach an undergrad course (juniors and seniors) on "History of Computers and the Internet" for the first time in 7 years. I'm looking for suggestions on three things: 1) A recent book on the history of personal computers that's well-written and exciting for undergrads. I used to use Fire in the Valley, but that's very dated now. 2) On history of the Internet, I've been using Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet for years. It's a great book but somewhat inaccessible for undergrads, and now a bit dated. 3) Books or articles -- again, exciting for undergrads -- on history of the WWW. Please, not Tim Berners-Lee's awesomely self-centered memoir. Thanks for any and all. - Paul ----------------- Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/ <http://www.si.umich.edu/%7Epne/> _____ _______________________________________________ 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
Dear all This is an excellent discussion. Like some of the other contributors, I don't have an answer to the literal question Paul raised. The undergrad teaching pattern here doesn't generally favour studying whole books: I have one wide-ranging required purchase (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray’s _Computer_) supplemented with individual papers or extracts. Most of the book extracts are copied under a licensing deal which allows only one chapter per volume per course, so we have to be quite wide-ranging in our selection. This approach is not ideal for all topics, but for the PC and mass internet I suspect it's the best approach right now. I'd echo Tom Haigh in recommending Lindsay's "From the shadows"; and, for British context, the intelligent pop history in Chapter 3 of Francis Spufford's _Backroom Boys_ (London: Faber 2003). _Accidental Empires_ and _Hackers_ (and, indeed, _Fire in the Valley_) are perhaps most valuable when used selectively and reflexively, pulling out a chapter or two to address both the content and presentation of computer history. Maybe this approach could be extended to first-hand accounts such as _Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer_ (Asheville, NC: WorldComm 1993), or the various (and highly variable) platform-specific histories. Tom Lean, who works on personal computing in the UK, is still preparing publications, but Frank Veraart has an English-language chapter on Basicode across Europe which is new in print -- details to follow shortly. Internet/web: I used Tom Haigh's chapters in the Aspray and Ceruzzi ed vol successfully with my undergrads this year. They will perhaps not enthuse a reluctant student, but they are great for providing engaged students with solid bridges from the world described in the well-established historical literature to the world they know from first-hand experience. In particular, "Protocols for profit" usefully clarifies how much "internet" culture has its roots outside the formal internet (eg, in proprietary content services such as CompuServe). I like to build up the paths-not-taken side by pointing to Ted Nelson, videotex, and Philip Frana’s 2004 _Annals_ piece on Gopher. Lastly, I find that using plenty of primary source material, including documentary video and emulated software, scores well in the "exciting for undergrads" dept. They may start out by laughing at the unfulfilled predictions / meagre technical specs/ notion that anyone would play SpaceWar all night, but some of them get hooked. And points that would be hard to write up become obvious when you show actual footage of an early dial-up user websurfing (if you can find it: I use footage from _The Net_, a 1994 BBC magazine show), or use sample issues to show how _Byte_ changed over a 20-year period. Hope this helps! I'd be interested to hear from any other listmembers teaching in this area. Best James Paul Edwards wrote:
All -
I'm getting ready to teach an undergrad course (juniors and seniors) on "History of Computers and the Internet" for the first time in 7 years.
I'm looking for suggestions on three things:
1) A recent book on the history of personal computers that's well-written and exciting for undergrads. I used to use Fire in the Valley, but that's very dated now.
2) On history of the Internet, I've been using Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet for years. It's a great book but somewhat inaccessible for undergrads, and now a bit dated.
3) Books or articles -- again, exciting for undergrads -- on history of the WWW. Please, not Tim Berners-Lee's awesomely self-centered memoir.
Thanks for any and all.
- Paul ————————————————— Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information
School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) http://www.si.umich.edu/~pne/
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_______________________________________________ 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
participants (6)
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Armand Van Dormael -
Geoffrey C. Bowker -
James Sumner -
Jay Hauben -
Paul Edwards -
Thomas Haigh