Does anyone know how to reach W. Barkley Fritz, who was a supervisor of the female "computers" for ENIAC during its Aberdeen days? I was given a phone number by Paul Deitz @ Aberdeen, but it's incorrect. This is part of my ongoing quest to learn * how * the ENIAC was moved from Moore to Aberdeen, beyond just "they took down a wall and used trucks." I contacted Harry (Joshua) Gray, who did his master's project on the re-installation, but even he only saw the computer before and after its physical move. Earlier this year I found a folder in the Aberdeen archives, with the title "ENIAC move to Aberdeen" (I forget the exact wording); that folder itemized every nut and bolt but contained virtually nothing about the move itself. All it said was, "U. Pennsylvania truck." Then I tried contacting the Penn facilities department to ask for 1946 records and they pretty much laughed at me ......
Hello, I am doing a limited study on Cybernetics & early computing history, within the French context.… In brief, there was a cybernetics craze in the late 1940s-early 1950s, then a decided separation beginning in the mid-1950s, obvious in the first international conference on Automatic Control (CNAM, 1956) and in several books on information processing, which clearly excluded "Cybernetics" from the field. The remaining interface between them, artificial intelligence, was not well considered itself by many computer scientists, particularly within the Schützenberger group of theoretical computer science. The interest for cybernetics culminated with the CNRS international conference on "Les Machines à Calculer & la Pensée humaine" in 1951, which was organized in three sessions : - Calculating machines - Calculating methods - Analogies with human thought. Does anyone know if other computing conferences included a similar session on typically "cybernetic" topics? To my knowledge, it was not the case of the conference organized at Cambridge by M. W. Wilkes, for example. Next question, did anyone of you study the separation process between computing and "cybernetics"? Thanks in advance. Pierre-E. Mounier-Kuhn CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris
Pierre, you probably already know Slava Gerovitch's book From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, which partly covers the split between computer science and cybernetics in the USSR in the period you're working on. Paul On Nov 18, 2009, at 9:32 AM, Pierre Mounier wrote:
Hello,
I am doing a limited study on Cybernetics & early computing history, within the French context.… In brief, there was a cybernetics craze in the late 1940s-early 1950s, then a decided separation beginning in the mid-1950s, obvious in the first international conference on Automatic Control (CNAM, 1956) and in several books on information processing, which clearly excluded "Cybernetics" from the field. The remaining interface between them, artificial intelligence, was not well considered itself by many computer scientists, particularly within the Schützenberger group of theoretical computer science.
The interest for cybernetics culminated with the CNRS international conference on "Les Machines à Calculer & la Pensée humaine" in 1951, which was organized in three sessions : - Calculating machines - Calculating methods - Analogies with human thought.
Does anyone know if other computing conferences included a similar session on typically "cybernetic" topics? To my knowledge, it was not the case of the conference organized at Cambridge by M. W. Wilkes, for example.
Next question, did anyone of you study the separation process between computing and "cybernetics"?
Thanks in advance.
Pierre-E. Mounier-Kuhn CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris
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participants (3)
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Evan Koblentz -
Paul Edwards -
Pierre Mounier