IT History Society Blog

As this report from Interop shows, SHARE is not only still around, it is alive and healthy. So is the mainframe. And IBM continues to play a major role in this market. And, yes, COBOL is still being used, although it takes a back seat to Java and Linux.

This came as a surprise to me, but it should not have. Old technologies don’t simply disappear. They evolve, and become embedded into the background. They become part of the infrastructure. Sometimes that means an obsolete, inefficient system is kept in place. But not always. Sometimes you need huge amounts of mass storage, and big pipes to move the data in and out. One thing that mainframes today have is high availability: lots of redundancy, so that when something breaks, the system keeps running while you swap out the bad part.

I have to wonder, though, about COBOL.

(By the way, that’s Grace Hopper at the console of a UNIVAC.)

Having just come back from a happy trip to see the latest Pixar production, Wall-E, I cannot help but think about the ways computers, and critical attitude to computerisation, percolate into everyday culture. Some fifty years ago a modern ‘electronic brain’ rhetoric swept the Western world. in 1947, even before its release, the Cambridge Edsac was to be commented upon as a ‘brain’ provided with an impressive two-ton “memory” of steel tubes and mercury promising to hold “25 times more ‘knowledge’” than the Eniac [1]. By 1949, the tone was somehow different. By then informed commentators warned as “misleading” the attribution of “almost human qualities” to the computer. As marvellous a machine that may perform 15,000 calculations a minute the Edsac may be, the reality was still ultimately a machine, or, in Wilkes ’s more incisive wording, “a moron who cannot think but can be trusted to do what he is told,” including silly things [2]. It had been realised that, beyond the rhetoric, the Edsac was and was ever to remain a thing “knocked up with a screwdriver” [3]

Each age since the 1940s has had its output of critical popular look-up upon computers’ ability to revolutionise the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, these criticisms were for example embodied in HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today we have Wall-E and other occurrences of computers in science-fiction popular writings, such as Hex, the ant-powered computer of Pratchett’s Discworld. We may all at times fall trustingly in love with the marvellous capabilities of our computers. Still I am trusting that some critical attitude will always pervade in human societies against believing that computers are not humanity’s Graal without people to knock them up, or down, with screwdrivers.

[1] “A Don Builds a Memory. 4Ft. Tubes in his ‘Brain’,” Daily Mail, October 1947

[2] “New ‘Brain’ Store Orders. Calculations At 15,000 A Minute,” Daily Telegraph, 17.6.49s

[3] Merrick Winn, “Merrick Winn Sees A Room Full of Astonishing Gadgets … It’s A MECHANICAL BRAIN,” The Star, 5.7.49

Like many of us, I was shocked to hear of Mike Mahoney’s passing last week. When I last saw him in October, he was in fine spirits and eager, as always, to discuss the history of computing with me.

Whether you knew him or not, I urge you to read the several accounts of his life and career posted in the “In Memoriam” section of this web site. There is not much that I can add, other than to say that I agree with those who say that Mike could be a great friend and colleague, but he was also uncompromising in his constant striving for a high level of intellectual quality in our research and writing. I often fell short of those standards, but he was right in insisting that I never lose sight of them.

The photo is of a group of historians and computer scientists who gathered at a beautiful country chateau in Dagstuhl, Germany, in August, 1996. Mike is front & center in the photo, in the safari jacket. I’m at the back, half-hidden (somehow appropriate for both of us!) He was at the top of his game at that conference, and his give-and-take with not just fellow historians but with practicing computer scientists was something I will always remember.

So long, Mike.

Memories are a funny thing. This just came back to me while checking up texts of transcripts of interviews of computing pioneers and re-listening to emotional trembling in recorded voices telling me on the UNIDATA short-lived European research consortium.

Collecting oral histories is oft seen as simply consisting in getting people, often elders - and you get the nickname of ‘gerontologist’ -, letting you record stories from their lives that you deem of historical value. In order: 1. You take contact with a potential interviewee; 2. You obtain his/her agreement to assist your scientific project; 3. You have the interviewee tell to a microphone stories; 4. You process the recording and work on a transcript that renders available to others the material unravelled during the interview; 5. While thinking about using the interview for publication you suddenly realise that there are lots of other issues to be dealt with legality, copyright, ownership, circulation, morality, etc. And you look out for expert methodological help by e.g. the Oral History Society or manuals like Thompson’s classic Voice of the Past.

The reality of practice is indeed somehow less simple. Oral history methods are still often criticised as unreliable, for collecting an oral history is an interactive interviewee-interviewer process. The convincing stage, for instance, involves the deployment of a sometimes complex charming strategy involving commenting on the project, yourself, the importance of the interviewee, the interview process etc… through multiple friendly meetings and phone calls… How many times do oral history practitioners hear sentences like: “But I have nothing to tell you about,” that is until you unleash memory flows…

By the time one gets to the interview process itself, there has oft been so many occasions to interact with the interviewee that (s)he is no longer an object of research but almost a collaborator to the research. You might fall under the charm of the modesty of a pioneer who underestimates his/her contributions. Or you might feel aversion against an interviewee who looks down on you as just a silly researcher asking questions about topics (s)he judges you not expert enough to understand. At the very least interacting with the interviewee fakes things up as far as your scientific distancing is concerned. Yet you can deal with this, if with your pride hurt. You will return to the transcript to try analyse and get rid of your undue own input.

What is oft forgotten is that interviewees too are affected by interviews. At the very best, you have exploited the interview to collect addresses and information about past friends and colleagues to contact back after a 20 years or so delay. Also, (s)he is likely to have now in mind ideas of other stories long forgotten. Or maybe (s)he is rethinking his/her own role in the story you have just recorded. At the very least you will have been giving feelings of joy for reminiscing at the good old days, and of pain for reminding them of what has been lost since those good old days. Some feeling of guilt often gets awakened too, about things lost or undone. And then YOU somehow feel bad for making an older man or an older lady coming back to past painful days.

All three of my kids have I-Pods. One of them has a model that holds 10,000 songs. If each song were, on average, about three minutes long, it would two months to get through them all, if you listened to the gadget for 8 hours a day. What’s the point?

At the dawn of the Information Age, a professor of mine in graduate school remarked how information, unlike the stuff of the existing industrial economy, could expand almost infinitely with no adverse effects on the environment. If you write a well-researched and objective description of something, no matter how obscure, there is no technical reason why it cannot, or should not, be posted to Wikipiedia. The editor of an encyclopedia that is printed on paper and bound into volumes does not have that option. So is this what we are witnessing? An almost-infinite storage medium, with random access? It is worth noting that this professor had been involved in a project called the Bicentennial Electronic Encyclopedia (BEE), which he hoped would be available in the bicentennial year of 1976. It would have been produced with punched cards.

But there’s too much music. Popular music is over-produced, over-packaged, and over-marketed. It serves as wallpaper for a post-industrial age, instead of the expression of a fundamental human instinct and desire. People (not just kids) go through their daily business with an iPod attached to their ears, playing a “sound track of my life.” The finest music I heard recently was a mockingbird outside my office window in downtown Washington, imitating the sound of a car alarm. That bird had it nailed! A neighbor of mine, Joe Bussard, is famous for having an amazing collection of obscure 78 rpm records. He once told an interviewer that no music recorded on more modern media is worth listening to. The interviewer thought that was ridiculous, and didn’t believe him. But Bussard has a point: what did it feel like to be the first person in the world to hear, for the first time, a voice or song that was not live? Joe Corn wrote about how the rapture people felt when they first saw a person in the sky flying in an airplane: they fainted and swooned at the sight.

I know this sounds like a broken record (no pun intended), but once again we see Moore’s Law at work. Steve Jobs, you’ve been a hero of mine, but please, can we have some silence?