IT History Society Blog

Tuesday morning. Guardian read of the day…  And a shocking news - for me: Kodak is taking its ‘Kodachrome’ product range off the market. Kodak’s decision is quite understandable. That type of film, which most of those among us below 30 do not really remember, does not sell any more with the rise of ever better equipment and tools for good, expert digital photography.

It is true that, being myself a regular user of these films - including when you could still find them in a black-and-white type -, I have gradually given them up for black-and-white and colour printed photography (but I always kept the ‘négatifs’ in good place), and then for digital cameras. Still I was totally gutted at the news. That news for me means the fading away of a past when not everything was digital. Then cartoons and animated movies were drawn by hand, and taking pictures was seen as an act to do properly, not in a consuming mode.

Once the centre of the attention and the occasion of to-be-paid-for public showing, my beloved film stripes will need historical and archival protection. My father being a highly skilled amateur ornithologist and photographer too, I have had a childhood happily filled with trips to remote places where to look out for eagles, falcons and vultures to take ‘diapositives‘ of. Back from holidays we all had this excitement of waiting for the films to be processed and then pick them up and at last watch these pictures we had been dreaming off for weeks. To watch them, you would buy a light table so that you would see them better (it’s better than staring through it with a desk lamp behind) or a special projector in which your pictures, carefully inserted into small plastic supports, would stick and jam. For children you had these little wheels of tiny pictures that you would insert into space-like plastic glasses with clic-clac button on the side to shift from one to the other.

The end of the Kodachrome is not to be celebrated: it is the announcing sign of the beginning of the disappearance of not so old ways in photography that made many cherished memories and practices of not so old people. It looks like part of my day will include a trip to the old photographer of the corner to get some 100 ASA black-and-white films… It will not be long before they disappear from shelves.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s History Committee is delighted to announce the two winners of its inaugural short-term fellowship in ACM history:

Irina Nikiforova, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech’s School of History, Technology and Society, for her dissertation project entitled “ACM, Turing Prize Scientists, and their Web of Affiliations.” Nikiforova will examine archival materials held at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the Charles Babbage Institute as well as online ACM materials concerning the Turing Award.

Bernard Geoghegan, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and Bauhaus University–Weimar, for a specific project on “Staging the ACM Chess Championships” which will draw on archival materials presently in private hands. Geoghegan plans a journal article from this research as well as a museum exhibit.

Each fellow will receive $2500 to support their project, which can be used for travel or other research expenses. The ACM History Committee hopes to sponsor another round of fellowship support next year as well. For more information, go here.

Here is an announcement of what promises to be a major, if not the major, conference on the history of computing in the near future: at the World Computer Congress, to be held in Brisbane, Australia, in September 2010.

Further details about the Congress may also be found at the WCC web site.

- History of Computing -

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

20-23 September 2010, Brisbane, Australia

First Announcement and Call for Papers

Aims and Scope

The aim of this conference is to get together a group of people interested in the history of computing and the contribution this has made to modern society, and to enable them to communicate their research and knowledge of this area.

In 2010 the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) celebrates its 50th anniversary. The WCC-2010 History of Computing conference is sponsored by IFIP Working Group WG9.7 History of Computing. At previous WCC events WG9.7 has run conferences on the History of Computing in Education, but at WCC-2010 this has been broadened to History of Computing.

The conference scope has deliberately been kept quite broad to include all aspects of the history of computing, such as computing hardware, software and computer applications (including education). In particular however, contributions are welcomed on the social aspects of computing topics that deal with the people involved in the history of computing and the influence computers have had on society.

To celebrate IFIP’s 50th anniversary WCC-2010 will also feature a series of history events called “The Pioneer Experience” in addition to normal paper presentations. Although it is completely separate, our conference will co-operate with The Pioneer Experience and participants will also be able to attend some of these events.

Conference Topics

Appropriate topics for papers for the conference include, but are not restricted to the following:

. History of computer hardware

. History of computer software

. Important events in the history of computing

. People in the history of computing

. Histories of computing in different countries

. Social trends relating to the history of information and communications technologies (ICT)

. Influences that computers have had on society

. History of computers in education:

- computer use in education

- teaching about computers and their uses

- teaching about the history of computing

. History of computers in other specific areas such as medicine, business, science, the arts, games, etc

. Histories of computer companies

. History of communications technologies

. History of the Internet/Web

. Historic artefacts and technology museums

. Approaches and techniques for making this history available and interesting to others

Review Process

All papers will be subject to a process of blind peer review before acceptance.

Proceedings

All accepted papers will be published in a Springer book.

Instructions for Paper Submission

Papers must be written in English and should be around 3000 - 4000 words in length. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference. Accepted papers should follow the publisher’s guidelines (see www.springer.com/series/6102).

Please send your paper to: Arthur.Tatnall@vu.edu.au as soon as possible, and certainly by the deadline shown below.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of papers: 31st Jan 2010

Notification to authors: 17th Apr 2010

Camera-ready copies required: 15th May 2010

A quick glance at the calendar reminded me the other day that my family birthdays’ season is starting up in as every year… This got me to think about the computing birthdays passed during the last decade or so… A quick stroll on-line and so we have had so far, at least, those of:

- the transistor, born 1948, just passed its 60th,

- the 50th of the Manchester transistor computer, of 1st run on November 16th 1953,

- the 25th of the computer virus, born July 1972,

- the 35th anniversary of the internet on October 29th, 2004,

- the 50th and 60th of the Manchester Baby Mark I, official birth date on June 21st 1948,

- the 40th of the mouse, born 1968,

- the 50th of the EDSAC computer, officially born May 6th 1949,

- the recent 50th of the SENAC-1, born 1959,

- the 30th of the Apple II, born 1977,

- the 25th of the PC, born August 12th, 1981,

- the 30th of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing,

- the 30th of the CD, 1st available commercially in 1982, but started up in 1979,

- the 25th of the MAC and PC, born respectively 1984 and 1981,

- etc, etc,

- and, not to forget the 50th and 60th of the venerable primes of the primes of computing, our very own ENIAC and EDVAC, and all the prestigious galas that took place all around it.

To be fair, this is a quite impressive list and palmares for a technological topic of which history is still largely institutionally unstable in most parts of the world. In other ways, I am quite uncomfortable with these lists of dates and birthdays, that, many narratives tell us, are landmark of a technology that revolutionised modern life (1). Is this all that the history of computing is made of? I cannot help but hope not.

How sad would that be that all that it took for computing to take the world by storm is simply to exist? No… there must be more, more, especially, about the people behind the machines, and their spread and diffusion… And indeed, there is more. After 50 years or so of asking on why and how such enduring intensive side-effects from computerisation, we have accumulated tons of stories of people telling on vintage machines and practices, stories that one finds in the ‘looking back’ columns in Computer, in Data News, in the biography and obituaries section of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing…, etc. These are all stories expanding on those anniversaries of successes and achievements we - well ‘we’ as their initiators - are so proud to celebrate (2). And every death of yet another pioneer is another occasion to note out how our past is glorious and worth remembering, as for instance recently with the death of David Caminer, pioneer of business computing.

There are also all those lesser prestigious, shameful, anniversaries we wish were not, for instance that of the short-lived 1972-1975 Unidata consortium. Unidata was born in 1972, 1973 as for the official signature (3), between three European computer industrial partners, the CII (French), Philips (Dutch) and Siemens (German). Dreamt as a strong industrail partnership that would protect European markets from a diabolical IBM invation, Unidata soon collapsed however, was politically-murdered, some claim, and ended in 1975, barely three years after its official beginning. I may be misinformed but I do not recall any special anniversary celebrated for the 25th of the UNIDATA signing up… I find it annoying. I keep being told that one learns from one’s mistakes. So when will we start being proud of these mistakes and failures that also pave the history of computing?

(1) Moreau, R. (1984), The Computer Comes of Age (MIT Press, 1^st ed. in French: 1981), 3: Moreau comments interestingly on the how and why of historians’ fascination for dates.

(2) Lavington, S.H. (1980), Early British Computers. The Story of Vintage Computers And The Men Who Built Them (Manchester UP).

(3) Dallemagne, B. (2001), Histoire de la CII, http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/projet/histoire_informatique/histoire_cii_1972-1975.htm

For a year or so, even since our project on Belgian computing history here started, we have been wondering about what a Belgian computing pioneers’ day (we thought about it as early as late 2007) would look like … That wish materialised this just gone Monday during a Belgian Computing History Day held here at the Faculty. After two months of preparation, e-mails, phone calls etc., we have just welcomed, in a room that finally ended up to be just the right size, a meeting of Belgian computing pioneers and ancients, some of whom having started their career as early as in 1955….

Coming back to my more boring - boring indeed by comparison! - routine at the office, I cannot help but think that it is a huge pay-off for our efforts.  By around 2 PM, a crowd of 40 or so retired Belgian computing experts, practitioners and pioneers in their best Sunday suits gathered up in the corridor for a full afternoon at which I was expecting them much later, for the late afternoon round table. Kicking off with a talk on computer sounds in relation to computer usage monitoring by Gerard Alberts, the programme included some presentation on the project and especially a round table of retired Belgian computing experts in fields ranging from programming syntax and Algol 68 with Michel Sintzoff, numerical analysis, with Jean Meinguet, computer centre management, with Rita de Caluwe and René Florizoone, management informatics, with François Bodart, computing as part of military training with Paul Gennart, also one of the founders of the now almost defunct Société d’Informatique Fondamentale, … to computer use in textual analysis with Friar R.-F. Poswick from the Centre Informatique et Bible.

That round table was a quite fascinating thing to listen to, with reminiscences flowing out about the Machine IRSIA-FNRS, about the Algol 68 endeavour, about “reken-punten” and computer centres management, about how and why informatics institute were created… Even more interesting there was the discussion that sparked up spontaneously from the audience that included likes of Jacques Loeckx, Jean-Jacques Quisquater, and Pierre-Jacques Courtois, from the Laboratoire de Recherches MBLE, Paul Pâquet from the Observatoire Royal de Belgique, Claude Fosséprez, from Philips, and others that we finally managed to meet thanks to the meeting, Paul Dagnélie among others, engineer on the Machine IRSIA-FNRS in the mid-1950s. While I was expecting a meeting filled up with mostly the retelling of happy souvenirs, I got confronted with past practitioners confronting expert opinions, contrasting views on what computing is supposed to be about: research or enhanced productivity? hardware or software? And you even hear about some of them writing up a biography of Vitold Belevitch….

Summing up in 4 words: definitely worth the effort….