IT History Society Blog

You would think that after all these years we would know pretty much the whole story of British code-breaking computers during World War II, but we don’t.  Here is a link to a BBC series, in which Simon Lavington discusses “Oedipus”–a post-war proto-supercomputer, the details of which are only now beginning to emerge. See my earlier post on Sam Snyder; also my post on the British lead in computers and how they lost it to the U.S.

Lavington says that one of the unique features of the machine was its use of associative memory. This concept was apparently independently discovered at least three times, by the British, by IBM, and lesser-known, in 1943 by Konrad Zuse (who has a sketch of associative-memory addressing circuits in his autobiography, Chapter 5). I’ll bet Zuse was the first.

I understand the need for secrecy, but what if this remarkable technology had not been kept under wraps? Now, with Google, the genie is out of the bottle anyway.

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I just received word that Herb Grosch passed away, on January 18. I wrote about him last April, as one of the original “wild ducks” at IBM.

As was often said about him, Herb knew everybody–including Ronald Reagan, to whom he explained the workings of a General Electric computer. And everybody knew him. That is not entirely true, as a younger generation of scholars never had that opportunity. I count myself among the lucky ones to have known him, although not as well as those who were present at the creation of electronic computing.

Herb could be a real pain to have around–I have at least one or two stories that I could tell, from the time when he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian.  Now that he is gone, I really miss him.

We are planning to write an obituary for the IEEE Annals; in the meantime, take a look at the material gathered at Columbia University about him.  Here is some more.

So long, Herb.

As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you’ve probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous, given our level of expertise. So he or she or it travels back in time periodically to shut the machine down.

What will computers of the future be like? Will they have consciousness, and will they surpass us as the next species? This has been the subject of some current research I am doing (not AI research but the history of this idea). Hard to believe, but it has been over 40 years since “HAL,” the computer that was the central character of 2001, a Space Odyssey, appeared. We forget that many believed in all seriousness that, with computing advancing as rapidly as it was back then, such a machine was not far off. Perhaps not by 2001, but certainly by now. In spite of 40 years of Moore’s Law, and countless other advances in computing, we still don’t have HAL. Maybe that’s a good thing, but will a real HAL ever arrive?

I hope the LHC gets its bugs worked out, and maybe it will help give us an answer.

I am at work now, about to go home. But according to this news flash from local radio station WTOP, I may have a difficult commute. It seems that the computer controlling traffic signals in Montomery County,Maryland, has failed, and traffic signals are not being synchronized. Traffic in suburban DC is chaotic anyway, so a glitch like this is not good.

According to the report, the computer is a “Data General main frame” [sic]. Now there’s a name I had not heard in a while. That company was a spin-off from DEC, about which I blogged a few weeks ago.  They were located a few miles from the Mill, DEC’s headquarters.  Most of know Data General from the book by Tracy Kidder–still one of the best books ever written about computing. Was this Data General Eclipse the “main frame” whose creation Kidder chronicled so well? Could be. Any computer that served as such a workhorse for so many years must be pretty good.  Data General alumni can hold their heads up high.

David Grier, former Editor of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, once wrote of a  “great machine” theory of history. I would not put the Eclipse on that list. But the Data General Nova, on which the Eclipse was based–now there was a computer! Let us raise a glass to DEC, Data General, and the fantastic engineering that came out of the Massachusetts woods.

A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It’s a project called “MyLifeBits,” and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall, by Bell and Jim Gemmell.  For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan Weissberger, who has sent us information on the CHM several times so far:

“For more than a decade, Gordon Bell- the principal researcher at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus- has digitally archived every aspect of his life. Conversations, phone calls, photos, CDs, articles, home videos, e-mail — every piece of data Bell has created or consumed has been squirreled away into a database. In effect, he has offloaded the past 11 years of his life into a comprehensive electronic memory bank. This effort was the genesis of the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research.

His decade-long data dump has convinced Bell that the frailty of bio-memory — what everyone else has to work with — is about to become a thing of the past. He claims we are about to usher in an era where your every moment is recorded.  Will we be able to find the signal (important and relevent information) through the noise (of extraneous recorded information)?  That remains to be seen.”

Weissberger is not as sanguine about the idea as Bell is, and I suggest you  contact him directly <aweissberger@sbcglobal.net> about that, or follow the blog at the above link.  I do not feel so comfortable with the project either, but what should I do? Looking at Silicon Valley from the East Coast, my principal observation about what goes on in the Valley is a simple one:  if it can be done, someone out there will do it.

I have had the great pleasure of having known Gordon for many years. He has been a great supporter of history. He is also one of the top computer engineers, whose innovations in computer architecture are found in the desktop and laptop machines we all use every day. The photo of Bell (he’s wearing the sports jacket) shows his team at the Digital Equipment Corporation’s  Maynard, Mass. plant — the “Mill”– at the unveiling of the PDP-6, around 1964. I remember Katie Hafner calling me one day and asking me what I thought was the most influential computer ever built, and I replied without a moment’s hesitation, this one. Why? I’ll save that for a future post.

Good Luck, Gordon.

P.S.: Here is a link to a YouTube video of Gordon explaining his work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gWEUA47Q4g