IT History Society Blog

A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted getting any of these devices, because they do not satisfy what  are very reasonable standards of “simple” design, which we  have a right to demand from those who would supply us with electronic gadgets.

There is one device that I have bought, and although not perfect, it does prove that the goal of simple but useful and practical products are indeed possible. The “Wiki Reader” is my constant companion. Take a look at it:

1) three buttons

2) no color

3) no internet connection or any outside connection of any kind

4) no pictures, just text

Almost makes me want to hang out in bars, since with one of these things in my pocket I can settle all bar bets. Anyway, now I have all the distilled knowledge of the universe in my hand–in a box smaller than a pack of cigarettes, with a battery life of about a year.Vannevar Bush’s Memex has arrived.

Don’t rush out and buy it just because I said so. This is not a product endorsement, and I know a lot of you are not going to like it–there are a lot of things it does not have. But I am glad that my hopes for such devices did not end when Hewlett-Packard stopped making decent calculators, or when Palm stopped using their original OS.

I just learned of the death of Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair personal computer. Here is a link.

In my book, A History of Modern Computing, I surveyed the many claims to what was the “first” personal computer, and I concluded that the Altair was it. A lot of people disagree with me, but I stand by that.

Here is a photo of Ed and his wife, taken in 1998 at Yellowstone National Park, on the occasion of his receiving an award from the American Computer Museum.

Roberts was an unappreciated pioneer who really changed the world.

Next week we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. Did you know that?

Anyway, here is a link to a site that celebrates it. Was she really “the world’s first programmer”? I prefer to say that she was  the first to realize that a machine’s functionality could be divided into what we now call a “hardware” and “software” component. Not a very elegant statement, but more accurate, and more defensible.

This is not an official endorsement by the ITHS, but go ahead & check  out the web site & associated festivities.

The T-shirt looks nice, too.

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.