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.

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.

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.

—

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.

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.

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.

“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

This story has wider implications. After World War II, Britain stood on the verge of dominating the post-war, high-tech economy. They built the world’s first electronic computers–at least 10 Colossus machines! They pioneered in the commercialization of computers, with the LEO. They pioneered in radar, with the invention of the cavity magnetron. They flew one of the first jet-propelled aircraft. They first described the workings of the DNA molecule–the basis for the modern biotech industry. But the U.K. did not gain the prosperity that should have gone along with that leadership in science and technology. A lesson for the U.S.?

(The logo was designed for the 2007-2008 50th anniversary of the Society & its journal.)

But wait, there’s more! The Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society will have its own supplemental program, on Sunday, October 18. Lots of interesting papers there, too. And the SIG will continue its long tradition of an informal lunch on Friday, October 16, where we can meet new folks and reconnect with old friends and colleagues.

See you there.