IT History Society Blog

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?

Maybe this post ought have come first before my comment on the Three Societies Meeting just up the blog. Still as it was more about me I have preferred leaving it out as second. I hope not being murdered for that.

I am Sandra Mols, young researcher on an interdisciplinary project with Marie d’Udekem-Gevers on Belgian computing history at the CITA, FUNDP, Namur, Belgium. My relationship with computing history dates back to a dissertation on Georges Lemaître, internationally known for being a forerunner of the Big Bang theory, and locally for his useless and yet expert computing research and efforts at creating the first computing laboratory at the Université Catholique de Louvain in the 1950s.

Some time later I debarked at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine of the University of Manchester, where Jeff Hughes and Jon Agar redirected me from astronomy at Jodrell Bank towards the crystallographic computing practices at the 1950s Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory. Then I had a one-day fascinating encounter with a gentleman who offered me strawberries with double cream for dessert.

This gentleman was Durward Cruickshank, a crystallographic computing expert from the 1950s whose many tales of error containment while using the Manchester Mark I and Pegasus got me to fall in love with the study of the expert treatment of the errors and failures that shape up the development of computerisation processes in practice: human error, technical defects, machine error, input and output error. Before I realised I was soon embarked on a PhD dissertation on 1950s crystallographic computing practices. From then on, my love for computing error became obsessive after extensive readings on Metropolis and Wilkinson. From then on too I tried on never to judge the historical importance of a computing research programme upon its official reputation of being a forerunner or so. The worst the reputation of a researcher in computing the more he (or she) is of interest to me.

With this as my brief vitae, let’s continue the work – i.e. editing and correcting transcripts of interviews of Belgian pioneers.

When recently I got contacted about the opportunity to contribute to this blog, I thought as a first post to report on the panels on the history of computing of the 6th Three Societies Meeting . This joint meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, the History of Science Society and the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science took place at Keble College, Oxford, the week-end just gone, and gathered together no less than about 400 researchers in the history of science.

Besides for its fascinating emphasis on the theme of Connecting Disciplines, the programme looked promising from a standpoint focused on the history of computing too. There were no less than three panels on computing, a first for me as far as history of science conferences are concerned. These were ‘Computing Without Borders’, ‘Computing in Industry and Academe’ and ‘Computing and its Applications’. There was also a wealth of other interesting papers on computing, e.g. Lean, but also on other themes wherefrom learning some methodological tricks on how to explore computing history in its relations with uses and users, emergence out of electrical engineering research and its later dissemination.

Being a historian of computing in the European periphery, there were also some most interesting papers methodologically, i.e. by Navarro on Zwicki’s neutron star research in the 1930s (Panel 3I), and Murphy and especially Terrall (Panel 5E) on the theme of circulation in early modern science. These papers highlighted that the emergence of interdisciplinary research programme, such as those of early computing research, are to be analysed as local wherever they happen. If ideas and concepts indeed travel distances, implementation always occurs locally. I was quite fascinated to listen to mounting evidence on the methodological relevance of the broader history of science recent literature at helping historians of computing analyse the spread and acceleration of the process of the computerisation of modern societies over the last 50 years.

These panels and papers got me to think that the field of the history of computing is quite under mutation at the moment, with books and papers on uses, users, and practices multiplying all around, for instance Akera’ s recent Calculating a Natural World … No doubt Edwards’s “Virtual machines” comments on the importance of uses and users have been heard and are starting to fructify. More interestingly for me, who came to the history of computing through the history of science, this is an evolution that tells too that the history of computing is starting to get out there and take on, critically, some relevant methodological tools devised initially for the history of science more broadly construed.