IT History Society Blog

In 1962 the Illinois Institute of Technology built this android for NASA, to test space suits. The idea was that it would replicate most of the motions of a human being. When installed in a suit, it would measure the stress of movement, without requiring a human being to spend long hours in an uncomfortable and tiring set of tests.

It worked on a combination of hydraulic and electrical mechanisms. Here is a snip of an old 8mm home movie of it in action. I hope to add more snips of the home movie in the next few days.

Does the Android belong in this blog? After all, it did not have any intelligence, but was controlled remotely from a console, through wires into the back of the Android’s head. You decide.

For decades it sat forlornly in a warehouse in Suitland, Maryland (think of that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark). A few years ago it was rescued, restored, and is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center at Washington Dulles Airport.

Is this an android or robot? The dictionary defines “android” as “…an automaton made to resemble a human being.”  Robots, on the other hand, can take almost any form, and outside of science fiction, many of them never resemble human beings.

As one contemporary magazine article said, “If I only had a brain!”

It seems I may be stuck into writing about news these days … Indeed, my interest as that of many of us has been caught by the recent world-wide financial crisis. Notwithstanding the risk of political incorrectness of such claim, let me just say that I love the news … as regards to what it reveals about computerisation. Back in time in 1929, on the famous Black Tuesday, stock exchanges went off the roof, leading out to a world-wide crisis, and a complete reorganisation of, and redistribition of wealth in the economy, the so-called Great Depression that ensued. Causes were stock markets losing sight of which shares corresponded to the real economy or which participated to the hype created within stock markets following on from rapid flow of exchanges and speculation among traders. And it was not long before Europe followed in. Quite strikingly the situation is not so different now. Stock markets have crashed massively under the same financially über-ponderous weight of far-too-speculated-with shares that everyone trusted to be safe, and yet were not so. Most financial institutions world-wide are worried sick with painful pecuniary itches from, e.g., having been trusting the stability and reality of the Icelandic financial products. Even conservative people had entered such practices. The University of Cambridge for example is in pass of losing about 11 millions pounds as a consequence of this trust. After Fortis and Dexia, even my more stable conservative bank in Belgium, ING, has signed in for some cash flow from the Dutch governement….

As in 1929, the word everybody has in mind is trust, and collapse of trust, trust in shares, trust in financial institutions, trust in bank managers and management, trust in national regulation of stabilising fund … raising out tricky questions for economies half-virtualised: how do you evaluate just how much you need to support the banking systems on? What should governements do? Buy out shares? At the risk of seeing their own budget fading away at the next hiccup of the stock markets? Who should be blamed for the crisis? Traders? Brokers? Etc. Etc. There is one issue that has barely been questioned or challenged in the press yet, that of the computerisation of stock markets and exchanges and the rise in pace for exchanges rendered possible therewith.

Computers are so embedded as normal practices among traders and brokers and the financial world that very few actually take into account the role of the technology as central to these practices, and the financial frailty and problems that ensue, such as the paralysis that occurred in 1989 in Canada when trading was stopped by a computer crash. No…. Of course not. Rather than questioning computerisation, one keeps embracing it, as in the UK where high-raking politicians brand out digitisation as a strategy to help easing up the credit crunch. Some ought to start some good readings in there, for instance Donald MacKenzie‘s works on computarisation and trust, e.g. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust or The material production of virtuality. Also, anyone interested to join in Bernardo Batiz-Lazo in his ‘history of computers in banking’ research at the SHOT Special Interest Group Computers, Information and Society ? I am…

Where I work, we are strongly discouraged from ever using the cliché “rocket scientist.” There are no such people. Engineers, not scientists, design rockets. Rockets work by the application of physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The only true rocket scientist may have been Isaac Newton, who lived and died long before the first practical rockets were built. The distinction is an important one.

I am not going to waste time trying to convince people to be more accurate and stop using this term. It has passed into common English usage, to signify anything that is hard to do or understand. The phrase is usually expressed in the negative, as in “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do ‘x’,” where ‘x’ refers to something like, say, changing the oil in your car, or fixing the global economy.

Speaking of which… It turns out that the origin of this term may have a lot to do with the recent news from Wall Street. We turn back the clock to the 1980s, when young traders on Wall Street overturned the classical models of trading, with their quantitative, or “quant” modeling of options. It was a time well-chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street. Armed with esoteric mathematical models, including one called the “Black-Scholes” equation, they were called by their elderly colleagues “rocket scientists.” At first the term was one of derision, later of envy. Their tool of choice was – surprise — the SUN workstation. SUN was a Silicon Valley start-up whose products were known for their innovations in architecture derived from a project at Stanford University (hence the name), and software from a computer scientist, not a rocket scientist, named Bill Joy. SUN developed the workstation for scientists and engineers, but the company thrived when it sold truckloads of them to Wall Street.

In 1984 Fischer Black, co-developer of the above-mentioned equation, moved from an academic post at the University of Chicago to Goldman Sachs in New York, and the era of rocket science began.It did not last that long, at least in its initial form.  The crash of the stock market in the fall of 1987 was supposed to end all that. Apparently it didn’t. At least one news account is blaming the current crisis on Black and Scholes. No one is blaming SUN, which saw its innovations preempted by cheap Intel Pentium chips running Microsoft software. SUN went on to develop Java and a host of other innovations, but workstations don’t seem to generate much excitement any more.

Perhaps in time we will get a fuller account of the causes of the current crisis. So far journalists are coming up with a new “real” cause per day. Looking for a silver lining in this cloud, perhaps the current crisis will cause people to think twice when they use the term “rocket scientist.” In any event, the next time you hear the term, don’t think of Wernher von Braun, think of Gordon Gekko, the character in the Oliver Stone movie.