IT History Society Blog

While in the just-over hectic fortnight spent at pre-preparing for a project proposal with the FNRS, the Belgian funding agency for scientific research, I got the sad news that Nicolas Rouche, one of the Belgian pioneers who had helped our research on the Machine Mathématique IRSIA-FNRS had died unexpectedly on the 18th of November 2008.

During most of his career at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Nicolas Rouche was a specialist in qualitative research on mathematical functions. Hence among most of his peers, he was Nicolas Rouche, the theoretical mathematician whose pedagogical qualities had made recognised among his colleagues and beyond. It is as part of this line of work that he has created the Centre de Recherche sur l’Enseignement des Mathématiques (CREM), the Research Centre on Mathematical Teaching based in Nivelles. As part of these pedogogical activities, he has published several works on ways of teaching mathematics, exploiting everyday experience as a tool to get mathematics better understood, for instance in his Du quotidien aux mathématiques and Le sens de la mesure. That he also had a computing past came as a surprise to several other pioneers we have met. In fact his name was first mentioned to me in 2002, when, while looking out for 1950s computing Belgian witnesses, he got referred to me by Jean Meinguet, the first director of the Centre de Calcul of the UCL as one of those who had contributed to the construction of the Machine Mathématique IRSIA-FNRS. The machine was the first Belgian computer (1951-1962) , funded by the IRSIA and FNRS and physically built in association with Bell Telephone Antwerp.

After some phone calls while on the current project and some conversations with a man whose voice sounded oddly very young, we met him last December with Marie Gevers for a friendly interview [1]. During this interview, he explained to us his work at Bell between 1953 and 1957, which included work on ferrite cores and on a cheque-processing banking machine we had barely heard about yet for the New York First National City Bank. These were comments crucial to our work on Bell and the Machine IRSIA-FNRS, especially as Nicolas Rouche kindly completed them with follow-up calls and e-mails as well as the sending of images and photographs. Besides for the technical work performed while at Bell, Rouche’s comments were superbly enlightening as regards to the inner functioning of Bell Telephone in Belgium, a company he joined following on contacts with a head hunter of the firm while at the Université de Liège (cf. CV page).

The comments were especially interesting as regards to the ways they suggested the  company to us as very ‘American’ – compared to other places he had known previously and afterwards.

This Americanness showed first in his pointing out to the management style that he met in the company. His account was filled with patent-seekers staff, head hunters looking out for skilled engineers to recruit in universities, and research leaders seeking out productivity first and foremost. As staff, this made his life odd sometimes, if not difficult, like when he was confronted with having to work out all by himself how to do a computer storage system using experimental – and costly at the time – ferrite core technology, or when being called in to work almost on his own on the inner technical design of the New York City Bank machine. He commented among others on how he got catapulted from project to project according to management’s changing decisions as to his role, his ferrite core work being for instance stopped one day on the grounds of its financial costs and unlikely immediate return.

His comments on the making of the Machine IRSIA-FNRS, which he mostly observed, were of the same kind. The project was a high-profile project paid by the FNRS and the IRSIA, and attracted a fair amount of local political attention, and, correlatively, inner care at Bell too. At Bell work was highly organised, between white-shirt engineers working at neatly arranged desks, all provided with ever-ringing phones and closely surveyed by a project manager sitting in a nearby glass office, and blue-collar technicians assigned their own special space. It was an organisation geared towards productivity. Rouche mentioned for instance the sheer panic and acceleration of work pace, and the frantic checking activities that preceded the visit of prominent American visitors such as Howard Aiken. It is on these grounds of work conditions that he did not appreciate too much that he decided one day to leave, preferring to return to university research. Another of our interviewees abunded on that direction commented on how Rouche disliked the fact to have to smoke outside, among others. If the practice was due to genuine technical concerns for the preservation of the health of electronic circuitry, it was a practice of which modes of enforcement he disliked.

Signing down our note to his widow, I could not help but thinking that his death means the disappearance of someone whose testimony was about Belgian computing history but also about how Bell Telephone Antwerp participated to the broader historical issue of the Americanisation of Belgian society.

So long Monsieur Rouche, and our many thanks indeed for not telling only the story of your 1950s technical work, but also the other tale of how you lived.

[1] Transcript of interview of Nicolas Rouche, 2007/12/03, Belgian Computing History Project, FUNDP, Namur

This photo is a well-known hoax: it was Photoshopped from a bunch of photos and artifacts that had been on exhibit at the  Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The “home computer” control panel in the back is actually the control station for a nuclear-powered submarine, part of an exhibit on subs. The printer in the front is from an old DEC PDP-9 minicomputer. And the gentleman on the left is none other than Harry Huskey, who was beaming as he stood in front of his creation, the Bendix G-15, which at the time was on exhibit.   Nowadays, no one looks at published photos the way we used to.

Next week, the Museum of American History will re-open its doors, after a two-year project to refurbish and rebuild its physical plant. Everyone is excited about this opening, as you might imagine. Among the icons of American history that will be on display will be the restored original Star Spangled Banner, rare Civil War artifacts, and of course Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz.

But no exhibit of historic computers (There will be a virtual exhibit).  No ENIAC, no IAS machine, no Bendix G-15, no Altair, no Microsoft BASIC tape. Those and many other classic artifacts, which are owned by the Smithsonian, will remain in storage.

Ten or 15 years ago, there was talk of a separate wing, perhaps even a separate museum, devoted to computing and its history. What happened? Well, there is the immediate issue of the need for funds to refurbish the physical plant of the building. That was a massive and expensive undertaking. Not much money was left over for exhibits. But I think the real reason is that the history of computing is no longer interesting any more. Another way of putting this is that computers are everywhere, and therefore there aren’t enough places where their physical presence is of interest to the museum visitor. So I don’t blame the museum’s management for that decision at all, as much as it is a personal disappointment to me.

Related to that was a conversation I had with people at MIT Press, the publisher of my book, A History of Modern Computing. That book first appeared ten years ago, and a second edition came out in 2003. It has been a big seller for the Press, and they are interested in a third edition, to keep it current and to retain its value as assigned material for college courses. I am pleased that the book is doing well, and I am flattered that the Press wants a new edition. But how do we write about the recent history of computing? Does anyone care? One thing is certain: the next edition cannot continue the line of hardware developments that I emphasized in the first edition. What can a historian bring to those stories that has not already been covered in the popular press? The social and cultural dimensions of computing are interesting now, not so much the hardware and software. But who can write about that in an intelligent way? What do you think?

A week or so ago, I went to Louvain-la-Neuve catching up with my readings on the economics of technology, especially the writing by Nathan Rosenberg on technological pathways and Tissot and Veyrassat‘s interesting edited volume on technological trajectories. The trip was also the occasion to visit Gilbert Lemaître, nephew of Georges Lemaître, and also one of the pioneers contributing to our research on Belgian Computing History with Marie d’Udekem-Gevers here at the FUNDP. As per usual while meeting pioneers, this trip turned up into some sort of strange close encounter of the third kind, the third kind of self-learnt always-on-the-move computer people that barely do not exist any more.

As I have mentioned, Gilbert Lemaître is Georges Lemaître’s nephew, Georges Lemaître being the astronomer and mathematician who was the topic of my undergraduate dissertation and about whom I have mentioned the love for old-fashioned calculators and the passion for numerical calculational methods. Gilbert Lemaître finished his studies during the 1960s. Then he went to work to the Centre d’Etudes Atomiques et Nucléaires of Mol, a centre in nuclear physics located in Flanders, near Antwerp. He also worked with his uncle, especially at the design of local plotters for the local NCR-Elliott 802. Thereby Gilbert was also led to get involved very closely with modern developments in computing. Previously to his passage in Mol, he had had his uncle Georges Lemaître instructing him to automatic computing machineries, among others the Burroughs E 101 he had at his laboratory during 1958-1962, leading to skills he perfected with the NCR-Elliott 802 that succeeded it. At Mol, he met a Ferranti Mercury, and a few years later, he was working at the Bureau d’Etudes Ordinateurs, a spin-off from the Laboratoire de Recherches MBLE created in 1963 by Vitold Belevitch. His later career took place at the Université Catholique de Louvain, where he was among the firsts to get the grade of ‘informaticien’.

Until here, nothing really odd or unusual about the encounter you will say … The unusual is coming from the actual little nitty gritty details of the meeting. Like many early days computer experts and researchers, Gilbert Lemaître was one of these pioneers who were not told on their first days what their job of everyday was actually going to look like. While working with his uncle on the Burroughs 101 and the NCR-Elliott 802 he was to be led towards discovering the joys of programming on machines sometimes, if not often, ill-equipped. In particular the Burroughs was quite some characterial piece with its pin-board programming area. The NCR-Elliott 802 proved no easier. The firm came out with its own Autocode. Yet local requirements by users soon called in for some intervention at the programming level, and Gilbert Lemaître came out with an adaptation of its own, the Vélocode, nicknamed so because it was faster, and much more efficient, provided you were ready to learn the language; and then you could then play with tens of meters long paper tapes. ‘Funny’ practices did not stop at that. Habits were to listen to the 802 to spot its misbehaviours, and also to get it to ‘sing’ some funny students’ songs such as the “Chant des Wallons” (a bit like when the Manchester Mark I ‘sang’ the “God Save the Queen“). Home-made plotting instruments were to be first first tested with … a smurf. There was some fun on out there thus, and, also advanced scientific work too, with physicists managing pseudo-Monte Carlo simulations on machines barely equipped for transcendental functions.

What the meeting also reminded me of was how early pioneers in computing had no background to locate themselves in a priori… There were little if no curriculum to get in; there were very few preprepared notes and advices to follow on while at doing their job as computing people; programming as foreseen by the computer firm very rarely corresponded to the actual practices that were needed to render the machine useful… As Knuth put it out rightly, computing was about practising a complex ‘art’. These habits are hard-skinned. Gilbert Lemaître, in this dying age of 100s of Gb storage systems, still pulls up with playing at programming carefully and condensely in languages long forgotten, maybe not the PL-1, but the APL for sure, which he explains to you in details for hours alongside some fantastic comments on how his work on APL is informed and shaped by his practice of letting himself learn, a bit like the process of learning as life attitude as it is discussed by Frank Herbert in Dune. Back to my place that night, I had the impression to have time-travelled; the meeting had taken place in a modern house with modern furniture and art pieces on the wall and yet it had been as much surreal as it could, filled with oddities, even for my young ears habituated to computer antics… Computers as artefacts are one thing, I agree on that; yet I cannot help joining in with Mike Mahoney’s comment that the practices of computing ought to be looked at as about people as much as about machines, actually a process of negotiation between machines and practitioners, “both among practitioners about the nature of their practice and between practitioners and the realities of current technologies, often in the shape of non-practioner technicians.”