IT History Society Blog

The photo, of a “Great Day in Harlem,“  was taken by Art Kane, a freelance photographer in the summer of 1958. Assembled on a Harlem sidewalk are 57 of the most creative and innovative jazz musicians the world had ever seen. The photo was published in Esquire magazine in January, 1959, and later became the basis for a 1994 Academy-Award winning documentary of the same title. We may never see a day like that again. Until….

The second photo is of a group of computer pioneers assembled at Yellowstone National Park, in April 1997. In the photo are: Chuan Chu & Arthur Burks, who worked on the ENIAC, Eldon Hall, developer of the Apollo Guidance Computer, Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff, developers of the microprocessor, Jerry Merryman and James van Tassel, inventors of the hand-held electronic calculator, and Jack Kilby, co-inventor of the Integrated Circuit (later winner of the Nobel Prize in physics).

Not sure, but I may have taken the picture. If I made a mistake identifying these folks, let me know. My memory is not what it used to be.

Anyway, a great day at Yellowstone.

Yesterday was our faculty annual dinner of cougnoux and hot chocolate, an occasion for the mixing up of all , that is the many computer science and informatics researchers of the faculty and of the few of us working in the humanities at the CITA technology assessment unit. At some point, these dinners and social occasions always turn out to be quite kind of odd things if you are no computer scientist or informatician, for conversations always somehow turn around detailed technical issues, say on programming in JAVA, on databases technologies, on numerical analysis, on information systems, on multimedia technology, on security issues in computer networks, on the why and how the death of the internet in a soon-to-come future, etc., etc.

As researcher in the humanities, you sometimes feel ill at ease, for if trying to get on with socialising you are faced up with the risk of losing track when conversations almost naturally turn to technical issues. And you are often  ashamed somehow with having to ask for explanations noone else needs but you. Also your usual cover-up socially concerned or socio-constructivist babble does not play in these environments either… Speaking of the weather is fine, until the point when you risk commenting on the accuracy of weather prediction techniques, all computerised and numerical … Speaking about shoppping for Christmas is a risk of seeing the conversation turn into a discussion on the algorithmically-enhanced popularity of the many on-line shopping websites you do not know about and wherefrom buy your presents. Briefly, you feel like the retarded luddites who ended up accidentally being members of technically well-informed social group. Indeed, unlike in the times of C. P. Snow, have little ways of trying to get their message and approach through conversations and socialising. These are conversations that indeed reflect the ever recurring gulf and difficulties of communication between the humanities and the so-called hard sciences. You face the nerd-vs.-non-geek social divide.

Yet things are not so bad though…. Providing a bit of patience, and acknowledgement of your lack of updated knowledge, and inherent technical ignorance, you might end up having quite some fun when raising up issues you dealt with while purchasing your latest machine, or trying to deal with the charaterial stubborn weaknesses and dumbness of your old one… One may not know what RAM stands for and yet, after a bit of rephrasing as ‘mémoire vive’ (active memory unit), one can get along with a discussion on what matters technically when using a computer. On another hand, your colleague or computer technician has some fun at telling out some of his many stories of his irritation and frustration when computers do not work for him either, and be a bit less hard on you when you call him for a repair. This being said, I wonder where Father Christmas belongs here? Is a Luddite or a computer scientist and informatician?  Let just hope he is both…

A little over 11 years ago, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began posting information about the impending landing of its Mars Pathfinder on the Red planet. An example of the “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy of spacecraft design, the Pathfinder used air bags, not rockets, to cushion its landing, and it was accompanied by a diminutive rover “Sojourner,” named after “Sojourner Truth,” an African American abolitionist and champion of women’s rights, who lived during the Civil War era.

The mission was a success. The toaster-oven-sized Sojourner sauntered over the alien world and sent back a wealth of images and data. And the web “hits” were staggering. The Internet struggled to handle the traffic, but it came through in a spectacular fashion. The mission came at a critical time. American households were getting connected to the Internet through slow dial-up connections. But people at work were getting higher-speed connections that allowed the viewing of these spectacular images from Mars. With the images coming from NASA, there was little complaint from employers that their Internet connections were being misused. JPL publicized the Web access and set up a number of “mirror” sites to handle the traffic. Naming the rover after Sojourner Truth didn’t hurt, either. That event marked the beginning of the Internet as a the Global Village’s public forum.

Yesterday (December 16, 2008), it happened again. An event was recorded on video, and almost instantly passed around the world. The Web, now several orders of magnitude larger, was once again strained to its capacity to handle the traffic. There were a few differences, however. This time it was not the results of a NASA mission, but the news of an angry journalist throwing his shoes at the President of the United States. And this time it was not the simple video of the event, but rather “mash-ups” of it combined with footage from “The Matrix,” the “Three Stooges,” “World of Warcraft,” “Austin Powers,” a hunt-the-duck game, and a lot of other video games that my kids know about, but I never heard of. Everyone who saw these mash-ups immediately copied the links and sent out mass e-mails to their colleagues, telling them they simply had to drop whatever they were doing and see this. The Internet groaned under the traffic but held up, just barely.

I took a quick look at work, but waited until I got home to spend time on this. I could have used my office connection, but, hey, I’ve got fiber-optic cable into my house, now, so I can handle video (even on an old laptop). Anyway, if the Pathfinder mission marked the coming of age of the public Internet, what was this?

(The quote is from the late Alan Perlis, #74 of his “Epigrams on Programming“).

I was recently asked for some advice on how best to present the history of software in the Computer History Museum’s timeline of computer history exhibit. I haven’t visited that facility for a while, but based on what I know of the people who work there, I am sure they are doing an excellent job. Telling the history of software – whether it be in a museum exhibit, book, or research paper – in not easy. Why? I wrote a little bit about this in my book, A History of Modern Computing. Although I devoted a chapter (Chapter Three) on the early history of software, several of the reviews  on Amazon.com were critical of the book because it didn’t deal with software!  Why did they feel that way, after I had devoted what I thought was a lot of space to the topic?

The problem begins with the definition. If software is the set of procedures by which one operates machinery, then it is as old as machinery itself. How to get a boat through a canal lock, for example. I’ve watched the National Park Service pass a boat through a lock of the C&O Canal in Washington, D.C., and it is a very complex algorithm that has to be executed precisely, or else the boat won’t go through the lock. But that is too broad a definition. Knuth would probably begin software with the calculation of the date of Easter – The first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21. Not an easy calculation at any time. Knuth says “There are many indications that the sole important application of arithmetic in Europe during the Middle Ages was the calculation of the Easter date…”(Art of Computer Programming, vol. 1, pp. 155-156).

Last spring I noticed that although the New Testament story of Easter is clearly associated with the celebration of Passover, in 2008 Easter was on March 23, while Passover was on April 19-20. What would a software engineer say about this? I was told (by a Unitarian!) that the discrepancy had to do with the difference between “March 21” and “the spring equinox.” So it is a specification problem.

Or at least that is what I think Perlis would have said.

One more thing. As a museum curator, I find it almost impossible to show software in a museum. By definition it is everything that is not hard, so where are the artifacts?