IT History Society Blog

Last week Palm introduced a new smartphone, designed to compete with Apple’s  iPhone.  It is an amazing device, with all sorts of features that you could hardly imagine could fit on something that small.

But there’s a price–and it is a lot more than the retail price of the phone. In coming out with the new phone, Palm abandoned its original Operating System. Applications written for the old Palm OS won’t work on the new phone. This sort of thing happens all the time, but in this instance, something profound has been lost. The original Palm OS was one of the few examples of a design that hit the sweet spot of being “as simple as possible, as complicated as necessary.”  It embodied most, if not all, of MIT researcher John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity. 

* It worked.

* The calendar and address book applications were straightforward & easy to use.

* It seldom, if ever, crashed.

* The device came on instantly.

* You could switch from one application to another instantly, without losing data.

* When you were done using it, you turned off the power, and it turned off instantly, without losing anything.

How many other pieces of software can you say that about? Why can’t we have more of these? Maeda’s book is but one of many that talk about the value of simplicity in design, but developers seem to read them, nod in agreement, then go on building baroque, cumbersome, buggy, crash-prone software. In discussions on this topic, people talk about the pressures of the market place, the demands of the consumer for more features, whether they ever use them or not.

This may have been the fate of Hewlett-Packard, which abandoned its wonderful line of RPN calculators and gone over to the dark side, namely calculators with (the horror!) parentheses. Fortunately I was able to stash up on a couple of the original RPN machines, which ought to last me into my grave. But I can’t do that with the Palm, as it depends on desktop software that it can synch with. So, unless I keep my current desktop forever — not likely — the time will soon come when the old Palms won’t synch.

Goodbye Columbus; Goodbye, Reverse Polish Notation; Goodbye Palm.

The Amsterdam Appropriating America conference promised to be a quite interesting meeting and indeed it turned out so. Sessions indeed were most interesting with talks and informal discussions on Cold War politics, on Europeans learned out to love Coca Cola and Americans Perrier sparkling water, how the Italian car industry was comparing itself with Soviet developments, etc. The sessions on computing were plenty too. Altogether there were about15 papers touching at computer issues, leading out to some quite fruitful reflections on how America shaped european perceptions on how they should deal with computing issues as regards to design,  politics, use, industry etc.

An unexpected important highlight of the conference for me, however, was the discovery – during one of the Friday afternoon Sound and Vision workshops – of a 10-minutes cartoon produced by IBM to show off at the Brussels 1958 World Fair. As I discovered last night while watching it again, the cartoon is a production of Charles and Ray Eames, known in the computing history community among others for their 1973 A Computer perspective.

This little piece is a marvel of propaganda of computing as embodiment of modernity, showing how numbers and rationalisation by computer use were a dream at last come true. I here add some  snapshots of the cartoon. However the best fun is definitely with watching it…

January 20th: “St. Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”

That was how John Keats described January 20th, the day before the feast of St. Agnes, which traditionally is considered to be the coldest day of the year. The Weather Channel agrees, although it is hard to get to the data from their web site. Anyway, it was cold. I’m standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where we could watch the proceedings on a Jumbotron. The Lincoln Memorial was pretty far away from the Capitol, where the swearing-in took place, but it was a close as we could get, and it turned out to be a very good place to be after all.

 The inauguration of a new president was moved back from March 4th to avoid a lengthy and unproductive session of Congress with a  ”lame duck” president, but did they have to move it to January 20th? Anyway, I was glad to be there. It was definitely a moving experience, no matter who you supported during the election. My wife, teenage son, and I rode our bikes–a bit cold but better than the crowds of the Metro, and driving was strongly discouraged.

This has nothing to do with IT History, but that’s where I was. The new president has assembled a group of people with a lot of scientific and technical credentials to be his advisers and in his cabinet. We’ll see. It seems like IT has been one of the few segments of the economy that has been doing its job and contributing to the economy lately, although it is not blameless.

That famous phrase is from the essay “Self Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. And here’s another one, from Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

Quoting them should make me feel good, but it doesn’t.  After posting here about the modern day Tower of Babel, and how as a result I would never join Facebook, I joined Facebook.

 Anyway, Emerson & Whitman notwithstanding, I made a mistake. Sometimes Whitman, and especially Emerson, got it wrong.  After only a few days, I already have over 50 “friends”–more than I ever had in my life.  Steven King once wrote that you never have friendships that are as real as the ones you had in high school.  Facebook is an attempt to get back to that time. But it fails–anyway, it doesn’t work for me, sorry. But I will continue to go to it.  Worse:  I am now addicted to it–I go there every day, sometimes several times a day.  Meanwhile, my Linkedin, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and mySpace accounts lie fallow. Facebook, you win.

Next week, the Inventing Europe Appropriating America meeting is going to be held in Amsterdam. This meeting is devoted to the exploration and discussing of appropriation issues in the history of technology in Europe. The programme is quite broad in scope, the themes covered ranging from food to housing and leisure history, to the history of the Marshall Plan, of electricity and telecommunications networks, of EC policies in technologies. Specific topics covered range from soft drinks, Coca Cola but also Perrier spakling water, sunbathing and holidays, kitchen architecture, shopping malls, Fordism, American radios in Europe, political visits by Khrutshev to the US, etc.

Quite unsurprisingly, computing is going to be well covered in the conference, with papers on computer networks in 1970s France (Schafer), on the Algol effort (Nofre), 1960s US views on the computing world (Haigh), IBM in Europe (Paju), on the history of the IFIP (Tatarchenko), the PC in the NL on the 1980s-1990s (Veraart), on Bull-GE and Honeywell-Bull (Mounier-Kuhn), BTM, IBM, Burroughs and the advent of the computer industry (Yost), the post-war automation debate and the technical productivity assistance (Schlombs), Americanisation and Sovietisation issues in the Czech Republic and the DDR (Durnova, Donig), cybernetics in the GDR (Aumann), EC Commission policy-makers in IT (Van Laer), and on Bell and early Belgian computing. With the format of the conference being that of a pre-circulated papers event, the meeting promises to lead to quite fruitful and in-depth discussions. Not to forget, too, some special sessions led by David Nye, David Ellwood, Andreas Fickers and Gerard Alberts. Other panel sessions also include broader discussions on the debate between the so-salled ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ features and characteristics of the processes of the Americanisation of Europe.

All in all it looks like this meetingis going to be a very good New Year present to those who will attend.

Bonne année!