IT History Society Blog

A couple of weeks ago, Evan Koblentz, president of MARCH, non-profit user group for vintage computer collectors, asked the SIGCIS members‘ opinion as regards to E.C. Berkeley’s paternity of the expression ‘Giant Brains’.

Given his famous eponymous 1949 Giant Brains or Machines that Think, of which typescripted draft was sold out for $ 16,000 at the 2005 Christie’s auction of computing history items, was Berkeley, also the inventor of the Brainiac and of the GENIAC, the first one to come out with the expression? This question led to a quite full discussion on the origin of the term on SIGCIS mailing list. The discussion that ensued expanded on how the brain metaphor as used to refer and comment on computing technologies dated back to the 1930s at the least, to times when computing devices were mechanical. Konrad Zuse, among others, would have come out with the ‘mechanical brain’ analogy as early as 1937 [1].

The discussion reminded me on the pervasiveness of the human dream of, one day, managing to artificially reproduce life itself. This is now the realm and domain of expertise of cyberneticians but was also that of much more ancient engineers, such as Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) well-known for his mechanical digesting duck.

The technologies embodying this dream of mechanising life have evolved over the centuries. Yet, the dream itself has changed remarkably little.  Alike Vaucanson when he was making musicians-automata,  we are  fascinated with all the devices mimicking life processes. Nothing cuter or less attractive than a kid-looking crawling robot.  Nothing scarier than Deep Blue and Deep Fritz (high street price: 55€) computer programmes playing chess better than mathematical geniuses and portent, as in the Matrix, or in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, of the end of unmechanised  life on Earth.

Strangely enough I cannot help but think that this plays a big part in our lives… and – at least -  might somehow relate to Wall-E being celebrated as Best Animated Feature at last night’s Oscars’ ceremony…

This week marks the first anniversary of the IT History blog. When I agreed to write for it, I was not sure it would work–I hardy knew what a blog was (although I did know its history!). Since then, it has been fun, and I plan to keep going.

I still have some reservations, though. Usually when I mention this to my long-time colleagues at the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, they typically say, “Great! Although I’ve never read it.” Or words to that effect. Who has the time to read blogs? Well, obviously some people do, as the statistics on readership have been encouraging.

There have also been the periodic “Blog is Dead” headlines in the press. Those arguments typically say that the blog has been superseded by Facebook, Twitter, and other more immediate venues for a person to vent their ideas. But I am not in this to vent, and neither I nor Sandra feel a need to blog every day telling our readers what we are thinking (or what we had for breakfast, or even more personal details that one finds on Twitter).

Let me go back to that first blog post, which included a photo of Ray Tomlinson and Tim Berners-Lee. Tim used to say that when he helped create the World Wide Web, he hoped that it would become as easy to write to as to read from. The blog fills that need, in ways that Facebook & Twitter do not. It does not mean that you have to write a blog, but you can if you want to.

A more serious critique of the blog is that they’ve turned into bloated, bureaucratic monstrosities, with editorial boards and an obsession with ad revenue and “hits.” Huffington Post and Politico come to mind.  That won’t happen here.

Still, I would welcome a little more feedback. Comments and advice are always welcome. Would you like to see coverage of topics that we don’t cover now? More links? Longer essays? I don’t think I can blog more frequently, but if you really want me to I can try.

But I’ll draw the line on what I had for breakfast.

A colleague joked up with me the other day on how rapid the development of ICT unravels… And it indeed does. This 22nd of January was the 25th anniversary of the MAC, born in 1984, just a few years after the PC, 1981, and accompanied by a fantastic advert by Ridley Scott. As useful as they are to map out history, I am however no fan of such anniversaries, dates and chronologies. Somehow, my feeling is that these chronologies do not matter so much for us. What matters rather is the moment these machines and technical developments entered our lives. And this seems to apply to computer pioneers too.

For instance, when chatting with Gilbert Natan and his colleagues of the Bull Museum at Grimbergen in the suburbs of Brussels, at visiting their PC section and especially their mecanography section, one is stuck by how what matters are less the machines per se but rather that these have a history. There is the traditional history of their design, and production, for sure. There is also, as, if not more importantly, that of their recovery, cleaning, and, in some lucky cases, repair, for instance as with the Trad 80. In the case of all the mecanographic equipement Natan and his colleagues managed to repair and bring back to life, what matters is less the ‘historical’ machines, than these machines they know inside out and that they used to repair back in the 1970s for Belgian ministries and insurance companies.

On that same note, Natan could not help but lament on how annoyed he was at not knowing where the first Belgian PC, a machine produced 2 or 3 years later in Belgium, had disappeared after IBM Belgium scrapped their computer exhibit at the Galerie Anspach in central Brussels. Worst, the machine had probably been scrapped off… Life plays us these games. Well not always. While on a visit to the Maison de la Métallurgie de Liège, we found that IBM PC of the Galerie Anspach throning discreetly against one of the walls of their computing history room … Time for a quick phone call to Gilbert Natan.