IT History Society Blog

As mentioned earlier, the local FUNDP is one of the locations of the Printemps des Sciences of this WE and of the Semaine du Numérique. As such, I have spent some time during the last few days collecting together some machines and items interesting to show to children and teenagers at our Back to the Future activity stand. This has been quite fun exercise for me. Especially so as we have just inherited some quite fantastic pieces here, thanks to the generosity of Philippe Duvieusart. Now, retired, Duvieusart was a banker and, also, constant observer of the evolution of computing, for administrative and, also, more entertainment purposes.

Among others, we have inherited a complete Sinclair ZX81, from 1981 or 1982, in its original packaging. This came in accompanied by all kinds of users’ manuals, some published by the  England-based National ZX80 and ZX81 Users’ Club, for instance an exemplar of the January 1982 34 Amazing Games for the 1K ZX81 by Alastair Gourlay.

The best piece we collected for me was somehow a lot  more obsolete. It is a Curta calculator, type I, in a perfect state of preservation, and accompanied by its protective envelop. This was a discovery for me. The size of and shape of a pepper grinder, but comparatively much heavier, this mechanical calculator, I have been told, was still widely in use well into the 1970s. It was the accountancy Pickett slide rule of the bank clerk, if we believe Philippe Duvieusart.

The machine itself is a fascinating combination of mechanisms any engineer or tool-kit enthusiast would happily play with for days, deconstructing, reconstructing, testing up the mechanisms thereof. From a more computing history point of view, if we could find an elder bank clerk to show us how to use it, and implement some of the rather gruesome users’ manuals available on-line, this could get us a good video of how much computig has indeed changed ever since …. not so long ago.

Usually I don’t reprint items verbatim from another source, but I’ll make an exception in this case. The ACM (founded as the “Eastern Association for Computing Machinery”) held its first meeting in New York in September, 1947. Among the founders was Edmund C. Berkeley, who handled much of the administrative work in the early years. Among the many societies devoted to computing, the ACM holds a special place. I hope to say more about it in a later post, including what I learned about the ACM the day I spent with Berkeley rummaging through his Newton, Massachusetts basement.

For now I will relay an announcement of a fellowship the Association is sponsoring. I look forward to the history that will be produced as a result:

ACM History Committee
Short-term Fellowships in ACM History

The Association for Computing Machinery, founded in 1947, is the oldest and largest educational and scientific society dedicated to the computing profession, and today has members in more than 100 countries. To encourage historical research, the ACM History Committee announces a new program of short-term fellowships in ACM history. This year we plan to make up to two $2,500 awards to support historical research on the wide variety of ACM related activities, including ACM members, officers, and prize winners, as well as ACM as an organization. Successful candidates may be of any rank, from graduate students through senior researchers.

To Apply: Applicants should send 2-page CV as well as a 750-word project description that [a] describes the proposed research project; [b] identifies the importance of specific ACM historical materials, whether traditional archival collections or online historical materials (oral histories, digitized conference papers, ACM organizational records, et al.); and [c] discusses the project’s planned outcome (e.g. conference paper, journal article, book or dissertation chapter, teaching resource, museum exhibit, etc.).

In preparing a proposal, applicants should examine the extensive list of ACM historical resources posted at . Other research materials relating to ACM’s rich history may also be used. Applications should include a letter of endorsement from their home department or institution.

Proposals are due by 30 April 2009. Proposals should be submitted as .pdf documents to .

Proposals are due by 30 April 2009. Proposals should be submitted as .pdf documents to <history-webmaster@acm.org>. Notification of awards will be made within six weeks.

As part of a search for material for an animation for the local popular science festival, I went back looking out for videos and films usable for computing history. Returning, hopeful, to the on-line prelinger Internet Archive, three videos emerged out, one was On Guard! The Story of SAGE, a film commissioned by the IBM Military Products Division in 1956 and promoting the SAGE air defence system.  The others were parts 1 and 2 of Logic by Machine: The Computer and the Mind of Man, a documentary by National Educational Television, dating back to the late 1950s-early 1960s expanding on how computing, especially the combination between high-speed programmable computing machines and intelligent thoughtful instruction devising was crucially to assist mankind’s mastery of nature.

On Guard! The Story of SAGE was pretty much what I expected of it: a straightforward popularising filmed narrative telling out on the efficacy and preventive virtues of the SAGE computerised air defense systems in times of Cold War and under risk of nuclear retaliation. It starts with a group of kids going to school and planes passing by in the skies above and finishes with shots of one of the girls among these kids sleeping looked at lovingly by her parents. Throughout the narrative brings you back and forth between planes, rockets, and computers, mainframes and miniaturised ones, displayed as crucial and necessary tools for the better safety of American souls. The whole thing is accompanied by musics and tunes fit to the theme: accelerating and ‘technologically’ sounding for rockets and aircrafts, sweet and peaceful for the family and children-based scenes.

By contrast, maybe it is because I am too cynical, Logic by Machine: The Computer and the Mind of Man came out as a surprise to me. I was expecting a propaganda movie on the potential marvelling artificial soul-making capabilities of electronic computing and cybernetics. Instead I got to a quite balanced account of what computers can, and can’t do, to borrow here a wording from Dreyfus’s What Computers Can’t Do. The film is permeated with a sense of marvelling at the technological accelerations and empowerment made possible thanks to electronic computers’ speed. Still the way it is framed out also constantly re-emphasised the importance of keeping one’s feet grounded. However marvellous, this may seem, it also ultimately rests with people and human users and programmers to get the best or the worst out of the machines. Especially the experts called in for the show, among whom Richard Hamming (1915-1998), quite push up the idea that  human creativity and ability to programme and frame instructions and machine orders are THE key element to seemingly computer-usage induced novelty and discoveries. How weird how filmed displays of computing can differ and contrast…

On a more funny note, somehow I wonder what to make as regards to critical analysis of narrative of Steven Wozniak, Apple co-founder, currently participating to the ballroom blitz of Dancing with the Stars. Besides the fact that he might survive on the show thanks to computer nerds and hackers’ support, I’ll be most interested in the kind of analytical exploration media studies will make of his more or less long-lasting participation and of its social and cultural meaning.

A recent news article had fun with Bill Gates, when reporters learned that he did not allow his kids or wife Melinda to have an iPod or iPhone. The nerve of that guy!

I think Bill was following an old (well, age is relative) principle in use at Microsoft, and one that has been critical to its success. It is not really a secret, as it has been well-documented and described, especially in Gregg Zachary’s excellent book, Showstopper: the Breakneck Pace to Crreate Windows NT and the Next generation at Microsoft.  Zachary describes it by a colorful name: “eating your own dog food.” It means you use the product, in whatever primitive state it may be, to develop what you hope eventually to sell to the consumer.  Another way of putting it is that if the product is so bad (i.e. tastes like dog food) that you’d rather use something else, then why do you think anyone else is going to buy it? In Zachary’s book, the product was Windows NT, which the programmers were forced to use as they brought it up out of the silicon. NT became the basis for the very successful later iterations of Windows. (By the way, it was a descendant of an OS developed for the DEC Vax, but that’s another story.)

I had seen this in action well before Microsoft adopted it. In the early 1980s I toured a Texas Instruments caculator assembly line, which was being controled by an array of TI 99/4 8-bit computers. I couldn’t believe it — that computer was fairly primitive by most standards, yet there it was. As I’ve discussed before, TI won the calculator wars for high schools  (although my son’s chem teacher secretly uses an HP). So TI is doing something right.

There has been a lot in the news lately about Microsoft stumbling, especially missing the Web 2.0 revolution. Maybe so, but I would not count them out. When the Asus eee “netbook” came out, people noted that it used Linux, not Wndows. Open Source triumphant! But the latest figures show Windows XP with about an 80% share on netbooks. I don’t own an iPod or whatever Microsoft products are supposed to compete with it, so I don’t know whether Bill is subjecting his family to cruel punishment. But I know why he’s doing it.