IT History Society Blog

As of this morning, the LHC is shut down again. By now you’ve probably heard the reason being floated: the LHC is so powerful it reaches into the future. There, some entity recognizes that generating such energies by Earthlings is dangerous, given our level of expertise. So he or she or it travels back in time periodically to shut the machine down.

What will computers of the future be like? Will they have consciousness, and will they surpass us as the next species? This has been the subject of some current research I am doing (not AI research but the history of this idea). Hard to believe, but it has been over 40 years since “HAL,” the computer that was the central character of 2001, a Space Odyssey, appeared. We forget that many believed in all seriousness that, with computing advancing as rapidly as it was back then, such a machine was not far off. Perhaps not by 2001, but certainly by now. In spite of 40 years of Moore’s Law, and countless other advances in computing, we still don’t have HAL. Maybe that’s a good thing, but will a real HAL ever arrive?

I hope the LHC gets its bugs worked out, and maybe it will help give us an answer.

I am at work now, about to go home. But according to this news flash from local radio station WTOP, I may have a difficult commute. It seems that the computer controlling traffic signals in Montomery County,Maryland, has failed, and traffic signals are not being synchronized. Traffic in suburban DC is chaotic anyway, so a glitch like this is not good.

According to the report, the computer is a “Data General main frame” [sic]. Now there’s a name I had not heard in a while. That company was a spin-off from DEC, about which I blogged a few weeks ago.  They were located a few miles from the Mill, DEC’s headquarters.  Most of know Data General from the book by Tracy Kidder–still one of the best books ever written about computing. Was this Data General Eclipse the “main frame” whose creation Kidder chronicled so well? Could be. Any computer that served as such a workhorse for so many years must be pretty good.  Data General alumni can hold their heads up high.

David Grier, former Editor of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, once wrote of a  “great machine” theory of history. I would not put the Eclipse on that list. But the Data General Nova, on which the Eclipse was based–now there was a computer! Let us raise a glass to DEC, Data General, and the fantastic engineering that came out of the Massachusetts woods.

A recent news item from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View informs us of the latest that Gordon Bell is up to. It’s a project called “MyLifeBits,” and is the subject of a new book, Total Recall, by Bell and Jim Gemmell.  For a description, I quote from an e-mail sent to me by Alan Weissberger, who has sent us information on the CHM several times so far:

“For more than a decade, Gordon Bell- the principal researcher at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus- has digitally archived every aspect of his life. Conversations, phone calls, photos, CDs, articles, home videos, e-mail — every piece of data Bell has created or consumed has been squirreled away into a database. In effect, he has offloaded the past 11 years of his life into a comprehensive electronic memory bank. This effort was the genesis of the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research.

His decade-long data dump has convinced Bell that the frailty of bio-memory — what everyone else has to work with — is about to become a thing of the past. He claims we are about to usher in an era where your every moment is recorded.  Will we be able to find the signal (important and relevent information) through the noise (of extraneous recorded information)?  That remains to be seen.”

Weissberger is not as sanguine about the idea as Bell is, and I suggest you  contact him directly <aweissberger@sbcglobal.net> about that, or follow the blog at the above link.  I do not feel so comfortable with the project either, but what should I do? Looking at Silicon Valley from the East Coast, my principal observation about what goes on in the Valley is a simple one:  if it can be done, someone out there will do it.

I have had the great pleasure of having known Gordon for many years. He has been a great supporter of history. He is also one of the top computer engineers, whose innovations in computer architecture are found in the desktop and laptop machines we all use every day. The photo of Bell (he’s wearing the sports jacket) shows his team at the Digital Equipment Corporation’s  Maynard, Mass. plant — the “Mill”– at the unveiling of the PDP-6, around 1964. I remember Katie Hafner calling me one day and asking me what I thought was the most influential computer ever built, and I replied without a moment’s hesitation, this one. Why? I’ll save that for a future post.

Good Luck, Gordon.

P.S.: Here is a link to a YouTube video of Gordon explaining his work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gWEUA47Q4g

U.K.. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued a sincere apology for the way Alan Turing was treated by his country, leading to his suicide in 1954. Brown correctly states that you cannot turn back the clock and undo a past mistake. But have a look at his statement, which you can find here.

This story has wider implications. After World War II, Britain stood on the verge of dominating the post-war, high-tech economy. They built the world’s first electronic computers–at least 10 Colossus machines! They pioneered in the commercialization of computers, with the LEO. They pioneered in radar, with the invention of the cavity magnetron. They flew one of the first jet-propelled aircraft. They first described the workings of the DNA molecule–the basis for the modern biotech industry. But the U.K. did not gain the prosperity that should have gone along with that leadership in science and technology. A lesson for the U.S.?

Sandra talked about a meeting in Budapest, which had an significant IT History component. Here’s another: the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, to be held this year in Pittsburgh, October 15-19. The program lists several papers and sessions that you will find of interest, including a paper that I am giving (session #37) on LISP and the Space Program (trust me).

(The logo was designed for the 2007-2008 50th anniversary of the Society & its journal.)

But wait, there’s more! The Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society will have its own supplemental program, on Sunday, October 18. Lots of interesting papers there, too. And the SIG will continue its long tradition of an informal lunch on Friday, October 16, where we can meet new folks and reconnect with old friends and colleagues.

See you there.