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November 3, 2008
Close Encounter of the Third Kind with a Trained-by-Fun 'Informaticien'
A week or so ago, I went to Louvain-la-Neuve catching up with my readings on the economics of technology, especially the writing by Nathan Rosenberg on technological pathways and Tissot and Veyrassat's interesting edited volume on technological trajectories. The trip was also the occasion to visit...
September 25, 2008
The Interface Strikes Back
Recently I bought a new laptop. Since then, I have been in heavenly misery. Pre-new machine, my life was simple. My machine being about five years old, I lacked the basic technology for a survival in this hyper up-to-date current age. Although most up-to-date when I got it - I was one of the rare...
September 23, 2008
Not Quite Machu Picchu, but Close.
I have a close relative who’s traveled the world. She’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. She rode on a dilapidated bus through the Khyber Pass, on her way to India along the famous “Hippie Trail." She visited Machu Picchu and taught at a school in East Africa. Even though my work involves travel, I am an...
September 8, 2008
Towards Geek Polities?
The other day, after being asked to contribute as a tutor for freshers, I had a nosey sneak through the faculty freshers' handbook. Besides being filled with answers to freshers' refreshingly naive and silly questions, this handbook struck me by its constant referring to computing: procedures to be...
July 23, 2008
Music
All three of my kids have iPods. One of them has a model that holds 10,000 songs. If each song were, on average, about three minutes long, it would take two months to get through them all, if you listened to the gadget for 8 hours a day. What’s the point? At the dawn of the Information Age, a...
July 10, 2008
Introduction: Hazards of life…
Maybe this post ought to have come first before my comment on the Three Societies Meeting just up the blog. Still as it was more about me I have preferred leaving it out as second. I hope not being murdered for that. I am Sandra Mols, young researcher on an interdisciplinary project with Marie...
July 10, 2008
A few historians of computing among lots of historians of science
When recently I got contacted about the opportunity to contribute to this blog, I thought as a first post to report on the panels on the history of computing of the 6th Three Societies Meeting . This joint meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, the History of Science Society and...
July 2, 2008
LEO was the first WHAT?
The first business computer. The first Systems Analyst. As a curator, I always demur when asked "what was the first....?" There's no end to it, and technology does not proceed that way. A new technology does not suddenly appear in fully functional form; it "eases up" to functionality. At some point...
June 27, 2008
SAGE and the Origins of Modern Computing
An old, rare IBM film about SAGE recently surfaced on YouTube -- what a fantastic resource that web site is. The film brought back many discussions I've had with my colleagues about the place of SAGE in the history of computing. Paul Edwards saw SAGE as the centerpiece of the "Closed World" of...
June 18, 2008
Two Dispatches from the U.K.
Despite my dissertation research on Konrad Zuse, I've been accused of a bias toward the American side of computer history. Here are a couple of news items from the U.K. that may offset that. The first concerns what may be the first recording of music generated by a computer--the Manchester "Baby,"...
June 13, 2008
Moore's Law Again, and a (Possibly) Naked Emperor
In an earlier post (March 20), I discussed Moore’s Law and its relation to the history of computing. Once again I feel compelled to return to the topic—this time, to discuss its impact, not on computer science and technology, but on its historians. Put simply, historians of technology, including...
May 21, 2008
History of Computing — the View from Montana
In an earlier post I mentioned the American Computer Museum of Bozeman, Montana. You can look at its web site for details. Now that the weather is getting warm, it is time for all of us who are interested in computing history to figure out a way to get to Bozeman and see it. You don't really need...