IT History Society

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...

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...

By now you've all heard about the Microsoft Zune bug that was caused by its software having difficulty dealing with a leap year. On at least one other post I talked about the problems the Gregorian calendar gives computer programmers (actually it was Church officials, which is sort of the same thing). We need calendar reform now! Make every month...

While in the just-over hectic fortnight spent at pre-preparing for a project proposal with the FNRS, the Belgian funding agency for scientific research, I got the sad news that Nicolas Rouche , one of the Belgian pioneers who had helped our research on the Machine Mathématique IRSIA-FNRS had died unexpectedly on the 18th of November 2008. During most of his...

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 Gilbert Lemaître , nephew of Georges Lemaître , and also one of the...

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 persons to use Windows XP...

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 armchair traveler, not an...

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 performed by e-mail, documents to download from the uni intranet, etc. There...

All three of my kids have I-Pods. One of them has a model that holds 10,000 songs. If each song were, on average, about three minutes long, it would 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 professor of mine...

Maybe this post ought 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 d'Udekem-Gevers on Belgian computing history at the...