IT History Society

Hello everyone. I'm honoured to have been invited to be an occasional contributor to this stimulating and important blog. I hope you enjoy my contributions and find them relevant to your interests. A bit about me. I'm a writer and Research Professor of New Media in the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. My first novel...

In a couple of months a book entitled Science Fiction and Computing , edited by David Ferro and Eric Swedin will appear. I contribute an essay about the relationship between Artificial Intelligence research and AI's portrayal in science fiction, especially "HAL" in the Kubrick film 2001: a Space Odyssey . In my paper I argue that the reality of AI...

Today, January 25th 2011, marks the first anniversary of Herb Grosch's death . I was fortunate to have many chances to meet and talk with Herb Grosch over the course of my Graduate work. When I first met him Herb had just arrived at Toronto from Nevada and various other places. One of his first pieces of advice upon meeting...

The 25th anniversary of Invention & Technology (from American Heritage) is marked by a list of the “top twenty five revolutionary inventions in the United States.” At least that is how it’s reported by IT economist (and sometime historian) Shane Greenstein in his blog, Virulent Word of Mouse. (I was unable to find the article for free on the website.)...

A while ago I mentioned a book I was reading called The Laws of Simplicity , by John Maeda. Forgive me if I return to this topic, but it seems too important to ignore. With all the fuss about the products coming from Apple, and the Amazon Kindle, it is time to revisit the topic. I have resisted getting any...

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...

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...

Tuesday morning. Guardian read of the day... And a shocking news - for me: Kodak is taking its 'Kodachrome' product range off the market . Kodak's decision is quite understandable. That type of film, which most of those among us below 30 do not really remember, does not sell any more with the rise of ever better equipment and tools...

A quick glance at the calendar reminded me the other day that my family birthdays' season is starting up in as every year... This got me to think about the computing birthdays passed during the last decade or so... A quick stroll on-line and so we have had so far, at least, those of: - the transistor , born 1948,...

By now you have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting down its Geocities site. There has been a lot of coverage in the press about this, usually relating to two themes. The first is that it illustrates the worst of the dot.com bubble, as Yahoo! bought Geocities for way too much money, at the height of the bubble, and then...