Founded in the mid-1980s, SIGCIS is the leading international group for historians with an interest in the history of information technology and its applications. Our primary activities include meetings held in connection with our parent society, the Society for the History of Technology; and a range of online resources hosted from this website.
Recent News
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N-Grams and the History of Computing
As I’m sure most of you know, late least year Google announced a new research tool known as the Ngram Viewer. (An n-gram is any sequence of items–in this case words–of length n; so a 2-gram would be any word pair). The tool was released in conjunction with the publication of a paper in Science…
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Paul Baran’s Passing
Polish-born engineerPaul Baran died this week in Palo Alto, at age 84. [Aside: the number of important figures in the history of computing who were born to Jewish families in Eastern Europe before World War II and later emigrated to the U.S. is quite astounding; computing must rival physics in this regard.] He is best…
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The Latest Synthesis
Ars Technica has posted the last of three articles adapted from Johnny Ryan’s recent book, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (Here are the first and second.) Ryan’s main thesis is that the Internet represents the victory of “centrifgual” systems over “centripetal” ones. I can’t endorse this material as great history. Most…
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There and Back Again
The recent announcement of a planned merger between AT&T and T-Mobile here in the U.S. led me to compile a (rough and partial) time-line of recent mergers in the telecommunications industry (or at least a big chunk of it – I’ve ignored the cable industry, for example). I justify my undertaking of this little project…
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From the Horse’s Mouth
I’m pleased to share with the SIGCIS community a resource on Internet history that I was totally unaware of until a friend of mine sent me the link a couple of weeks ago: an oral history of the Internet compiled and edited by Vanity Fair magazine. It begins (as many Internet histories do) with packet-switching…
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The Root of the Problem
An interesting story appeared recently from Nancy Scola at The Atlantic on a little-known event in Internet history (yes, it was only 14 years ago, but in Internet Time, history started yesterday!) Scola recounts the tale of Eugene Kashpureff and “AlterNIC.” Annoyed by the dominance of the Internet by Establishment types, Kashpureff created an an…
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When Computer Dating Was Mail Order
Atlantic blogger John Hendel reports on the phenomenon of computer dating in the 1960s. These services operated by comparing questionnaires that would-be romancers submitted by mail, returning a list of potential matches some days or weeks later (in a similar fashion to job-matching systems of the era). I’ve had the computer dating craze of the…
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Watson and AI: Does Mind Matter?
The upcoming televised matches between IBM’s Watson and Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter seems like a good time to reflect on the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field. The initial intent of “AI”, as defined by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathan Rochester and Claude Shannon in their proposal for the seminal…
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A Tribute to Ken Olsen
Paul Ceruzzi has pointed the mailing list to this video, commemorating the life of Digital Equipment founder Ken Olsen, who died on Sunday. (See also the discussion onSlashdot and the New York Times obituary). Please feel free to use the comments section to discuss Olsen’s life and role in the history of computing.
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King Knuth
The latest discussion on the SIGCIS mailing list surrounded the impending release of a new volume (or sub-volume, rather) in Donald Knuth’s computer science masterwork, The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 4A is now in print from Addison-Wesley. Paul Ceruzzi announced this development earlier today: (See also Paul’s own post on the matter at the…