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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E3 Gets Historical
The annual Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) is where video game companies have congregated since 1995 to show off their forthcoming gadgets and games to the press. It is a bombastic celebration of the latest and greatest, the newest and shiniest. Any attention to the past is, for the most part, uncomfortably out of place there.…
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Filming the History of Computing
Next month, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is screening a new documentary called Something Ventured. To my knowledge, this is the first documentary on the history of computing intended for theaters. Okay, technically it is a history of venture capital, not computing. But the primary focus is on entrepreneurial firms in computing or…
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SIGCIS Photo Galleries
Tom Haigh has begun putting photo galleries from the SIGCIS meetings up on this very site. You may find them here. Thanks to Tom for putting in the work to make this happen. Like any blog post (hint-hint!) these images are open for comment. So if you have a funny story, thoughtful recollection, or just…
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Remembering Mike Mahoney
Tom Haigh’s recent announcement of the completion of his edited volume of Mike Mahoney’s work seems a good time to put down some brief thoughts about the brief time that I knew him. My last meeting with Professor Mahoney (as I called him then, and still think of him) was on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008,…
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Mahoney’s Histories of Computing is published
Earlier this week I received a full set of authors copies of Histories of Computing, the edited works of Michael S. Mahoney on the history of computing. These were shipped from the Trilateral warehouse, which handles Harvard distribution, so I assume the book can now be ordered. I’ll be sure to set aside one or…
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A Light-Hearted Interlude with Clippy
The Atlantic’s James Fallows posted recently on the 10-year anniversary of the demise of Microsoft Office’s “Clippy” (officially the Office Assistant), the cartoon paperclip helper that would pop up to offer advice and suggestions while a user was creating a document. Clippy is nigh-universally mocked and scorned. Yet Microsoft didn’t dominate desktop software for two…
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Frictions in the Cloud, Part 2
Details have finally begun to emerge in the past few days regarding exactly what caused the Amazon cloud-computing-service shutdown. Amazon’s own account is rather dense and chewy, but Ars Technica has provided a more digestible explanation. When one reads this account, it’s apparent that Amazon’s “EC2” (Elastic Compute Cloud) failure is quite unlike some of…
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Movie Night at the Museum
I know I promised more on the cloud; that will come later. Right now I want to plug another excellent resource for the history of computing, the Computer History Museum (CHM)’s YouTube channel. (This plug was inspired by the posting today of a recent talk given at CHM by Paul Allen, discussing his recent memoir.)…
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Frictions in the Cloud
In light of the recent failures of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service, Paul Ceruzzi has pointed out the very grounded reality of the cloud. It all comes down to real data centers in real physical locations that can suffer from real failures. The dream of a seamless, frictionless net of service-based computing, however, is not…
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N-Grams and the History of Computing, Part 2
I was fiddling around some more with n-grams, and I came across a surprising result. So surprising, in fact, that I am deeply suspicious of it. As you can see from the graph, I searched for “radio,” “television,” “computer” from 1920 to 2000. The oddity is the powerful surge of “computer” in the 1950s and…