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In a recent blog post, The Betrayel of the Internet Imaginaire, SIGCIS Chair Elect Andy Russell offers a fresh perspective on Snowden, the NSA, and Internet politics. Drawing insight from historical and social studies of technology, he especially focuses on whether the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) might serve as a mechanism for enabling a more open Internet – a highly germane topic given recent revelations about the extent to which our technologies and networks are riddled with backdoors and actively surveilled.

Old Ideas: Recomputing the History of Information Technology

SIGCIS Workshop 2013October 13, 2013, Portland, Maine

Pictures from this event are now available on Facebook (no account required).

The Society for the History of Technology’s Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS – http://www.sigcis.org) is holding its annual scholarly workshop on Sunday, October 13, 2013 in Portland, Maine. As in previous years, SIGCIS’s annual workshop occurs immediately after the regular SHOT annual meeting program, the details of which are available from http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html.

Questions about the workshop should be addressed to Thomas Haigh (School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), who is serving as chair of the workshop program committee. Email thaigh@computer.org.

Registration: Registration for the workshop should be made through the registration procedure for the main SHOT meeting at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/portland/portland_registration.htmll. SHOT does not collect an additional advance charge for the SIGCIS workshop, though we may need to collect contributions at the beginning of the meeting if SHOT requires us to cover the cost of coffee breaks and/or projector rental. When you register be sure to check the box for “Sunday Workshop on History of Computing” — that’s the SIGCIS workshop. We’ve been told that there is a special $70 one day registration option for those not attending the full conference — contact SHOT@virginia.edu if you are interested in this option as it is not available online.

Workshop Theme

Information technologists have little time for old thinking, or for anything else old. Entrepreneurs seek the new new thing, computer scientists tackle the grand challenges of future computing, and management consultants chase the next fad. Scholars in the humanities, who are professionally skeptical about the nostrums of neoliberalism, the myth of progress, and the allure of the technological fix, can nevertheless exhibit a similar weakness for the shiny allure of new technologies. In short, information technology is rarely understood as something rooted in history. Its cultural associations are with the future, not the past.

For the SIGCIS 2013 Workshop, we invite scholars to turn their attention to something different: old ideas and their relationship to information and computer technology. Perhaps to their overlooked charm, their enduring power, and their continuities with the putatively new. Such papers might

• Reclaim from what was famously termed the ”enormous condescension of posterity” the ideas about information and information technology held by specific historical actors, explaining what they really thought they were doing and how the understood the world around them.
• Demonstrate hidden historical continuities, by showing that technologies, ideas, or practices generally assumed to be of recent origin have a close relationship with those formerly known by different names.
• Advocate explicitly or by example the relevance of less fashionable historical approaches, such as quantitative analysis, old-school Marxism, or micro-level studies of technical practice to understanding the history of information technology.
• Explore connections between historical research on computing, and the burgeoning recent literature on software studies, game studies, platform studies, etc. produced by scholars in other areas of the humanities.
• Place topics within the history of information technology into broader arcs of birth, aging, and death – whether of individuals, institutions, or social practices.
• Illuminate the cultural work done to construct some things as old and others as new, and explain who is carrying out this work and why.

Workshop Program

All sessions will occur in the Holiday Inn on the Bay, which is also the main location of the SHOT conference. We are currently waiting to hear from SHOT which rooms we have been assigned.

	Kennebec Room (all plenary events held here)	Lincoln Room
9:00 – 10:30	Opening Plenary Introduction to Workshop and of Keynote Speaker by Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (SIGCIS Chair & workshop organizer) Keynote Address, William Aspray, University of Texas at Austin, “In Search of the Many Histories of Information”
10:30-11:00	Coffee Break Including presentation of the Computer History Museum Prize, by Jonathan Coopersmith, Texas A&M University, to the author of an outstanding book on the history of computing, broadly conceived.
11:00-12:30	New Wine in Old Bottles? Tensions Between Computer Science and Traditional Disciplines Organizer: Janet Abbate, Virginia TechChair: Chuck House, InnovaScapes InstituteCommentator: Joseph November, University of South Carolina Janet Abbate, Virginia Tech, “Old Disciplines and New Infrastructures: Constructing Computer Science in the 1960s” Pierre Mounier-Kuhn, CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne, “’Une Science Encore Incertaine’:  The Emergence of Computer Science in France (1955-2000)” Irina Nikiforova, Higher School of Economics (Saint-Petersburg), “Competing Visions of New Science: Computer Science Journals in the US and Russia, 1945-1970” (3×20 minute presentations followed by a 10-15 minute comment and general discussion)	Old Ideas on Control and Communication Chair: James Gallo, Science & Technology Policy InstituteCommentator: John Laprise, Northwestern University in Qatar Julie Cohn, University of Houston, “’The old was analog.  The new was digital’: transitions from the analog to the digital domain in electric power systems.” Christopher Leslie, New York University, “A Missing Link: Placing International Teleprinter Networks into the Prehistory of the Internet” Joy Rankin, Yale University, “The Time-Sharing Movement: Building Educational Computing Networks in Minnesota 1965-75” (3×20 minute presentations followed by a 10-15 minute comment and general discussion)
12:30-2:00	Lunch with IEEE History Committee Lunch in the hotel will be provided by the IEEE History Center and we will be meeting jointly with the IEEE History Committee and the members of other SIGs. The plan is for an informal event, starting with a short presentation on the committee’s activities and a recap of some of the issues raised in the Presidents’ roundtables. This will be followed by informal discussion among all those present on the general topic of how engineers and historians of technology can work together.
2:00-3:30	Work in Progress Session Leader: Andrew Russell, Stevens Institute of Technology Bernadette Longo, New Jersey Institute of Technology, “Giant Brains, or Machines That Think.” (Withdrawn) Trevor Croker, Virginia Tech, “Cloud Computing and the Physicality of the Internet.” Jacob Gaboury, New York University, “Image Objects: Computer Graphics at the University of Utah.” Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Actually, Turing Didn’t Invent the Computer.” (Short presentations, approx 5 minutes each, to introduce precirculated papers, to be discussed in turn by workshop participants)	Old Ideas and New Technologies Chair: Lars Heide, Copenhagen Business SchoolCommentator: Steven W. Usselman, Georgia Tech Barbara Hahn, Texas Tech University, “Punch Cards and Industrial Control: Old Devices with New Relevance” Mary E. Hopper, Digital Den Inc., “Wisdom from Athena: A Paradigm for Precognition” Rebecca Elizabeth Skinner, “The Impasse and the Breakthrough: The Pregnant Pause of the early 1950s, and the Birth of Artificial Intelligence Computing” (Withdrawn) Ulf Hashagen, Deutsches Museum, “The Computation of Nature, Or: Does the Computer Drive Science and Technology?” (Withdrawn) Dan Feldman, IBM, “The Netezza Performance Server: Market Disruption Through Deep Hardware and Software Co-Design” (3×20 minute presentations followed by a 10-15 minute comment and general discussion)
3:30-4:00	Coffee Break
4:00-5:30	An Ancient Continent as a New Frontier: Discovering that Computing has a History in Asia  (Closing Plenary) Chair:Jeffrey Yost, University of Minnesota (Charles Babbage Institute)Commentator:  James W. Cortada, University of Minnesota (Charles Babbage Institute) Ross Bassett, North Carolina State University, “Rethinking the Victorian Internet:  The Mahratta and the Rise of Technological Nationalism in Poona, India, 1881-1901” Ramesh Subramanian, Quinnipiac University, “Old Ideas: BBSs and the Emergence of Online Communities in India” Ling-Fei Lin, Cornell University, “The Origins of Laptop Contract Manufacturing in Taiwan and the Transnational Learning Years, 1988-2001” (3×20 minute presentations followed by a 10-15 minute comment and general discussion)
5:30-6:45	Time to recover
6:45	Meet in the lobby of the conference hotel to walk to an optional group dinner in a neaby restaurant. We have a reservation for 7pm at Local 188, a nearby restaurant.

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CFP Material is Below — For Reference Only

Deadline: June 30, 2013

(Following description of workshop theme)

If none of the above fit your work, even with some creative twisting, then despair not: we also accept new ideas! SIGCIS has a tradition of welcoming all types of contributions related to the history of computing and information, whether or not there is an explicit connection with the annual theme. Our membership is international and interdisciplinary, and our members examine the history of information technologies and their place within society from a variety of scholarly perspectives including the history of technology, business history, labor history, social history, the history of science, science studies, communications, gender and sexuality studies, computing, disability studies, and museum studies.

Suggested Formats for Submissions:

Proposals for entire sessions and individual presenters are both welcome. We hope to run special sessions featuring dissertations in progress and other works in progress. The workshop is a great opportunity to get helpful feedback on your projects in a relaxed and supportive environment. All proposals will be subject to a peer review process based on abstracts.

Individual contributions can fit one of a variety of formats:

1. Traditional 15 to 20-minute presentations followed by a question and answer session. In this case, a one-page abstract (maximum 400 words) will be reviewed and included in the electronic conference program. Abstracts should address the paper’s topic, argument, evidence used, and contribution to the existing literature. A full version of the paper should be sent to the session commentator at least 2 weeks prior to the meeting. We welcome proposals for entire sessions (3-4 papers that elucidate a common theme) or for individual presentations.
2. Dissertation proposals. We intend to continue SIGCIS’s tradition of hosting special sessions that feature dissertations in progress so that scholars can receive critical feedback in a relaxed and supportive environment. Interested students should submit a dissertation proposal (for projects in the early stages) or draft dissertation chapter together with table of contents of the whole dissertation (for those nearing completion), which will be pre-circulated in the electronic conference program if accepted. Participants will be encouraged to read this prior to the session. You will have five to ten minutes to introduce the material, leaving the bulk of time available for discussion.
3. Works in progress. This is your chance to receive informal and expert discussion of draft dissertation chapters, journal articles, or book chapters. Submit a one page abstract (maximum 400 words) including discussion of the current state of the work and any specific kinds of feedback you are seeking. If your proposal is accepted you will need to supply the draft for discussion by 1 September for inclusion in the electronic program for the workshop. You will have five to ten minutes to introduce the material, leaving the bulk of time available for discussion.
4. Proposals in other formats are also welcome, such as round table discussions, “works in progress” proposals for early-stage research projects, demonstrations of software of interest to historians of computing and information, or “author meets critics” sessions.

SIGCIS follows traditional practices for the submission of papers for professional historical conferences, specifically: selection based on abstracts rather than full papers; no pre-circulation or publication of full papers (with the exception of dissertation proposals as noted above); and the requirement that presenters share their full paper with the session commentator at least 2 weeks prior to the meeting.  Presenters are encouraged to submit their work the SIGCIS Member Contributions collection.

Submission Procedure

All submissions should be made online via the SIGCIS website by June 30, 2013. People already scheduled to participate on the main SHOT program are welcome to submit an additional proposal to the SIGCIS workshop, but should make sure that there is no overlap between the two presentations. However program committee may choose to give higher priority to submissions from those not already presenting at SHOT. The same person should not be included as a panelist or speaker in more than one proposal to the SIGCIS Workshop, though it is OK to appear both as a speaker/panelist in one session and a chair or discussant in another.

Individual submissions should be made at http://www.sigcis.org/workshop13a. Note that this requires a one page curriculum vitae as well as the proposal itself in the form described above.

Proposals for complete sessions should be made at http://www.sigcis.org/workshop13b.

They should include:

• a description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overall theme)
• the names and email addresses of each presenter)
• an abstract and title for each presentation (in the form described above)
• a one-page c.v. for each presenter and other participant (including commentator or chair if named)

Travel Support

The top financial priority of SIGCIS is the support of travel expenses for graduate students, visiting faculty without institutional travel support, and others who would be unable to attend the meeting without travel assistance. The submission page includes a box to check if you fall into one of these categories and would like to be considered for an award. These is no separate application form, though depending on the volume of requests and available resources we may need to contact you for further information before making a decision. Details on our travel grant program are at http://www.sigcis.org/travelaward. Any award offered is contingent on registering for and attending the workshop and, for participants in work in progress or dissertations in progress sessions, on fulfilling the deadlines set for providing work in progress to be shared on the workshop website.

Funding sources include donations from SIGCIS members at our annual meeting, income from the Mahoney Fund http://www.sigcis.org/mahoney and support from MIT Press for our annual book auction. Please note that SHOT does not classify SIGCIS presentations as participation in the SHOT annual meeting and so acceptance by SIGCIS does not imply eligibility for the SHOT travel grant program.

Format

For information on previous SIGCIS workshops in 2009-2012, please visit the “Activities and Events” section of the SIGCIS website at http://www.sigcis.org.We expect to follow a similar format this year. There is an informal dinner in the evening after the workshop.

The World IP Day program was to promote and celebrate the many benefits of intellectual property in San Jose and the SF Bay Area. San Jose and Silicon Valley lead the nation in patent generation and the City cohosted this West Coast event to celebrate the contributions of innovators and creators worldwide. Marcian E. “Ted” Hoff’s keynote speech is summarized in this article.

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Other speakers included: James Pooley, Deputy Director General of Innovation & Technology at the World Intellectual Property Organization (a United Nations organization based in Geneva), Michelle Lee, the Director of the Silicon Valley Office of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, San Jose Council Member Rose Herrera and San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. The schedule is online here.

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Early Inventions and a Surprise Phone Call

At age 12, Ted Hoff became interested in electronics. He started reading electronic design magazines, built a short wave radio from a kit, and then built an oscilloscope and repaired TVs. After graduating from high school in 1954, Ted got a summer job doing electronic assembly work at General Railway Signal Company in Rochester, NY. This work involved using transistors, which were very new at the time.

During the following summers away from college he continued to work for General Railway Signal Company. That work led to two patents, one covering a circuit which detected trains using audio frequencies transmitted along the railway track and the second covering lightning protection for that circuit. The filing date for the first patent was in 1955 when he was only 17 years old!

After completing his university education (BEE 1958 from RPI, MS 1959 & PhD EE 1962 from Stanford), Dr. Hoff worked for Stanford Professor Bernard Widrow- PhD, as a Research Associate until he got a surprise phone call from Bob Noyce in 1968. Noyce had just left Fairchild Semiconductor and asked Ted to join a new semiconductor memory start-up company named Intel. Ted jumped at that offer and became employee #12 at Intel where he worked till 1983.

Semiconductor Memory Challenges & Opportunity

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In his early years at Intel, Ted designed and developed semiconductor memories and generated application information for them. Intel’s goal (which few at the time believed was realizable) was to replace magnetic core memory in computers. In 1970, Intel predicted the IC memory price would drop to 1 cent per bit by 1972 and that would be the crossover point. In contrast, today you can get over 100M bits of memory for 1 cent!

But cost was not the only issue. The most dense semiconductor memories at that time were DRAMs (dynamic random access memory), which were characterized by the structural simplicity of its storage cell: three transistors per bit compared to six used in static RAMs (SRAMs). Later DRAMs would be made with only one transistor and a capacitor to store each bit. Both static RAMs and DRAMs lose data if power is removed, while core memories do not.

In addition, DRAMs are volatile, e.g. storage is lost if the data are not accessed frequently. To ensure data retention, refresh circuitry was added to refresh each row of memory cells every few milliseconds. This made the DRAM controller’s logic circuit more complicated than SRAM, but that was outweighed by the fact that DRAM is much cheaper per storage cell and because each storage cell is very simple thus providing higher densities.

Ted wrote a mini-textbook and Semiconductor Memories (he calls it a pamphlet) that this author used in a SCU Graduate EE course on that subject in Fall of 1971!

Custom Chips and the Invention of the 4004 Microprocessor

As the time to design, package, test and sell semiconductor memories was quite a long process, Intel decided to develop custom circuits for various customers in order to generate revenue. One of those was a Japanese company named Busicom who (in April of 1969) asked Intel to design MOS LSIs for a family of calculators. Hoff was assigned the duty of helping Busicom engineers transfer their chip specifications to appropriate engineering teams within Intel.

Many complex chips were involved in that initial design effort, e.g. BCD arithmetic, shift register control, keyboard scanner (and de-bouncer), printer control, display control, etc. As he learned more about the Busicom design, he became concerned that it might be a problem for Intel and with Bob Noyce’s encouragement, Ted proposed to greatly simplify the chip set design by eliminating many chips in the family. The simplification was accomplished by implementing the functions as stored programs running on a very simple general purpose central processor. He was later joined by co-designers Stan Mazor and Fredrico Faggin. The architecture he had defined was sufficiently simple that it allowed the central processor to be implemented as a single chip which was released as the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715). The 4004, a 4-bit microprocessor, was announced in November 1971. In subsequent years, Intel introduced the 8008 and the very popular 8080 microprocessor.

By 1975 the microprocessor was established as a replacement for many MSI random logic designs and as an embedded controller for many different types of devices and equipment.

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Monolithic CODEC for Digital Telephony

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In 1975, Bob Noyce asked Hoff to study the telephone industry to see if there might be a role for Intel to play. Hoff put together a team that developed a single chip CODEC (COder-DECoder), which converted between the analog signals associated with a conventional telephone call (POTS) and a standard digital telephony format known as Pulse Code Modulation (PCM).

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At the time, the principal use of CODECs was for T1 carrier digital transmission between telephone company (telco) central offices. However, the Intel CODEC allowed extending the use of that PCM digital format into new application areas, such as private branch exchanges (PBXs).

The CODEC does conversions in both directions between analog and digital representations. Analog signals are converted to a 64 kilobit-per-second PCM digital signal and vice versa. Voice coding and signaling are included.

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With the signals in digital format, Hoff recognized that some functions usually performed by analog circuits, such as touch tone processing, would need to be handled digitally. His group developed an early Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to provide such functionality. When a CODEC is used, some filtering of the analog signals is needed, and Ted was fortunate to have consulting assistance from Professor Paul Gray of UC Berkeley. The result was that Intel could offer its CODEC with a switched-capacitor filter. The project succeeded and by 1980 Intel was offering CODECs, switched-capacitor filters and a DSP chip. These telephony LSIs appear to have been the first commercially available.

Career after Intel

In early 1983, Ted joined Atari which had extensive R&D programs underway for PC applications and video games. Unfortunately, Atari didn’t have good financial controls nor good visibility into its market. While initially very profitable, the video game market really started to saturate. Without market visibility, Atari overinvested. They went from annual revenue of well over $2 billion down to below $1 billion in the space of a year. The unanticipated market changes and bad financial controls led Warner Communications to sell the company in mid 1984.

In 1986, a former close co-worker of this author (Gary Summers at Signetics from 1976-79) started a company called Teklicon to do consulting to attorneys who were looking for either testimonial experts or advice about where to find particular art (i.e. intellectual property or patents). Ted worked with Teklicon from 1986 doing IP research and expert witness work till his retirement in 2007.

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In this, his second career, Ted learned that patents were critically important to the semiconductor and high tech industries. He thinks that IP awareness should be part of every engineer’s college education.

Awards

Ted received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in November of 2010. He was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1979 and The Franklin Institute’s Certificate of Merit in 1996. Hoff was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1996 and goes there each year for a reunion with fellow inventors. He was a recipient of the Kyoto Prize in 1997, and the James Clerk Maxwell Award of the IEEE in 2011. He was made an Eminent Member of the IEEEs Eta Kappa Nu in 2013. He is a Life Fellow member of the IEEE.

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Introduction:

In this interesting and informative lecture at the Computer History Museum (CHM) on March 11, 2013, Grady Booch asked and tried to answer this question: ”What does it take to make “sentient” devices (that can feel, sense, think and reason) out of silicon and software?”

But before we can address that question, there are many others that need to be thought about. For example, what does it mean to be intelligent? Is intelligence only in the mind or can it also be computable? Some such as Marvin Minsky believe the mind to be computable; others such as Roger Penrose do not (more about him later in this article). Components of life appear to be common to many species, but sentient life is uncommon.

For a definition of “sentient” please see: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient

How much of a mind can we build out of silicon and software? Can we build sentient machines?

In the end, we are compelled to consider the question of what it means to be human: producing even the illusion of the mind raises profound questions as to their person hood and our relationship to intelligent machines.

History of the Mind as a Machine :

Intelligent machines have been pondered for many centuries:

• Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) first thought of modeling a human being as a machine.
• Babbage tried to develop a mechanistic explanation for the mind. Was there a “divine programmer?”
• Ada Lovelace said, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.”
• There are now many different types of intelligent robots made and used in Japan.
• IBM’s Watson (natural language understanding) computer plays jeopardy better than humans

Science of the Brain:

Human brain is ~3 inches in diameter. It consumers the energy of a 100W light bulb. The brain is compose of billions of interconnected neurons which resembles “a system of systems.” It’s estimated there are 100B neurons with 100 to 500B neuron connections between them. The connections produce electrical signals and also are activated for “time triggered events.” Grady said that neurons and their connections could be simulated (some research projects aim to do that- see below).

Mental states equate with brain states. Different parts of the brain “light up” at different times and in different ways, depending on what’s being experienced. Given that, maybe there’s a mechanistic explanation of the brain, Grady suggested.

Compelling story of Artificial Intelligence (AI):

nAlan Turing (1912-1954) is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He once said that a computing machine was intelligent if it could deceive a human being into believing it was human. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke later dubbed that the “Turing Test.”n nThe term Artificial Intelligence was first coined at a 1956 Dartmouth conference on thinking machines. AI went through several distinct periods after that. Grady described the following phases of AI:nn

• Cybernetics
• Semantic information processing (or symbol manipulation)
• Knowledge engineering and expert systems/ inference engines
• Brute force methods
• Statistical approaches
• Societies of the mind

Other references on AI History (independent of this lecture):

http://library.thinkquest.org/2705/history.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligencehttp://www.stottlerhenke.com/ai_general/history.htmn nIBM’s Watson:n nnMr Booch showed a short video clip on the architecture of IBM’s Watson AI computer which attempted to address how it works. But that wasn’t really accomplished in the tongue and cheek dialog between Grady and Watson that was shown. Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. The machine was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! It learns from experiences which improves its subsequent memory searches.n nBut Watson is now on to bigger and better things than game playing. It’s now being used as a physician’s assistant at hospitals. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system’s first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson’s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90{823cabba6e02d1a9e99cfb4fb89f3fefce84e3050c8475354a77cb6e3cf6d21a} of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.n nSource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)n nOther Perspectives on Creating Sentient Machines or Devices:n nA clip of Roger Penrose was quite illuminating. Penrose said that natural understanding depends on conscious thinking, which can NOT be simulated on a computer. Mr. Booch respectfully disagreed with that assertion. But he wonders how far we can go in building a sentient mind in a machine or device made from silicon and software.n nWe then saw a clip of a female Canadian android parsing natural language (English), feeling pain and sensing touch. Then a “Google Car” driving itself. Grady proposed “intelligent drones” that would avoid civilian buildings as targets and hence reduce collateral damage from drone strikes.n nWill Intelligent Devices Make Us Dumber?n nWe are slowly surrendering our choices and intelligence to “sentient devices” like Siri – the personal assistant accessed via Apple’s iPhone. Outsourcing human jobs to machines has contributed to the “global economic malaise,” according to Grady. That’s because many jobs are being replaced by computing machines (e.g. switch board operators by automated computer attendants).n nResearch Projects to Study the Brain:n nThe European Commission (administration for the European Union countries) has selected research projects to study how the human brain works. Those projects may simulate brain functions.nhttp://www.nature.com/news/brain-simulation-and-graphene-projects-win-bi…n nDARPA is funding projects that will build silicon replicas of neurons. With 100B neurons and 1B x 1B bits of information that’s really BIG DATA ANALYTICS!n nAnd the Obama administration has proposed a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-…n nConclusions:n nWe are on a journey to build replicas of sentient minds using silicon and software. Such sentient devices would give us the illusion of being human. Can we build such devices that dream? Maybe. Dreams could be automated and simulated.n nGrady believes that sentient devices are inevitable. How then will we co-exist, evolve and live with them?n nReferences: nTwitter: grady@_boochnWebsite: computingthehumanexperience.com

This week in The Slate Book Review, writer Matthew Kirschenbaum tells the story of what was probably the first novel ever written using a word processor – IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter). This brief but insightful article, titled The Book-Writing Machine, gives us a glimpse of the author, the machine, and the novel at the center of this pleasent little slice of late-1960s era computing history. 

Abstract:

The microprocessor changed what is now known as Silicon Valley from a mostly agricultural and defense electronics region into a center of innovation for many new technologies. How did that happen and what challenges were faced along the way?

The Jan 7, 2013 IEEE Life Member panel discussed the development of microprocessor technologies in the 70?s, 80?s and 90?s.  The evolution of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architectures and the battle for dominance in the commercial market place with conventional CPU architectures (CISC). The technological developments that lead to the creation of RISC architectures and the reaction of CISC suppliers (e.g. Intel) to address this competitive threat was debated. The panel members also shared their views on the factors that lead up to the microprocessor architectural wars and the impact microprocessor companies had in shaping Silicon Valley.

This panel session was expertly moderated by CHM CEO and President John Hollar, who provided a brief introduction to the mission and accomplishments of the CHM, which is summarized in a blog post on this website.

The panel members and their former company affiliations:

*Anant Agrawal – SPARC chip designer at Sun Micro*John Mashey- Software architect at MIPS*Dave House- Marketing Director & later GM of Intel’s Microprocessor Division

Event Summary

Through John Hollar’s skilled moderation, the panelists revealed a lot of hitherto undisclosed information about microprocessor activities at Intel, Sun Micro and MIPS. The audience was thrilled to hear that information from primary sources who were directly involved in the mid 1980s competitive race between general purpose (CISC*) and reduced instruction set (RISC) microprocessors.

John’s opening remarks about CHM progress has been previously published as a blog entry on this website.

* General purpose processor architecture is often referred to as Complex Instruction Set Computing, even though there are very few complex instructions. The term CISC is therefore somewhat of a misnomer. It was used to differentiate classical processor acrchitecture from Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC), where fewer instructions are available to be executed by the CPU.

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Read full article at:  http://ithistory.org/blog/?p=1826

Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011).

Prize Citation

Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a well-researched, insightful historical analysis of utopian computer technology and politics in Chile before, during, and after the brief presidency of Slavador Allende. Eden Medina situates the history of technology in a national framework to integrate topics and approaches from economic policies to cybernetics and managerial ideology, international relations, and biography.

2012 Prize Committee Members

Jonathan Coopersmith (Chair): Associate Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4326 j-coopersmith@neo.tamu.edu

Pierre Mounier-Kuhn: CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne 28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris, France mounier@msh-paris.fr

Rebecca Slayton: Visiting Assistant Professor, History of Science and Technology Program, University of Minnesota, 108 Pillsbury Hall, 310 Pillsbury Drive Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55455 rslayton@umn.edu

This Thursday, Oct 25th was a huge event day at the CHM in Mt View, CA.  The week included a number of important events and milestones:

1. There were 5 different venue rental events on Oct 25th, including Day One of the Rusnano Conference; Day Two of the Internet Identify Conference; a Symantec theme party; a K&L Gates meeting, and the University of Texas.

2. There was also a Quarterly CHM Board of Trustees meeting.

3. Thursday is a “open to the public” day for the CHM’s flagship Revolution exhibit.  There were over 1,100 visitors were at the museum- quite a bit for a work day.

4. Every available space/inch of the museum was used on Oct 25th.  Some rooms were even used twice in one day.  And just about every parking space was filled. Since there wasn’t enough meeting space, the museum arranged a meeting in a full-sized rental bus in the parking lot! Might be a new business opportunity for the entreprenuerally-minded – a fleet of mobile meeting rooms. 🙂

5. Wednesday marked the CHM reunion of former Shockley Seminconductor Lab employees and their families. They all got together at the Museum to tour a semiconductor exhibit on silicon. More on that exhibit at:

http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1956-Silicon.html

Here’s the reunion story from today’s San Jose Mercury:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mike-cassidy/ci_21854588/cassidy-shockley-semiconductor-alumni-remember-where-silicon-valley

Oral history of Shockley Labs is at:

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658033

And how Shockley Labs gave birth to the semiconductor industry in Santa Clara Valley (now called Silicon Valley: http://www.computerhistory.org/events/The_Rise_of_Silicon_Valley_EventSu…

6.  On October 21st, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid was in Conversation with NYT’s John Markoff at the museum.

Here’s the event summary:  http://ithistory.org/blog/?p=1776

 

Bottom line: CHM is becoming one of the most popular gathering spot in Santa Clara Valley (AKA Silicon Valley)!

Histories of the Internet – Call for Papers

This is a call for papers for a special issue of Information & Culture: A Journal of History (Volume 50, Issue 1, February-March 2015). For the latest and most complete information on the special issue please see www.sigcis.org/InternetIssue.

Guest Editors

• William H. Dutton, Professor of Internet Studies, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow, Balliol College
• Thomas Haigh, Associate Professor of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
• Andrew L. Russell, Assistant Professor of History, College of Arts & Letters, Stevens Institute of Technologyn

Deadlines

Abstracts can be submitted to an editor of the special issue for informal feedback until 1 March 2013: e-mail: William dot Dutton at oii dot ox dot ac dot uk.

Full papers should be submitted to the managing editor, George Royer, for review by 30 August 2013.

The Call

The increasing importance of the Internet, Web and related information and communication technologies, such as social media, has made it ever harder and ever more important to understand their history. Many authors have traced the timelines of technical developments, and a growing number of books have been written about the social history of the innovations that comprise and enable this network of networks. Scholars disagree over the very definition of the Internet and its history as a set of protocols, a large technical system, an infrastructure, or ensemble of technologies.

The editors invite original, scholarly treatments of the history of the Internet that critically examine common assumptions about its origins and developments over the decades. Submissions could take any number of approaches, including:

• Broad historical perspectives on the Internet’s development;
• Historical case studies of particular developments, such as ARPANet, TCP/IP, the World Wide Web, or Facebook;
• Accounts of computer and communication networks, such as Open Systems Interconnection, online services, the European Informatics Network, and digital mobile telephone networks that contributed to or anticipated aspects of today’s Internet but did not use Internet technologies;
• Regional histories of Internet adoption or innovation;
• Studies of an institution, such as ICANN, W3C, or Internet Governance Forum;
• Explorations of an event, such as the dotcom bubble;
• Critical analyses of scholarly or popular narratives about the Internet’s history.

These are only illustrative of possible approaches, as we would welcome creative approaches to the history of the Internet that go beyond these specific examples.  

About the Editors

William H. Dutton is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, Bill was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he was elected President of the Faculty, and remains an Emeritus Professor. In the UK, Bill was a Fulbright Scholar, then National Director of the UK’s Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT), and founding director of the OII during its first decade. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (forthcoming 2013), and is writing a book on the Fifth Estate.

Thomas Haigh is an Associate Professor of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and chair of the SIGCIS group for historians of information technology. He has published widely on the history of computing – see more at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.

Andrew L. Russell is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts & Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Russell has published numerous articles and book chapters on the history of computers and telecommunications, and is the author of An Open World: History, Ideology, and Network Standards (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

About the Journal

Information & Culture: A Journal of History publishes high-quality, peer reviewed articles on the history of information. The journal honors its (45+ year) heritage by continuing to publish in the areas of library, archival, museum, conservation, and information science history. However, the journal’s scope has been broadened significantly beyond these areas to include the historical study of any topic that would fall under the purview of any of the modern interdisciplinary schools of information. In keeping with the spirit of the information schools, the work is human centered and looks at the interactions of people, organizations, and societies with information and technologies. Social and cultural context of information and information technology, viewed from an historical perspective, is at the heart of the journal’s interests. See: http://www.infoculturejournal.org/about

Submission and Review Process

Full papers should be from 6,000 to 10,000 words, including all notes and bibliography. Shorter or longer papers might be considered in exceptional cases, based on the merit of the case. The editors expect to publish 4-6 papers in the special issue, with any additional papers that merit publication scheduled for journal issues that will appear after the special issue. Before preparing or submitting an article, please check for any updated instructions at www.sigcis.org/InternetIssue.

Authors are asked to please follow the submission guidelines available at http://www.infoculturejournal.org/submissions/submission_requirements. In particular, authors should prepare notes and bibliography in accordance with the journal style. Neither the editorial office nor the special editors should need to make formatting changes to notes or bibliography.

         “Sometime in the last ten or twelve years, the stereotypical image of the Silicon Valley programmer has shifted from a socially awkward, Utili-kilt-wearing geek to something far more sinister, and fratty, and sexist,” begins the article in the Sfist. Recently, a new term for programmers in their 20s has come into the national consciousness: brogrammer. Half fratty “bro” and half programmer, as a whole the concept of the brogrammer is completely masculine. So is this latest reaction to the nerdy programmer stereotype a problem?

         Many commentators have pointed out the damage that this new type of computing culture might have on women coders or potential coders. A recent Mother Jones article pointed out that if women are looking for a job in an environment where interviews by a committee can be casually referred to as “gang bang interviews,” they might be turned off by the workplace culture of a company before they even have the chance to work there.

         And the phenomenon isn’t limited to just a few Silicon Valley startups. As a cultural archetype, it’s been gaining currency and power for the last year or so at an alarming rate: “the term has become the subject of a Facebook group joined by over 21,000 people,” notes Bloomberg Businessweek in their recent article.

(Image from Bloomberg Businessweek)

         It’s difficult to parse the different levels of irony—or genuine commitment—that those thousands of individuals feel for the brogrammer identity.  But this may be part of the problem. As the Mother Jones article indicates, several companies and their employees–when called on the sexism of the brogrammer ideal–excused themselves on the grounds that they were being ironic, and that people just weren’t getting the joke.

         If it is a joke, and much of the brogrammer identity is certainly meant to be facetious, then “there’s also an audience that feels left out of the joke…. Anything that encourages the perception of tech as being male-dominated” will contribute to the decline of women in computing, warned Sara Chipps, quoted in Bloomberg. Chipps is the founder of Girl Develop It, which encourages women ask questions of other women programmers to minimize the intimidation factor of workplaces with a gender imbalance.

         One thing missing in the recent flurry of discussions on brogramming and its ills is the fact that this issue isn’t really about women. It’s about gender. And the image of the straight, feminine woman the media invokes as likely to be turned off by a workplace environment where brogrammers hold sway is actually only one of many likely to be hurt by brogrammer culture.  A panoply of other people with different gender identities and sexual identities–men, women, or genderqueer–would likely be similarly unhappy in an environment that privileges a certain kind of retro, straight, masculine gender identity as normative or aspirational.

         The other element that seems to be mostly missing from these conversations in the press is the historical element. Although each article quotes the obligatory handful of stats about women’s declining share of computer science degrees, they don’t go any further. And yet, in many ways, the rise of the brogrammer is unsurprising to historians: it’s just another iteration of the “alpha nerd” archetypes that have circulated since the inception of commercial computing. From sixties-era self-styled wizards who held the key to the black art of programming; to mischievous whiz kids like Gates and Jobs who got their start in the wild west of computing in the seventies; to the scruffy, bearded, UNIX geeks who became mainstream in the nineties; to the most recent wave of fabulously wealthy boy wonders epitomized by Mark Zuckerberg and other start-up billionaires who fit a certain age, race, and gender profile.

         The characters in these stories have appeared in the popular press for decades, gaining more and more currency with each repetition, and coming to define the narratives we tell ourselves and each other about computing. Those who don’t fit these molds end up disappearing, unrecognized and unrecognizable as technology workers because they clash with the popular images conjured and reinforced by media.

         Historians of computing like Nathan Ensmenger, Janet Abbate, Tom Misa, Jennifer Light, myself, and others have shown how these images and discourses can’t be taken for granted as accurate: computing was never as masculine as our received popular conception makes it seem. And the recent furor over brogramming shows that it’s still not.