Spring 2015 - Charles Babbage Institute

CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE
CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
NEWSLETTER
Vol. 37 No. 1
Spring 2015
In This Issue:
Director’s Desk
Gideon Gartner and Gartner Group Records
3,500 Cortada Collection Books Cataloged
CBI
Michael J. Samek Bequest
Cullinane: Smarter than Their Machines
Yost Attends NSF SaTC PI 2015
CBI “Computer Security” Annals Special Issue
Misa on Isaacson’s Innovators
Norberg Travel Grant Recipients
Con Diaz 2015 Tomash Fellow
Antitrust at CBI: U.S. v. IBM
Software History at CBI
(Norberg Grant)
Partnership for Computer History
Hollywood Computer Graphics at CBI
Recent Publications
Featured Photograph
CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE
CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
NEWSLETTER
Spring 2015
Vol. 37
No. 1
In This Issue:
Director’s Desk
3
Gideon Gartner and the Gartner Group Records
5
Cortada Book Collection Cataloged
6
Michael J. Samek Bequest
8
Cullinane: Smarter than Their Machines
10
Yost Attends NSF SaTC PI 2015
12
CBI “Computer Security” Annals Special Issue
13
Misa on Isaacson’s Innovators
15
Norberg Travel Grant Recipients
17
Con Diaz 2015 Tomash Fellow
18
Antitrust at CBI: U.S. v. IBM
19
Software History at CBI
(Norberg Grant)
21
Partnership for Computer History
23
Movie Graphics Move-In to CBI
26
Recent Publications
28
Featured Photograph
31
CBI Newsletter Editor: Jeffrey R. Yost
Charles Babbage Institute
211 Andersen Library
University of Minnesota
222 21st Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
Email: cbi@umn.edu
Ph. (612) 624-5050
Fax: (612) 625-8054
www.cbi.umn.edu
The Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Technology is sponsored by the University of Minnesota and
the information technology community. Charles Babbage Institute Newsletter is a publication of the University of
Minnesota. The CBI Newsletter reports on Institute activities and other developments in the history of information
technology. Permission to copy all or part of this material is granted provided that the source is cited and a copy of the
publication containing the copied material is sent to CBI. © Charles Babbage Institute
2
Director’s Desk
As a historian I am committed to understanding how history is made, often through the give-andtake interactions of strong structural forces such as globalization or the digital revolution with
individual human beings struggling to get a computer program to run or a printer jam cleared.
But as director of the Charles Babbage Institute, I am reminded daily of how humans literally
make history—donating valuable records, conducting oral histories to pin down critical turning
points, traveling to an archive far away (or doing research right at hand), experiencing the thrill
of an unanticipated nugget of historical insight in the umpteenth box of letters at the end of a
long day. So here are some vignettes from CBI.
CBI archivist Arvid Nelsen was, as many of you know, away from CBI for three months this
spring. The University Libraries granted him a research leave, and he invested time tracking
down the amazing people behind pioneering efforts to bring computing skills and access to
African American communities in California from the 1960s to today. He was privileged to talk
with several founders of local computer-literacy efforts in East Palo Alto, Oakland, and the area
surrounding much-fabled Silicon Valley. He is doing research for a book drawing on their
experiences and, like the excellent professional archivist he is, also mindful of archiving the
relevant records so that these experiences can be better understood and also might serve as
inspiration for similar education efforts today and tomorrow.
In Arvid’s absence, we had the excellent assistance of Rebecca Hranj. She had the time of her
life unpacking a just-received archival collection from Mark Sylvester documenting Wavefront
Technologies and Alias|Wavefront. Wavefront was founded in 1984 by Sylvester, along with
Bill Kovacs and Larry Barels, to develop graphics technologies for television and movies.
Among their early clients were Universal Studios, Electronic Arts, and NASA. Wavefront’s
techniques appear in numerous major films, such as the James Cameron–Arnold Schwarzenegger
blockbuster True Lies (1994), among many others, and earned the company two Oscars.
Rebecca assembled choice Wavefront artifacts for an exhibit outside the CBI office suite in
Andersen Library.
This February Jeff Yost and I put the final touches necessary to send our book on the National
Science Foundation’s FastLane computer system into production at Johns Hopkins University
Press. FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World is our title. Among other thanks, we
salute the 800+ people who granted us interviews that documented their varied perspectives on
this notable e-government effort. Jeff is pounding away at the keyboard, hard at work on his
computer services book for MIT Press. He’s now on chapter four, making excellent progress
and looking forward to delving into our ADAPSO records.
Katie Charlet keeps the 101 moving pieces of CBI well organized. In addition to assisting
visiting Norberg Travel Grant recipients and other researchers, she is also handling the necessary
visa paperwork so that we can welcome Janet Toland from New Zealand as a visiting researcher
at CBI later this summer. The University of Minnesota shut down its central computer system
for ten days in April, and Katie was our guru in navigating the multifarious challenges before
and after the upgrade. Katie also lends her organizational, editing, and layout skills to bring
together this newsletter.
3
Three Ph.D. students are currently in residence at CBI. Jonathan Clemens is writing the core
chapters of his dissertation, which treats the history of video arcade games and is based on
archival records from Atari and several principals including Al Alcorn. Nic Lewis continues
work on the CBI–Los Alamos high-performance computing project, with several articles in the
pipeline and a summer’s worth of research in the mountains of New Mexico on the docket. For
the CBI–Sloan Foundation project investigating women in the early computing industry (196585), Will Vogel is examining archival records from Control Data and Burroughs and assessing
the advertising and editorial stances of Datamation and Computerworld.
As for me, I too am keeping myself out of trouble. In March I organized and submitted two
scholarly sessions for the upcoming fall SHOT conference in Albuquerque. At SHOT and
SIGCIS we are planning sessions showcasing research supported by the ACM’s History
Committee. Last week I sent an article off to Communications of the ACM. Yesterday I saw the
reviews that will shape the final revisions for Bernadette Longo’s biography of Edmund
Berkeley, forthcoming this year from ACM Books. Today I secured college-level approval for a
new course “Digital World” that will be first offered in Spring 2016. Tomorrow I have lunch
with Bob Price and a chance to discuss a possible Control Data company history project. And of
course there are sundry meetings that offer diversion.
If you are in the Twin Cities, please drop us a line. We’d love to show you around the CBI
office suite and, as time permits, sneak downstairs to see what new treasures Arvid has added to
CBI’s archive. And have a look at our roster of archival collections. You, too, can call up some
boxes of your choice and have a go at making history yourself.
Thomas J. Misa
4
Gideon Gartner and Gartner Group Records
Sarah and Gideon Gartner during their September 2014 visit to CBI. Photo courtesy of Arvid Nelsen.
In the summer of 2014, the Charles Babbage Institute received a significant donation from
Gideon and Sarah Gartner. Following on a donation of Gartner reports in 2010, the 2014 gift
documents the career and contributions of Gideon Gartner, a truly influential figure in
information technology and investment. In 1979 Gideon established the Gartner Group, an
information technology consulting and advisory group that sold services to vendors of hardware,
software and services, to enterprise and organizational IT users, as well as to investors and
consulting firms. Gideon brought expertise in both computing – from his professional beginnings
at IBM, Philco Corporation’s Computer Division, and System Development Corporation – and
finance, having been a partner at Oppenheimer & Co, where he was recognized as a top
technology analyst on Wall Street. Among his many accomplishments, Gideon is recognized for
developing a research process, documented in the “Research Notebook” (included in the
materials now at CBI) and that was used to create the concise research reports that were deeply
valued by the IT industry, investors, and users. Gideon also created the technology advisory
consulting company GiGa in 1995 and the financial services/broker-dealer firm Gartner
Securities Corp. in 1984, which became SoundView Technologies Group in 1988. The collection
that now resides at CBI documents all of these innovative and respected organizations. See
Gartner Group Records (CBI 228) at <purl.umn.edu/202668>: 57 linear feet.
R. Arvid Nelsen
5
Now in Public Eye: 3,500 Cortada
Collection Books
In 2009 CBI received four large book collections that, together, boosted our volume count to
approximately 10,000. In an earlier CBI Newsletter article, we noted the treasures that existed in
the Erwin Tomash (CBI 75), Michael Mahoney, Carl Machover, and James Cortada book
collections. With support from the University of Minnesota Libraries we have been able to move
these valuable volumes squarely into the public eye. Once, you needed to know that a certain
book existed in the Mahoney or Cortada collection; then you could look it up specifically — in
that collection. Now, users across the university and around the world can discover and gain
access to these volumes through the university’s catalog. The result is more work for us, since
(as CBI archivist Arvid Nelsen reports) the increased visibility has already resulted in a
noticeable uptick in requests. The Cortada collection is now cataloged, the Tomash collection is
in process, and the Mahoney and Machover collections are in the cataloging queue.
The best thing is that you don’t need to know “what specifically” is in the Cortada collection to
be able to discover it. But, just in case, here is a set of tantalizing tidbits from a wide collection
that Jim Cortada assembled from his own shelves and IBM technical libraries:
These range literally from “A to Z” . . .
Michael Abbey and Michael J. Corey’s
ORACLE 8 - A Beginner’s Guide (1997)
through to Edward J. Zoll’s Logic: A
Programmed Text for Two-Valued and ThreeValued Logics (1968). The earliest book
might be Richard Courant and Herbert
Robbins’s What is Mathematics? (1941).
Another early gem is Gordon S. Brown and
Donald P. Campbell’s Principles of
Servomechanisms (1948).
Many special titles on notable topics, such as
. . . Paul W. Abrahams and Bruce A. Larson’s
UNIX for the Impatient (1992) . . . Dr. Dobb’s
Toolbook of C (1986) . . . Federal Electric
Corporation on Logarithms (1972) . . .
Richard Y. Kain on Automata Theory:
Machines and Languages (1972). And who
can resist Ned Snell on Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 hours (1998)?
Even a few famous authors, such as . . . Franz L. Alt on Electronic Digital Computers (1958) . . .
Gordon Bell on Computer Structures (1971) and Computer Engineering: A DEC View of
Hardware Systems Design (1978) . . . Edsger Dijkstra’s Primer of ALGOL 60 Programming
(1962) . . . A.P. Ershov and D.E. Knuth’s Algorithms in Modern Mathematics and Computer
Science (1981) . . . Bernie Galler and Alan Perlis’s View of Programming Languages (1970) . . .
Marvin Minsky on Semantic Information Processing (1968) . . . Nils J. Nilsson on Learning
6
Machines (1965) . . . Willis H. Ware on Digital Computer Technology and Design volumes 1
and 2 (1963).
Researchers will find 30 ACM conference volumes . . . 55 volumes of Bell System Technical
Journal (1940s though 1980s) . . . 50 IBM publications on diverse topics . . . 106 volumes of
SHARE Proceedings (1950s through 1970s).
Any of these volumes can be located through the main University of Minnesota’s catalog at
<https://www.lib.umn.edu/>. If you search for “Unix …
Impatient” you get the catalog entry: UNIX for the
Impatient, Available at TC Andersen Library Babbage
Institute (Cortada) (QA76.76.O63 A27 1992 ). A quick
consultation with us can deliver the volume to your
impatient hands.
Upstairs we have around 2,000 volumes in our reference
collection in the CBI office suite. “Where is there room
for an additional 10,000 volumes?” you might be thinking.
The Cortada, Mahoney, Machover, and Tomash book
collections are safely stored downstairs in our climatecontrolled caverns. Arvid Nelsen is taking these volumes
out of the usual archival boxes and installing them in book
trays on the cavern shelves. The books remain in optimal
storage conditions while gaining global visibility.
Thomas J. Misa
7
Michael J. Samek Bequest:
Long-Term Support for CBI
I have before me the record of Michael Samek’s first donation to the Charles Babbage Institute
— as well as his last donation. His contributions to CBI form quite a story, stretching over 25
years. We are sorry to report that Michael has passed away, but his bequest to CBI has
permanently endowed a special fund that will enhance CBI’s long-term programmatic activities
in research, scholarship, and special events.
Michael had a distinguished career in the computer
industry, and he drew on his personal experience as an
information-technology manager and executive to
encourage three CBI directors — Arthur Norberg, Robert
Seidel, and myself — to devote appropriate attention to
the users of computing. He wrote me in October 2006,
shortly after I became CBI director, expressing his
experience of having been one of those who “started early
service bureaus and/or became ‘MIS directors’ and
eventually CIOs” and emphasizing the challenges of
“[bringing] a relatively unstable technology into business
and industry — affecting the health of organizations not
Michael Samek in a talk to the Society for
Management Information Systems (1972)
to speak of careers.” Our files have a letter Michael
wrote to Arthur Norberg in May of 1986, two decades
earlier, expressing a similar concern about the importance of “the early users of computing
technology . . . the early enthusiastic promoters who frequently spurred new developmental
ideas.” He’d made a similar point in 1972 to the Society for Management Information Systems:
“Computer people must ‘stop building systems for systems’ sake’.” 1
Michael was born in Vienna, Austria, and came to the United States in June 1939. He enlisted in
February 1941 and was assigned to the Army Air Corps, volunteering for glider-pilot training
after Pearl Harbor. After initial training in California and Texas, he did field training in Egypt
and Algeria and saw combat duty in Sicily and southern France. After the war he stayed in the
Air Force Reserve, retiring as Lieutenant Colonel in 1962. 2
His wartime experiences led naturally to the aerospace industry where he worked in a variety of
engineering positions. Courses at Columbia University prompted his early entry into the
computer industry, where he worked in operations, consulting, and management. For many
years, Michael was a manager and executive with Celanese Corporation, a Fortune 100
petrochemical company, retiring as vice president of its management services division.
He took special interest in connecting information technology to corporate executives. In a 1974
Computerworld article reporting on a session he’d organized at Info ’74, he praised the
1
2
Edward J. Bride, “How to Succeed in MIS: ‘Identify with Company’,” Computerworld (20 September 1972): 4.
World War II Glider Pilots (Turner Publishing, 1991), p. 135.
8
expansion in the attendance of corporate managers: “this year 10 of you out of about 100 are
corporate executives. I think that’s progress.” At the time Michael was a vice president at
Celanese concerned with the “management gap” between corporate executives and dataprocessing personnel. 3 Eight years later, Computerworld profiled Michael’s keynote address to
the International Data Corporation’s 1982 Spring Executive Conference. There Michael gave a
critical assessment of office automation, noting successes with word processing, but observing
many other promising applications (including email!) were hampered by too many “buzzwords”
and not enough careful alignment of technology and conceptualization of office work. 4
Michael began donating to the CBI Friends program nearly the moment it got off the ground: his
first contribution was December 1982 (and our donor records clearly indicate this was a “new”
membership). He continued faithfully and regularly, most frequently as an Associate member,
over more than two decades. We were saddened to hear of Michael’s passing in 2007. His
estate passed into probate in New York state, then was transferred to Israel for final settlement.
This process has taken some time, but we are grateful for the very generous contribution that
came to CBI as a residual legatee of Michael’s estate. We have arranged with the University of
Minnesota Foundation to create the “Michael Samek Fund” with its purpose to be “support of
longer-term activities and initiatives of the Charles Babbage Institute, such as funding for special
workshops, conferences, CBI research programs, and associated scholarly publications that
enhance visibility and scholarly attention to CBI.”
We are grateful to Michael for his support over these many years and, especially, for his
intentional donation to CBI through his estate planning.
Thomas J. Misa
3
“Gap Narrows Slowly But Top Executives Still Shy From DP,” Computerworld (25 September 1974): 9.
Bruce Hoard, “Conference Keynoter Critical of OA [office automation] Scene,” Computerworld (10 May 1982):
16.
4
9
John Cullinane’s CBI Book: Smarter than
Their Machines (2014)
John Cullinane came to us last spring with a great and urgent question. “You have these
amazing oral histories,” he told us, “and you simply must get them out to the world!” It
happened that back in 2003 John had been interviewed by CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost as
part of CBI’s NSF-funded project
on the history of software. John
was the founder in 1968 of
Cullinane Corporation, one of the
earliest and most successful
software products companies. He
clearly had an important story to
tell.
John floated the idea of
publishing a book from the CBI
oral histories, and Jeff made the
suggestion of adding John’s voice
and perspective as an integral
part. John went to work looking
up the people that he’d worked
with and, sometimes, worked for
in the CBI interviews. He also
crafted introductions and
commentaries that connected his
personal story with the
interviews.
The CBI interviewees that had
direct connections to John’s
history formed quite a list. Early
on, John went to work for C-E-IR, Inc., the prototype computer
services company founded by
Herbert Robinson. John was a
“hockey dad” at ringside with
famed computer designer Richard Bloch, the pioneering computer programmer with the Harvard
Mark I. Bloch’s computers were among those that Sam Wyly sold as a rising Honeywell
salesman, while Gene Amdahl’s computers for IBM were also sold by Wyly; and it happened
that Wyly succeeded massively in the computer-services sector where Robinson had struggled.
Interactive computing was a mainstay of Cullinane Corporation, which used data networks and
databases to create and deliver software products. So there are intriguing selections from the
ARPANET and Internet pioneers: J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Larry Roberts, and Bob
Kahn. The transformation of computing at MIT is a focus of Marvin Minsky and Michael
10
Dertouzos, and Joseph Traub describes the creation of Carnegie Mellon’s notable computerscience department. Jeff’s interview with John rounds out the volume.
We hatched a plan for publishing the book. John finalized the text, photos, and captions in
September 2014. We’d arranged a contract with the newly launched series at ACM Books. The
fine editorial and production staff at publishers Morgan & Claypool went to work, and we had
the book by November, well in time for Christmas. ACM Books is a new venture, publishing a
wide variety of computer science volumes — including history of computing. John’s book
contains extracts from the CBI oral histories, and the e-book version contains direct links to the
complete oral histories on the University of Minnesota server. It is simply unheard-of to have a
2.5 month book production cycle.
You can find John’s book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in the ACM’s Digital Library and
by DOI. For that matter, since we sent thank you copies to each of our CBI Friends, you can join
the CBI Friends today and we’ll send you John’s book tomorrow!
John gave an hour-long seminar at Harvard University earlier this spring, and a pod cast is here
<https://soundcloud.com/harvard/public-private-partnerships-a?in=harvard/sets/m-rcbgpodcasts#t=4:55> “Are we still smarter than our machines?” he was asked by an audience
member. Judging from the up-swelling of computer savvy by young people, he noted, the
answer remains a resounding ‘yes’.
Thomas J. Misa
11
Yost Attends NSF SaTC PI 2015
CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost attended and presented a poster at the National Science
Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Principal Investigators Conference in
Arlington, Virginia, in early January 2015. The event (held biennially) brought together NSF
SaTC-funded investigators to present results, network, share ideas, and plan for the future.
The three-day conference, led by SaTC program director Jeremy
Epstein and attended by more than 400 investigators, included
keynote talks, breakout discussions, “rapid-fire cross-collaborations,”
and regular, poster, and “birds of a feather” sessions on many key
topics in computer security and privacy. Among the highlights, Chief
Information Security Officer of In-Q-Tel Dan Geer presented, “T.S.
Kuhn Revisited,” in which he examined the history of computer
security within the context of Kuhn’s concepts of “normal science,”
“extraordinary science,” and “paradigm shifts,” and in a closing
plenary session, former NSF Trustworthy Computing (SaTC’s prior
name) director Carl Landwehr explored how—despite many
achievements in computer security research—the field’s largest
problems have been constant over the past decade and a half.
Jeremy Epstein, SaTC Director
Yost’s poster highlighted the
accomplishments of CBI’s “Building an
Infrastructure for Computer Security
History,” a SaTC-funded project he coleads with CBI director Tom Misa. To
date 27 of the planned 30 oral histories
have been conducted (with many of the
foremost computer security pioneers,
including Rebecca Bace, Terry Benzel,
David Bell, Dorothy Denning, Peter
Denning, Butler Lampson, Carl Landwehr,
Steve Lipner, Teresa Lunt, Peter Neumann,
Roger Schell, and Gene Spafford). The
full text of these interviews—typically 2 to
4 hour interviews with 70 to 150 page
edited transcripts—are available at
www.cbi.umn.edu/oh. The first of our
two Computer Security special issues of
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
(April-June 2015) will be out shortly and
features seminal scholarship on the history
of cryptography, computer security
standards, network security, computer
security and policy-making, and the
computer security industry. The articles
richly explore the many social, cultural, political, economic, and institutional contexts to
12
computer security (see the following article). As with the second special issue (to be published in
2016), it is composed of revised papers from CBI’s “Computer Security History Workshop,”
held at the institute in July 2014. In addition to facilitating and editing scholarship of an
emerging computer security history community, the project team has been actively publishing.
Yost has two peer-reviewed articles coming out, GSRA Nic Lewis one, and Misa, Yost, and
Lewis have more in the works. Our project’s Computer Security Wiki—detailing the history of
key people, events, ideas, and systems—has been receiving thousands of page views per month.
The Wiki is at <tinyurl.com/cbi-secure>. And our archival collecting effort has yielded many
important materials donated by Steve Lipner, Stephen Lukasik, Lance Hofffman, and others.
First of Two CBI “Computer Security” Special
Issues of the Annals (April-June 2015)
The July 2014 CBI Computer Security
History Workshop brought together
leading computer historians and some
of the foremost computer security
pioneers for two days of presentations,
discussions, and exchange. Revised
papers from this event will be
published as two CBI guest edited
special issues of IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing, the first of
which will be out any day now (and
the second in 2016).
This special issue features RAND
Corporation’s Willis Ware on the
cover, a leading computer scientist
who was the first to formally articulate
(at the 1967 Spring Joint Computer
Conference) the multi-level computer
security problem introduced by the
rapid advance of time-shared computer
systems in the 1960s. Ware went on to
lead the Defense Science Board Task
Force on Computer Security in the late
1960s that completed the famed Ware
Report in 1970, and several highly
influential committees on computers
and privacy later that decade. CBI holds the Willis H. Ware Papers, which are especially strong
documenting his committee leadership efforts regarding computers and privacy.
13
The articles of our special issue make major contributions to the technical, business, political,
social, cultural, and intellectual history of computer security. US Cybercommand Historian
Michael Warner and Microsoft’s Steve Lipner’s papers concentrate on foundations—with
Warner focusing more on policy history within the executive and legislative branches and Lipner
on the pre-history, history, and consequences of the Department of Defense computer security
standards with the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (“The Orange Book”) and the
associated certification infrastructure in the 1980s. Cornell University’s Rebecca Slayton and I
extend these foundations. Slayton’s article examines how U.S. government regulators valued
risk analysis and metrics, as practitioners often questioned the measurement of risk. I analyze
the origins and growth of the computer security software products industry—showing how
computer giants (IBM) and startups (SKK, Inc.) listened to users in developing access control
software products well short of the high assurance goals (upper end of the criteria levels) set by
the DoD with TCSEC. Finally, American University’s Laura DeNardis and Indiana University’s
Dongoh Park concentrate on elements of the political and social history of communication
security, surveillance, and cryptography. DeNardis’ article investigates the design tension
between national security interests for surveillance versus network security in computing from
the mid-1980s into the 2000s—focusing on the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Park extends the geographic scope with a case study of public key encryption technology in
South Korea—highlighting the significant social and cultural challenges, as well as technological
ones, in implementing public key infrastructure.
We are grateful to all the participants of the workshop for their insightful comments and
especially to the Annals Editor-in-Chief Nathan Ensmenger for his participation at the event and
guidance with the issue. We are also grateful to the National Science Foundation and past and
present program directors Carl Landwehr and Jeremy Epstein (of Trustworthy Computing and
SaTC respectively) for funding the workshop and CBI’s larger four-year computer security
history project—NSF 1116862.
Both electronic and print subscriptions to the Annals are available from the IEEE Computer
Society, and electronic versions of all issue content are free to download to those affiliated with
organizations subscribing to either the IEEE Computer Society Digital Library (through IEEE
Xplore) or Project MUSE.
Jeffrey R. Yost
14
Isaacson’s Innovators: Historian’s Reflections
A philosopher-colleague once told me that historians read books “backwards.” Normal readers,
he thought, read books from their beginning to the end, from start to finish, left to right, top to
bottom. What was most important was the quality and soundness of the author’s argument, and
he or she built it up one sequential piece at a time. And you follow an argument from beginning
to end. Historians, by contrast, open a book to the beginning pages, start in on their reading, but
soon they are rummaging around in the footnotes, at the end of the book, how strange. Of
course, I responded, for a historian the key thing is trying to assess the quality of the evidence.
And you find the telltale trail of evidence in the footnotes.
Walter Isaacson’s Innovators: How a Group of Hackers,
Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)
is, I believe, a philosopher’s book. It offers memorable
profiles and a powerful narrative, providing a neat and tidy
argument linking up Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in
the early 19th century through the haze of the 1960s
counterculture’s LSD parties and onward to the buzz about
social media today. Ada Lovelace is the touchstone: the
subject of his first and last chapter, seeing better than her
collaborator and confidant Babbage that computing could
be about far more than numbers and calculation. Isaacson’s
Lovelace attained the lofty heights of “poetical science,”
where the idealism of the Romantic period fused with the
calculating mentality of the Victorians. In his conclusion,
“Ada Forever,” Isaacson speculates that were she alive
today she would celebrate computers as “beautiful
machines that can . . . make music and process words and
‘combine together general symbols in successions of
unlimited variety’.” He thus meaningfully connects
Lovelace with Twitter, no small achievement.
I made it to page two before my “backward” historian’s habits kicked in. Before burdening the
reader with my rummaging around in the sources and footnotes, let me give an overview of
Isaacson’s themes and perspective. Isaacson finds his heroes in latter-day Renaissance men who,
like Leonardo da Vinci, creatively combined science and technology with an interest in art,
music, and philosophy. William Shockley, the brilliant but troubled co-inventor of the transistor,
“grew up with a love of both art and science.” J.C.R. Licklider, the visionary behind the
Arpanet, was a shrewd judge of computer scientists, yet “one of [his] passions was art.”
Likewise, Isaacson shows repeatedly that vibrant communities of diverse practitioners (Bell Labs
was the locus of George Stibitz, Claude Shannon, and the transistor trio) are the locus of
technological innovation. Solitary geniuses, such as John Atanasoff “on his own” at isolated
Iowa State or even Charles Babbage, who in Isaacson’s retelling was alone “in the shed behind
his London home,” lack the supportive environment to realize enduring achievements.
Above all, Isaacson is a master at the all-encompassing narrative that lines up and connects
disparate people and diverse facts. The narrative creates connections and conjures influences
15
forward, even where the historical evidence is slim. In his very first paragraph on Howard
Aiken, then a Harvard graduate student, Isaacson has him discovering a fragment of one of
Babbage’s Difference Engines (two wheels) and becoming “fascinated by Babbage.” Soon Aiken
drafts a 22-page memo to the Harvard faculty that finds its way to IBM. “The Harvard I
[computer] borrowed a lot of Babbage’s ideas,” he writes (52). Another narrative arc connects
Bell Labs and Silicon Valley. Compared with 60 pages on the familiar storyline from Shockley
and Bell Labs to Intel and the naming of “Silicon Valley” in 1971, there is by my count just three
paragraphs on Hewlett Packard. Personal computing is likewise a familiar story (based on John
Markoff and Fred Turner) with Steward Brand at the center. Footnote 3 on page 509 discloses
the tantalizing bit that Isaacson, then at Time magazine, assigned to Brand the the 1995 essay
“We Owe it All to the Hippies,” the origin point of the counterculture-creates-personalcomputing mythos. LSD gets seven pages in the index, more than Manchester and Cambridge
universities, Maurice Wilkes, and Freddie Williams—combined (this is an American story).
What drops out of strong narratives is the uncertain play of contingent events and the possible
roads not taken. For example, Isaacson provides a lengthy treatment of America Online, since it
seems AOL provided the masses with an essential introduction to the World Wide Web. Little
remarked is the $350 billion mega-merger of AOL with the Time-Warner media empire. 1
Looking back, we see Isaacson as a print journalist working at the sharp cutting edge of the
digital revolution, and we imagine he has an insider’s story to tell about these challenging years.
On page 3 he relates, all too briefly, “I helped to run a digital division at Time and Time Warner
that launched new Web and broadband internet services . . . [quoting poet Wordsworth:] ‘Bliss
was it in that dawn to be alive’.” Yet later, he rues that “we abandoned our focus on creating
community after we settled into the Web in the mid-1990s” (421). Absent from this account is
reflection on the 1990s big-media dogma that “content is king,” attributed to Bill Gates in the
heady days of MSN and Windows 95; of course Isaacson writes with the present perspective that
the Web led naturally to Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
Isaacson consulted Charles Babbage Institute oral histories for his profiles of ENIAC and
UNIVAC guru J. Presper Eckert as well as the pioneers Richard Bloch, J.C.R. Licklider, and
others. He also did his own interviews with many prominent figures, including insights from his
acclaimed biography of Steve Jobs (2011). By all means pick up Isaacson for a readable
overview of the digital revolution. But keep in mind that there are other compelling figures that
deserve your curiosity. And remember that a full understanding of history cannot be reduced to
a straight line or captured in a single strong narrative. Look sideways to John Agar’s
Government Machine (2003) and Larry Owen’s articles in Technology and Culture and Annals
that dispel the quick judgement that “Digital Beats Analog” (p. 36). Look over the Atlantic to
better understand early programming at Cambridge University and early networking in Europe.
And look beyond the shores of Silicon Valley to understand the contributions and the
consequences of the digital revolution in Japan, India, and China.
Thomas J. Misa
1
Tim Arango, “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times (10 January 2010) at
<www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/11merger.html>.
16
Five 2015 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients
This year’s Arthur Norberg Travel Grants have been awarded to University of Waterloo’s Scott
Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute STS doctoral student Ellen Kathleen Foster, New
York University Department of Music doctoral student Joshua Hudelson, College of William and
Mary American Studies doctoral student Nabeel Siddiqui, and Northeastern Illinois University
CIO (and affiliate Computer Science faculty member) Kim Tracy.
Campbell is studying how Canadian scientists, engineers, managers, and users sought to
professionalize their work in computing in the 1950s and 1960s. He will be drawing on CBI’s
strong collections of organizational records, including those of the Association for Computing
Machinery, Data Processing Management Association, (IBM) Share, Inc., (Univac’s) USE,
AFIPS, and IFIP.
Foster’s dissertation concentrates on the communities, social dynamics, and politics in
“hackerspaces/makerspaces.” At CBI she is particularly interested in researching the influence
of the federal government on “maker culture,” as well as the role on maker communities on
agencies such as ARPA/DARPA. She plans to examine the Alex McKenzie collection on
computer networking as well as the John Day papers.
Hudelson is examining the way in which computer-generated sound and musical notation have
been presented as examples of technological progress, and the impact this has had on musicians,
composers, and audiences. He will be using the John Nash papers, who created the first
computer-generated musical score with the University of Illinois’ ILLIAC, as well as the Carl
Machover papers.
Siddiqui is studying private sphere discourses on computers that have played out in public
through media meant for public consumption (magazines, newsletter, other media). She will be
researching hobbyist newsletters at CBI such as The Amateur Computerist, The Homebrew
Computer Club Newsletter, Dr. Dobbs Journal, and The Silicon Gulch Gazette.
Tracy is conducting archival research at CBI in support of a textbook he is writing on software
evolution and lessons from history (for ACM Books). CBI’s extensive software history
materials provide many opportunities for this broad study. Several collections he is particularly
interested in using are the Michael Mahoney Papers, the Carl Machover Papers, and the Charles
Bachman Papers. (See his write-up elsewhere in this newsletter.)
The Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grant Program is a fund created by donors in honor of the Charles
Babbage Institute’s founding director. To donate to this important fund please go to
<www.makingagift.umn.edu/onlinegiving> and indicate ‘Norberg Fund’ under special
instructions.
Jeffrey R. Yost
17
Gerardo Con Diaz Awarded Tomash Fellowship
Gerardo Con Diaz is the recipient of the
2015-2016 Adelle and Erwin Tomash
Fellowship. He is ABD at Yale University
(History of Science and Medicine), and has a
M.A. from Trinity College, University of
Cambridge (History, Philosophy, and
Sociology of Science and Medicine) and a
B.A. from Harvard University
(Mathematics). Over the past year he has
actively been presenting his dissertation
research at leading conferences, including
the Society for the History of Technology
(2014), and publishing peer reviewed
scholarship (two upcoming articles accepted
at IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing).
Diaz’s dissertation is entitled “Intangible Inventions: A History of Software Patenting in the
United States.” It argues that the commercial, legal, administrative, and philosophical problems
born out of the patent protection of computer programs from the 1940s to the early 1980s shaped
four legal frameworks that facilitated the spread of personal computing in the 1980s. These
frameworks are the copyright protection of computer programs, notions of free software,
software taxation, and the intellectual property protection of visual displays and microchips. His
argument highlights that patent law was central to the emergence and establishment of computer
programs as new technologies, inventions, and commodities.
Archival materials held at CBI have been central to his dissertation research. In fall 2014, he
used the collections on ADAPSO and the CCIA to study how trade associations helped to shape
the software industry’s relationships with the law. He also examined the papers of prominent
firms and people such as Applied Data Research, Martin Goetz, and Calvin Mooers to study the
personal, financial, and professional stakes involved in the intellectual property protection of
software (see related article). CBI’s collections of oral histories, conference proceedings, and
industry periodicals are also prominent throughout the dissertation. In 2015-2016, Diaz will be
conducting archival research at industrial research laboratories, court depositories, and several
branches of the National Archives.
Jeffrey R. Yost
18
Antitrust at CBI: Engaging with the
Archival Holdings on U.S. v. IBM
In the fall of 2014, I visited CBI to perform archival research for my doctoral dissertation,
Intangible Inventions, a history of software patenting in the United States. I worked very closely
with the collections for which patenting is a central concern. These include Applied Data
Research, the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations (ADAPSO), and Martin
Goetz. 1 However, one of my goals for the semester was to examine the relationships between
intellectual property law (the field of law that includes protections such as patents, copyrights,
and trademarks) and antitrust law, which is designed to preclude firms from engaging in
anticompetitive behavior. Fortunately, CBI has an extraordinarily rich collection of antitrust
records compiled by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). 2
My purpose in this essay is to discuss some of the intellectual challenges and opportunities that
arise in the course of studying this massive and often cryptic collection. I use as an example the
records for the prominent antitrust case U.S. v. IBM (69 Civ. 200, S.D.N.Y., 1969), which
comprise a large portion of the CCIA collection. 3 The Department of Justice filed this suit on
January 17, 1969 at the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York. Their
complaint alleged that IBM’s bundling—that is, its free distribution of software with the
purchase of its hardware—was illegal. The suit continued until 1982, when the Assistant
Attorney General, William Baxter, dismissed the suit for lack of merit. In the process, the suit
yielded over one hundred thousand pages in trial transcripts, not counting the thousands of pages
added by trial exhibits and other related materials.
The finding aid for the CCIA’s antitrust records is very useful, but the large volume and unusual
structure of the documents for U.S. v. IBM make the aid difficult to navigate. 4 Twenty two of the
collection’s boxes are labelled by the page numbers and dates of the trial transcripts that they
contain, and several more boxes are labelled with little more than exhibit numbers written in two
different systems. For example, an entry for Box 15 reads “Pages 70371-76096, March 27, 1978June 23, 1978”; another entry specifies that Box 32 contains trial exhibits “CCIA 1327-1357.”
Although the dates in several entries give some sense of when the materials therein were
produced, more information is necessary in order to identify and understand the main issues at
the time.
1
Two articles that I wrote based on my work at CBI are forthcoming in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
Please keep an eye out for “Embodied Software: Patents and the History of Software Development, 1946-1970,” and
“Contested Ontologies of Software: The Story of Gottschalk v. Benson, 1963-1972.”
2
Computer and Communications Industry Association. Antitrust Records (CBI 13), Charles Babbage Institute,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. A sister collection is held at the Hagley Museum and Library: Computer &
Communications Industry Association IBM antitrust trial records (Accession 1912), Hagley Museum and Library,
Wilmington, DE 19807.
3
This is a well-known case in the history of computing. See Steven Usselman, “Unbundling IBM: Antitrust and the
Incentives to Innovation in American Computing,” in Sally Clarke, Naomi Lamoreaux, and Steven Usselman, The
Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth Century American Business (Stanford University Press,
2009), 249-279.
4
Finding Aid, Computer and Communications Industry Association Collection of Antitrust Records, CBI 13.
Available online at http://purl.umn.edu/40650.
19
The key to engaging with records for complex cases such as U.S. v. IBM is to think about the
ways in which courts of law generate knowledge. One effective way to start doing this is to study
the courts themselves: What procedures need to be followed in order to accomplish things such
as taking a deposition? What kinds of evidence are admissible, and what standards govern the
admission of facts and exhibits into the trial? For federal courts such as the District Court for the
Southern District of New York, a useful guide to these questions can be found in the Federal
Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence. 5 However, understanding the legal
frameworks involved is not sufficient to make historical sense of them. This is where the
historiography of science, technology, and the law becomes very useful. Indeed, many historians
and STS scholars have written valuable studies that illustrate how to place rules of evidence and
civil procedure in their historical contexts. The space constraints of this contribution preclude me
from discussing their arguments, but their works are valuable examples of how to historicize the
relationships among knowledge, technology, and the law. 6
Still, developing a sophisticated historical understanding of evidence and procedure is only half of
the battle; the other half requires direct engagement with the historical objects themselves.
Fortunately, the U.S. v. IBM collection’s finding aid contains just enough information to begin
this work. In particular, it notes the location of briefs that all parties involved filed at different
points throughout the trial, and each brief in turn notes locations within the transcripts and
exhibits that the historical actors themselves deemed important. The aid points to a gem in the
history of U.S. v. IBM—a document known as the “Mancke Narrative,” crafted by the economist
Richard Mancke and some of his colleagues. An economic analysis of the history of IBM, this
document became the basis for IBM and the United States Data Processing Industry, a book that
Mancke and his co-authors published in 1983 based on their commissioned research for the trial. 7
The citations to the court records found in Mancke’s narrative, in his book, and in the briefs filed
throughout the case’s history provide enough information to start identifying the major factual,
evidential, and procedural issues in the history of U.S. v. IBM. These are difficult to interpret,
however, without understanding the methodological and intellectual matters at stake in the study
of technology and the law. After all, many court documents are hundreds of pages long, and they
can serve as boundary objects among all interested parties—that is, as robust objects that held
different meanings to different people, and which served diverse purposes. Still, despite these
difficulties (or perhaps because of them) the intellectual heavy lifting required to engage with the
U.S. v. IBM records is very rewarding. The collection remains one of my favorite ones at CBI.
Gerardo Con Diaz
Ph.D Candidate, Yale University, gerardo.condiaz@yale.edu
5
Of course, these rules change over time, so it’s important to become familiar with their histories as well. Their more
recent versions can be found in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Available online at
http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp; and Federal Rules of Evidence. Available online at
http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre.
6
Four works with which a scholar new to this field can start thinking about these issues include Ian Burney, Bodies
of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of English Inquest, 1830-1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999); Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case that Put the Whale on
Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010; Tal Golan, Laws of Men
and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004; Sheila Jasanoff, “Science and the Statistical Victim: Modernizing Knowledge in Breast
Implant Litigation.” Social Studies of Science 32 (February 2002): 37-69.
7
Franklin Fisher, James McKie, Richard Mancke, IBM and the United States Data Processing Industry (New York,
Praeger, 1983).
20
Software History at CBI
(Norberg Grant)
Software history, and in particular, that history which is relevant to current students of
computing is the subject of a textbook that I have been working on for some time. I have a fairly
expansive technical background in software, but there are some gaps in my knowledge,
particularly on happenings before my professional career began. Additionally, I knew I needed
to know more about particular key events in software history such as the creation of technologies
we now all depend on such as operating systems, database systems, and computer graphics. The
book I’m working on is entitled Software Evolution: Lessons Learned from Software History. 1
My early searches made it clear that the Charles Babbage Institute was the best single place to go
for such materials. So, as part of my recent sabbatical, I included a trip to CBI in October 2014
as well as several other archives. As a result of that initial trip in October, I applied for and
received a Norberg travel grant to return to CBI in April 2015. The initial trip was only a week
long, and I learned that the resources at CBI certainly deserved devoting another week.
The resources at CBI turned out to be extremely helpful to my work. Since “software” is such a
broad topic and there’s no work quite like this which has a technical history of software, I needed
to develop a framework and an approach for addressing it. In the first visit, it helped me a great
deal to pour through the resources to help solve two issues: How to structure this work? And
what kind of examples should I use?
Particularly helpful to me was the Michael Mahoney papers (CBI 213). Mahoney had devoted
much of his professional career as a historian to computing history and software history in
particular. His papers show a methodology and approach which I found extremely helpful in my
own thinking about how to interrelate topics and changes in software. His papers are littered
with unpublished notes and diagrams that are just fascinating to go through. Additionally, he
had collected almost every seminal paper and book which related to many aspects of software
history. This made it easier for me to find many of the materials that I would end up using.
My initial thought in visiting CBI was to gather specific examples, particular from early
examples of software technologies. Certainly, I found a lot of these including the collections of
Charles Bachman (CBI 125), Alan Perlis (CBI 64), and Carl Machover (CBI 206). These gave
me examples of very early database systems, programming languages and compilers, and
graphics.
Besides the broad scope of materials at CBI, my visit also helped me tie together and better
understand the relationships and interactions between early software pioneers. I had also visited
the Grace Hopper papers at the Smithsonian and the George Forsythe, John McCarthy, and Doug
Engelbart papers at the Stanford University Archives. For instance, when I subsequently visited
the McCarthy papers, having gone through Mahoney’s papers, I had a better understanding of
McCarthy’s role in the theory of computation (even though I had known McCarthy when I was a
student). I found a copy of a 1932 letter from Columbia University’s astronomy professor
1
See an abstract at http://books.acm.org/subjects/forthcoming-titles
21
Wallace J. Eckert to IBM requesting a multiplying tabulating machine. This reminded me of a
similar letter I had seen at the Smithsonian from a Harvard astronomy professor requesting a
computation device in a similar timeframe.
Besides my research on the book, there were several items that, as a computer scientist, are just
awe-inspiring to see. One example is Charles Bachman’s Turing Award (in CBI 125), which I
just had to see and touch. Another fascinating document is the 1948 interrogation report of
Konrad Zuse by British Intelligence where they describe his debriefing (in CBI 17). Other
examples of thrilling items were reminders of my personal history at Bell Labs and items that
filled gaps in my memory (like Brian Kernighan’s 1981 paper on why Pascal was not his favorite
language, and the notes behind the UNIX oral history project in CBI 213). Another thrilling
example was the boards from the Bendix G-15 in CBI 90-008.
Bachman’s 1973 Turing Award Plaque.
Bendix G-15 Flip Flop board (IC1007RA), 1954.
22
In summary, the resources at the CBI were invaluable to me and my project. The scope and
breadth of the computing history resources cannot be matched anywhere. Additionally, the
collections are well-organized, well-maintained, and the finding aids are accurate and detailed.
The staff at the CBI are excellent, I never had to wait for materials, and they were extremely
responsive to my requests making my visits very productive.
Kim Tracy
Chief Information Officer, Northeastern Illinois University
k.w.tracy@ieee.org
Partnerships for Computer History
In January 2006, a fledgling Information Technology (IT) Legacy Committee met with Dr.
Arthur Norberg, then Director of the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI). Three months earlier,
Richard ‘Ole’ Olson (a Lockheed Martin [LMCO] Fellow) approached the VIP Club Board
requesting that they help LMCO to document history associated with their Eagan, Minnesota,
division. Club Director Lowell Benson volunteered to co-chair a legacy committee with Ole.
Board Associate Dick Lundgren spoke up, saying that he would help. He recommended that we
start at CBI. (The VIP Club is a non-profit, social and services club of 1,000 retirees and former
employees of UNISYS, LMCO, and their Twin Cities heritage companies.) Thus, two new
partnerships emerged: the Club partnered with LMCO for legacy investigations and with CBI for
computer history preservation.
Although Dr. Norberg published a book 1 covering UNIVAC’s formation, the committee realized
that that book did not tell the entire story of innovation in the Twin Cities that began with
Engineering Research Associates (ERA). At that January meeting, Dr. Norberg suggested getting
retirees to write career summaries and to record some oral histories. He added that if we could
gather experiences from 200 key people, that we might have the total history of the corporate
lineage. It seemed apropos to begin with ERA: 1) CBI founder, Erwin Tomash, worked at ERA
early in his technical and business career and 2) CBI directors hold the ‘ERA Land-Grant Chair
in History of Technology’ at the University of Minnesota.
Heeding Dr. Norberg’s advice, the IT Legacy Committee established three objectives:
•
First, capture whatever remaining material and information is available;
•
Second, catalog and archive all the material collected;
•
Third, publish/publicize our history and heritage in ways that interest industry and our
fellow Minnesotans via the web and local institutions.
1
Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert Mauchly Computer Company,
Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957 (MIT Press, 2005).
23
The committee realized that we could not document all of
Minnesota’s computer history and so decided to focus on the
heritage illustrated by our IT Legacy icon (at the right).
Thus, even though Bill Norris was one of the ERA founders,
we would not follow details of his subsequent founding of
Control Data Corporation (CDC). Although Seymour Cray
followed Mr. Norris to CDC and subsequently founded
Cray, Inc., we would not pursue that history path. A
UNISYS Fellow, Ron Q. Smith, from our Roseville,
Minnesota facility joined the Legacy committee to provide
the commercial computer industry aspects of the Twin Cities
Legacy.
The LMCO/Club partnership spread the word among employees and retirees asking for paper
and hardware artifacts. LMCO provided artifact storage space plus office space and PCs for the
capture and cataloging efforts. Club volunteers cataloged the artifacts as they were donated.
After Dr. Norberg retired, new CBI Director, Dr. Thomas Misa, continued the partnership as an
advisor. Lowell Benson started a web site to publish retiree/employee career summaries and
project stories. In 2007, we merged the Club and Legacy Committee web sites. We’ve posted
over 100 ‘Article for the Month’ topical papers since then at
<http://vipclubmn.org/documents.html>.
Our partnerships took on a new initiative for 2008 when Dick Lundgren arranged a committee
meeting with the Minnesota Sesquicentennial Commission. The Club/LMCO/UNISYS
committee subsequently displayed hardware artifacts and history posters in a tented booth on the
St. Paul Capitol grounds during the state’s formal, public celebration. The Commission was quite
impressed, and thus asked us to set up the booth display at the Minnesota State Fair and to
conduct a half-day computer history forum at the fair. About 100 volunteers from the Club,
LMCO, UNISYS, and CBI supported these efforts. Then Dick and Lowell arranged to have
documentation 2 of this initiative included in the 2058 Bi-centennial Time Capsule.
In September 2008, Dr. Misa started “Minnesota’s Hidden History of Computing,” a lecture
series presented at the Charles Babbage Institute. The series placed the ERA story within the
larger picture of Minnesota’s computer technology history. Tom referred to our anthology web
site in the lectures and cited a few specific web pages in his recent book Digital State: The Story
of Minnesota’s Computer Industry (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
CBI is part of the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering (CSE) – Dr.
Misa is a professor there in addition to being the CBI director – and the University Libraries. In
January 2010, the Legacy Committee in cooperation with CSE administrative staff set up an
artifact/poster display3 in the University’s Walter Library for the spring semester, then did a
change out for the summer semesters.
In November 2010, Lockheed Martin MS2 in Eagan, Minnesota triggered the ending of the
Club/LMCO partnership with their announcement of a pending 2013 Eagan facility closure. In
2
3
http://vipclubmn.org/Articles/It%27sAWrap.pdf edited by Lowell A. Benson
Display descriptions are articles #138 and #142 at http://vipclubmn.org/documents.html
24
2011, Bernie Jansen (DCHS trustee and VIP Club Member Emeritus) invited Chad Roberts, then
Dakota County Historical Society’s (DCHS) Executive Director, to visit the LMCO Eagan
facility and to review our growing artifact collection. Mr. Roberts was immediately interested in
our rich UNIVAC/Sperry/UNISYS/LMCO local history. The DCHS Board subsequently
approved a motion by Mr. Jansen to accept a donation of the hardware and photo artifacts
gathered by the IT Legacy Committee and to house a permanent Legacy display at their Lawshe
Museum in South St. Paul. Therefore, yet another partnership began – the Club and DCHS.
In the fall of 2012, LMCO’s John Westergren (Legacy Committee co-chair after Ole retired)
facilitated shipping to the Charles Babbage Institute documents, brochures, engineering
logbooks, photo negatives, and other two dimensional items. John also facilitated the LMCO
donation of two semi-truck loads of three-dimensional items such as computers, hardware items,
corporate mementoes, photo prints, 35mm slides, photo transparencies, etc. to DCHS’s Lawshe
Museum. Mr. Roberts proposed and received a state Legacy grant for the accessioning of the
artifacts into the DCHS database. At the museum, retiree volunteers set up a 5-station network
with which to log and identify 20,000 or more photos.
In 2013 volunteers worked with new
DCHS Executive Director, Lynn
Gruber, to write a second MN Legacy
grant proposal, “The Birth of
Minnesota’s Computer Industry – A
Photo Essay.” The partnership set up
a couple of ‘history poster’ displays 4
in their grand hall for public viewing
beginning in August of 2013, and
then started working on the second
grant.
THE FUTURE? These computer history partnerships will continue! This year we plan to: 1)
Write a third MN Legacy grant proposal to develop additional topical poster boards for the
Lawshe Museum Exhibits; 2) Continue the volunteer photo identification work at the museum;
3) Continue web site ‘Article for the Month’ postings; and 4) perhaps repeat display setups at the
University as we did in 2010 or set up small legacy displays in other public facilities.
Lowell A. Benson
VIP Club 2014/15 President
labenson@q.com
4
Exhibit descriptions are articles #185, 199, & 200 at http://vipclubmn.org/documents.html.
25
Hollywood Computer Graphics at CBI
Wavefront exhibit at CBI curated by Rebecca Hranj. Photo courtesy of Justin Meredith.
In January this year, I set to processing several pallets of materials that had arrived on the
Andersen Library loading dock from California. The initial inventory was large and disorienting
but turned out to be an exciting new collection for the Charles Babbage Institute: the complete
contents of Mark Sylvester’s office at Alias|Wavefront. Sylvester, CEO and cofounder of
introNetworks and well known in the TED community, was a pioneer in computer graphics
animation. Along with Bill Kovacs and Larry Barels, Sylvester cofounded Wavefront
Technologies in 1984 and set to work on revolutionizing computer graphics in film, industry,
advertising, and video games.
Early software applications include The Data Visualizer, Composer,
and Dynamation. In 1995 Wavefront was purchased by Silicon
Graphics and merged with Alias Research to become Alias|Wavefront.
This merger gave birth to Maya, 3-D modeling and animation software
that has become an industry standard. Maya, now owned by Autodesk,
is used to produce South Park and earned Alias|Wavefront a 2003
Academy Award for scientific and technical achievement.
Anyone who has consumed media in the last decades has seen the
fruits of Alias|Wavefront’s labors. Even a sampling of names and titles
shows the impact their software had on the entertainment industry:
Photo: Justin Meredith
26
NBC, NASA, GameWare for Atari, Knight Rider, Crimson Tide, Aladdin, Stargate, Total Recall,
Columbia Pictures.
The collection itself reads as a history of the company and
Sylvester’s professional engagement. Holiday cards from
LucasFilm came in boxes with hundreds of pages of bound
news clippings documenting the company’s work.
Company records were interfiled with awards from the
Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce and thank you cards
from elementary school students. Sylvester’s career as a
chef is also recorded by a substantive collection of
restaurant menus. Conference materials and design
publications cover 20 years of industry history, and a book
collection shows a leader with a desire to have a positive
impact on everything he touched. A substantial collection
of videos—in several formats, including BetaMax—
provides access to samples, shorts, and portfolios from
names that regularly appear in movie credits. The company
demos astound the viewer with the range and beauty of
their work.
Photo: Justin Meredith
The history and development of computer graphics told by the Alias|Wavefront collection will
naturally appeal to historians that frequent CBI, but it will also prove important to graphic
designers, film and gaming historians, even students of Chinese and Japanese cultures.
The Wavefront archive will be made available later this year. For further information, please
contact CBI Curator-Archivist, Arvid Nelsen. Special thanks go to Mark Sylvester, both for
donating an incredible collection and sharing tidbits via Twitter. You can give him a shout-out at
@marksylvester.
Rebecca Hranj
27
Recent Publications
Alberts, Gerard and Edgar G. Daylight. “Universality Versus Locality: The Amsterdam Style of
Algol Implementation.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 36:4 (October-December
2014): 52-63.
Alper, Meryl. “Augmentative, Alternative, and Assistive: Reimagining the History of Mobile
Computing and Disability.” [Think Piece] IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37:1
(January-March 2015): 93-96.
Aspray, William. “The Many Histories of Information.” Information & Culture 50:1 (FebruaryMarch 2015): 1-23.
Bradford, Phillip G. and Paul J. Miranti. “Automating Odd-Lot Trading at the New York Stock
Exchange, 1958-1976.” Technology and Culture 55:4 (October 2014): 850-879.
Bruderer, Herbert. Meilensteine der Rechentechnik: Zur Geschichte der Mathematik und der
Informatik (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015).
Carlsson-Hyslop, Anna. “Human Computing Practices and Patronage: Anti-Aircraft Ballistics
and Tidal Calculations in First World War Britain.” Information & Culture 50:1 (FebruaryMarch 2015): 70-109.
Collopy, Peter Sachs. “Video Synthesizers: From Analog Computing to Digital Art.” IEEE
Annals of the History of Computing 36:4 (October-December 2014): 74-86.
Coopersmith, Jonanthan. Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2015).
Cortada, James W. “‘There is No Saturation Point in Education’: Inside IBM’s Sales School,
1970s-1980s.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37:1 (January-March 2015): 56-66.
Cullinane, John. Smarter Than Their Machines: Oral Histories of Pioneers in Interactive
Computing (New York: Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool, 2014).
Driscoll, Kevin. “Professional Work for Nothing: Software Commercialization and ‘An Open
Letter to Hobbyists.’” Information & Culture 50:2 (May-June 2015): 257-283.
Durnová, Helena. “Embracing the Algol Effort in Czechoslovakia.” IEEE Annals of the History
of Computing 36:4 (October-December 2014): 26-37.
Durnová, Helena and Gerard Alberts. “Was Algol 60 the First Algorithmic Language?” [Think
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IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 37:1 (January-March 2015): 44-55.
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Compiled by Jeffrey R. Yost
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Featured Photo
“Claude Shannon, the originator of Information Theory, at the board and Dave Hagelbarger work out
some equations needed. Their current projects include work on automata - advanced type of computing
machines which are able to perform various ‘thought’ functions.” Bell Laboratories, circa. 1955.
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