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Welcome to Computing ThenWhile Computing Now focuses on hot-topic articles and the latest developments in the technology world, Computing Then is designed to take a step back—to contemplate, explore, celebrate, analyze, and learn from the past. The site draws considerably from articles and documentation of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, the leading source of scholarship and pioneering accounts in this field. Computing Then presents materials in both traditional (PDFs) and new, multimedia formats (including podcasts). The site will continue to explore new mechanisms and means for producing and distributing a wide variety of content on the history of computing, software, and networking. — Lars Heide, Editor in Chief, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing | ||
Cybernetics, Automata Studies, and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1956, is generally regarded by historians and computer scientists as the "birthplace" of AI. Pamela McCorduck argued that two events mark its significance: the debut of the "new paradigm" of symbolic information processing, represented by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's Logic Theorist computer program, and the "social patterns" set by participants who founded the early AI programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Stanford Research Institute. Click here for a PDF (237 KB) of the entire article (12 pp.). Charles W. Bachman: Database Software Pioneer
Charles W. Bachman was born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1924 but did not stay there long. His father, a Hall of Fame football coach, moved their family several times before settling in East Lansing, Michigan, for a long spell working at what was then Michigan State College. Charles earned strong grades in most subjects but decided on an engineering career at an early age. When I interviewed him in 2004, he told me, "I was never interested in anything else. I was always going to be an engineer." Click here for a PDF (237 KB) of the entire article (11 pp.). Events and Sightings: 50th Anniversary of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System
Time sharing was in the air around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge in the years surrounding 1961. MIT faculty, staff, and students who had worked directly with the Whirlwind or TX-0 computer sitting at their consoles wanted more of that interactive access. The then-traditional batch-processing computer system approach was slow for program debugging and was made worse by machine overloading as digital computing was becoming more popular. MIT professor John McCarthy had been articulating the argument for time-shared interactive computers for several years, and professor Herb Teager proposed his own experiment with time sharing. Click here for a PDF (138 KB) of the entire article (2 pp.). | New from CS Press: The IBM CenturyMore than a century ago Herman Hollerith pioneered punch card tabulation technology. In 1911 his enterprise became the centerpiece of a new corporation (renamed in the 1920s), International Business Machines (IBM). Over the past century IBM has transformed how we record, calculate, and process information — forever changing business, science, engineering, government, and leisure. Far more than any other firm, IBM created the IT revolution. This unique volume brings together fascinating memoirs of key IBM engineers and managers of the past 100 years — from Walter Jones, who started as a sales engineer in 1912 and rose through the ranks for three decades, to Cuthbert Hurd, James Birkenstock, Bob Evans, John Backus, Watts Humphrey, and others who led IBM to supremacy in digital computing and software. It details punch card tabulation, IBM’s entrance into computing, and the transformative IBM hardware (IBM 650, IBM 1401, System/360) and software (FORTRAN, SABRE, IMS) that changed the world. The IBM Century contains an IBM timeline, the most comprehensive IBM annotated bibliography to date, and a new introductory essay that characterizes IBM's 100-year history and contextualizes each of the memoirs. Jeffrey R. Yost is associate director of the Charles Babbage Institute, a faculty member in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota, and editor-in-chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. He has published books on the history of the computer industry and scientific computing, and more than a dozen single-authored, peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the business, social, cultural, and intellectual history of computing. He has led or co-led more than $1.6 million in National Science Foundation-sponsored historical research projects on computing, software, and networking. Read an excerpt from the book (PDF) Purchase the book — enter code EC4Z898L at checkout to receive a 15% discount. Annals Through the YearsFor three decades Annals has been publishing path-breaking academic scholarship, pioneer accounts, and department pieces detailing the rich history of computing around the world. "Annals Through the Years" highlights this material with a few selections from each year. These selections, chosen for their importance and/or continuing interest, will be rolled out on Computing Then every several weeks from the earliest volumes forward. Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug
Click here for a PDF (731 KB) of the entire article (5 pp.). The ENIAC Patent
Click here for a PDF (260 KB) of the entire article (6 pp.). | |
The terms "computer bug," "software bug," and "debugging" have long been ubiquitous in the IT world, and in recent decades, with the broader public. In this engaging short article, historian Peggy Kidwell examines the history of the term "bug," and its use in engineering, and more specifically, in computing and software. She unravels truth from myth as she explains how a moth was actually found in 1947 in one of the relays of the malfunctioning Harvard Mark II (a tale commonly cited as the origin of the term). The moth was removed and taped to the Mark II logbook (and now resides at the Smithsonian Institution), but the term had been used by engineers for many decades to designate a problem or roadblock to the successful design or operation of various technologies, and had been adopted by Harvard personnel, and perhaps others, for at least several years in reference to problems with the operation of digital computer systems. The very fact that the moth was saved was because of the existence of the terminology, the language was not the result of this incident—though the story probably has lent weight to the accelerating usage of the terms "bug" and "debugging." Kidwell provides a highly interesting exploration of the history of this computer terminology, while making an important broader point of our need to more thoroughly study the history and processes of debugging computer hardware and software. In general far more attention has focused on design of hardware and software than on its maintenance—despite the tremendous time, skill, and expense of fixing systems and keeping them running.
The ENIAC patent, and particularly the testing of the patent in the famous Honeywell versus Sperry Rand court case (180 USPO 670), were pivotal moments in the computing field with significant potential ramifications for innovation in computing technology, and the trajectory of firms within the computer industry. The author of this Anecdote, Charles E. McTiernan, was an U.S. Army captain first stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground's (APL) Ballistic Research Laboratory in 1944, and later APL's Instrumentation Section (in both cases giving him exposure to the ENIAC project as it progressed). After the war, McTiernan became a patent attorney, working in the U.S. Patent Office, and later, a corporate patent attorney—first for IBM, and in 1960, for Sperry Rand. From his unique set of vantage points he traces the history of the development of the ENIAC patent application, the violation of the property rights of ENIAC's inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the nearly decade-long period where the patent was not examined, negotiations with computer industry firms on royalties for the Sperry Rand-held ENIAC patent (Sperry Rand's UNIVAC division was in part the legacy of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and the trial and ruling that invalidated the patent in 1973.