CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

NEWSLETTER

CBI Vol. 39 No. 1 Spring 2017

In This Issue:

Director’s Desk

SIGCIS Command Lines

CHM Software History Roundtable

News from the Archives

Babintseva 2017-2018 Tomash Fellow

Walter Bauer and the Birth of “Informatics”

2017 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients

Computer History Outside

Eric A. Weiss Papers

Recent Publications

Featured Photograph

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CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

NEWSLETTER Spring 2017

Vol. 39 No. 1

In This Issue:

Director’s Desk 3

SIGCIS Command Lines 6

CHM Software History Roundtable 9

News from the Archives 11

Babintseva 2017-2018 Tomash Fellow 13

Walter Bauer and the Birth of “Informatics” 14

2017 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients 17

Computer History Outside 18

Eric A. Weiss Papers 20

Recent Publications 22

Featured Photograph 24

CBI Newsletter Editor: Jeffrey R. Yost

Charles Babbage Institute 211 Andersen Library University of Minnesota 222 21st Avenue South Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

Managing Editor: Kathryn Charlet

Email: cbi@umn.edu Phone: (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

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Director’s Desk I began these columns in Fall 2007, roughly a year after I arrived at the University of Minnesota in 2006. The interval in the CBI Newsletter was largely devoted to a celebration of Arthur Norberg’s retirement as director of the Charles Babbage Institute and my accommodation to the new post. Since then it’s been an exciting and engaging eleven years. It’s been a tremendous honor and genuine privilege to lead CBI. This is my last “Director’s Desk” since I’ll be stepping down at the end of June, the usual and customary timing for University of Minnesota administrative appointments. Later in this piece I’ll make some observations about the directions CBI is going, but first I’d like a chance to reflect on where CBI has been. We’re historians, after all. I’d dreamed of having a second crack at the “golden age” of CBI that existed in the years following its move to the University of Minnesota in 1980. Then, the founding trio of Arthur Norberg, Bill Aspray, and Bruce Bruemmer had the heady experience “of passionate and energetic intellectual work while we labored to create a new academic discipline,” in Aspray’s words. I think we’ve done our part. In the CBI Newsletter containing the inaugural “Director’s Desk” there were articles on launching the NSF–FastLane project, Jeff Yost becoming Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, inaugurating the Arthur Norberg Travel Fund, and expanding CBI’s international profile. And that was just the Fall of 2007! No one imagined that for the FastLane project we’d do an immense set of oral histories, far beyond expectation: 643 are in a publicly accessible dataset, out of the total of 800 interviews we did for the five-year project as a whole. When I asked Katie Charlet, who took charge of the herculean task of editing, processing, and posting them—well, how many pages does the set of FastLane transcripts total, her reply was firm but polite: I’m not counting; don't ask. So, instead, we measured the transcripts, filling three oversize file cabinet drawers, at six linear feet. Based on this unique dataset, Jeff Yost and I co-authored FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World (Johns Hopkins University, 2015). What is more, with the FastLane project we honed a new model of structured interview questions that proved helpful for the recently completed Sloan Foundation project on women in the computing industry. Jeff Yost’s editorship of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing also set new benchmarks. In his four-year term, Jeff published more scholarly articles than ever before, making Annals a highly respected scholarly journal in the history of computing. Jeff has gone on to lead the IEEE Computer Society’s History Committee, creating greater awareness within the IEEE CS of its rich history as well as initiating an oral history project to interview the society’s past presidents. For our subsequent multi-year NSF project, on the history of computer security, with Jeff’s insight and initiative we published two special issues of Annals on computer security. And with the Arthur Norberg Travel Fund, we began an initiative that has supported 31 splendid research projects that mined CBI’s unparalleled archival, print, and image resources. This fund was imagined by Arthur’s University of Minnesota colleague Sally Kohlstedt to honor his leadership of CBI and to expand research in the field on the base of CBI resources. Researchers respond warmly. “My gratitude to the Charles Babbage Institute . . . is enormous. The Arthur Norberg grant . . . allowed me to spend two extraordinary weeks in the archives of the Babbage

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Institute . . . That experience in the archives remains one of the highlights of my academic life,” wrote one Ph.D. student in her dissertation’s preface. We’ve been fortunate in the great enthusiasm that CBI Friends have shown in helping us build up the Norberg fund. If you’d like to join these donors to the Norberg Fund, don’t hesitate to give us a call. It’s difficult to untangle CBI research projects, CBI oral histories, and CBI archival collections. Indeed these are three legs of the infrastructure for computer history that CBI has been building for decades. For the NSF-funded computer security project, we completed 31 oral histories with pioneers in the field. As a result of an oral history, we often find collecting opportunities for archival materials. Prior to the NSF funded research project, CBI had three computer-security collections, including papers from Willis Ware, David Cavanagh, and Donn Parker; now we have additional collections from Steven Lipner, Lance Hoffman, Terry Benzel, Thomas Bailey, Rick Smith, Dick Kain, and Stephen Lukasik. And speaking of archives . . . soon enough came the “Nelsen Tsunami,” which crested in two successive waves during Arvid Nelsen’s tenure as CBI archivist beginning in spring 2007. I gave some highlights in the Spring 2016 Newsletter. As a rare books specialist, Arvid gave special attention to CBI’s print materials. These expanded during his tenure by a factor of five, from roughly 2,000 to 10,000 volumes. Even better, the books are fully visible in the University Libraries online catalogue. I used it just last week. I’ve been collecting some oddball volumes and wanted to donate them to CBI. Who knew that Cecil Hastings’s Approximations for Digital Computers (Princeton 1955) was already at CBI in the Cortada collection? Or that Ross Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics (London 1964) was already in the Mahoney collection? At least I’ll donate a singular copy of Ed Yourdon’s Silent Witness: A Novel of Computer Crime (1982). Arvid’s accomplishments in traditional archiving were equally impressive. He added no less than 192 archival collections that total 1,640 cubic feet. This measure is around one-third of the entire CBI archival collection that existed in 2006. There are many impressive gems, including the records from Gartner Group, Lockheed Martin, Association for Computing Machinery, and the Carl Machover Papers, among many others. He also started the “Social Issues in Computing” print collection described in the Newsletter. Arvid capitalized on the work done by founding CBI archivist Bruce Bruemmer and his successors Elisabeth Kaplan, Carrie Seib, Karen Spilman, and Stephanie Crowe; and we are excited that Amanda Wick is continuing the tradition with active collecting and imaginative outreach. She is energetically following up with archival collections documenting motion-picture graphics, including company records from Alias | Wavefront direct from co-founder Mark Sylvester (120 cubic feet) and papers from long-time Los Angeles ACM SIGGRAPH leader Joan Collins and collector Russell Hobbie. I’m especially proud of CBI’s research output. In the past dozen years CBI staff have published a dozen books, three special issues of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and more than 20 articles and chapters. In addition to this, Jeff Yost helped revise the widely used textbook in history of computing, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Westview Press, third edition, 2014) and I published a revised second edition of Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Johns Hopkins University Press 2011). My book Digital State: The Story of Minnesota's Computing Industry (University of Minnesota Press 2013) is based on CBI oral histories, photographs, and archival collections. In the past year ACM Books published my edited volume, Communities of Computing: Computer Science and Society in the ACM (2016), which draws extensively on CBI research supported by the Norberg

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Travel Fund as well as the ACM History Committee. And, at this very moment, Jeff Yost is correcting page proofs for Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press 2017), based on his deep archival research that profiles the origins and six-decade evolution of today’s $1 trillion computer-services industry. History of computing is one of the liveliest fields around, with exciting new work and expanding audiences. CBI’s future is in excellent hands, and it will go from strength to strength. I’ll be returning to a regular faculty position in the university’s History of Science and Technology Program. We have excellent support from the University of Minnesota, embedded in the University Libraries, the History of Science and Technology Program, and the College of Science and Engineering. Beginning this summer, you can find (as always) Katie Charlet attentively keeping CBI operating smoothly and managing our projects, Jeff Yost energetically doing research and writing and running the center, and Amanda Wick capably holding down the archival fort.

Thomas J. Misa

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SIGCIS “Command Lines: Software, Power, and Performance”

The Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) held its first meeting outside of a SHOT Conference on March 18 and 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. While past SIGCIS conferences all have contained papers from multiple disciplines, the program committee (Andrew Russell, David Brock, Marie Hicks, and Laine Nooney) for this event (through its call for papers as well as invited talks) specifically targeted interdisciplinary perspectives by encouraging papers from history of computing, science and technology studies, software studies, code studies, game studies, media studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and studies of race, ethnicity and post-colonialism. Unlike past SIGCIS conferences the majority of papers were by scholars outside of the history of science and technology, and it was SIGCIS’ largest conference to date with roughly a hundred attendees, more than 40 papers, and several panel sessions. Women of color gave the majority of the invited talks, speaking on issues of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in IT. This programmatic focus resulted in a particularly important and engaging event. In the conference’s opening session, “Why Software? A Keynote Conversation,” University of California-Irvine historian Kavita Philip and Stanford University historian Tom Mullaney, gave fascinating talks on women IT laborers in India (Philip) and Chinese language representation/characters and software (Mullaney) that sparked a lively discussion. The second plenary session, “Power, Affect and Identity in Networked Interactions,”

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also provided rich analyses of race and gender through talks on gender bias and digital imperialism, forensics of child exploitation images, and countering the erasure of African American “technigrationists,” by literature, media, and communication scholar Halcyon Lawrence (Georgia Institute of Technology), sexuality studies scholar Mitali Thikor (Northwestern University), and information studies scholar Safiya Noble (University of California-Los Angeles) respectively. CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost chaired a session on “The Social Construction of Software”—with papers that ranged from “homebrew game development” in Australia to micro-communities using France’s Minitel network. The Computer History Museum provided a great setting as participants could visit the main (permanent) exhibit “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” as well as CHM’s impressive new exhibit “Make Software: Change the World.” The latter focuses on various types of applications—from Photoshop, MRI, and Wikipedia to gaming and motor vehicle crash test simulation software—and includes hands-on tools to teach about software. The papers included: Morgan G. Ames (University of California-Berkeley) “Performing Technological Utopianism with Constructionist Software, from LOGO to Scratch,” Sarah A. Bell (Michigan Technological University) “My Hello Barbie: Friendship is Scripted,” Ingrid Burrington (Data and Society) “Light Industry, Soft Power,” Alexander M. Campolo (New York University) “Graphics, Semiotics, and Governance: Jacques Bertin and Early Data Visualization,” Michael Castelle (University of Chicago) “Brokers, Queues, and Flows: Techniques of Financialization and Consolidation, 1985-2005,” Eileen Clancy (CUNY Graduate Center) “Sekiko Yoshida: Abacus ‘Software’ in the Early U.S. Space Program,” Guy C. Fedorkow (Juniper Networks) “The IBM 1401’s Place in History of Computing,” Bradley R. Fidler (University of California-Los Angeles) “Social Relations and Routing Architectures: Historicizing the End-to-End Principle,” Petrina Foti (Nazareth College of Rochester) “Echos of Power: Collecting and Exhibiting Software at the Smithsonian Institution,” Marie Hicks (Illinois Institute of Technology) “Hacking the System: Transgender Britons Confront the Ministry of Pensions, 1950-1970,” James A. Hodges (Rutgers University-New Brunswick) “Excavating (Anti-)Piracy: Materiality of Intellectual Property Struggles in 1980s Commodore Software,” Matthew L. Jones (Columbia University) “Visualizing Data and Augmenting Cognition from John Tukey to ggplot2,” Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler (Purdue University) “Raceways and Keyboard Trays: The Messy Integration of Personal Computers in American Office Design,” Thomas Krendl Gilbert (University of California-Berkeley) “Seeing Like an Algorithm: Machine Learning and the New Division of Apperceptive Labor,” Halcyon Lawrence (Georgia Institute of Technology) “Inauthentically Speaking: Speech Technology, Accent Bias and Digital Imperialism,” Dylan Lederle-Ensign (University of California-Santa Cruz) “git blame,” Daniel Cardoso Llach (Carnegie Mellon University) “Software Comes to Matter: An Episode in the Material History of Computational Design,” Julien P. Mailland (Indiana University) and Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia) “Micro-serveurs and Micro-communities: Alternative Networks on the Margins of Minitel,” Andrew Meade McGee (Carnegie Mellon University) “Programs of Control: Bureaucratic Hierarchies, Software Implementation, and Agendas of Policy and Power in the U.S. Federal Government, 1963-1983,” Jeffrey Moro (University of Maryland-College Park) “Roomba in Revolt: Sociability and Securitization in the Internet of Things,” Ramsey Nasser (Independent Computer Scientist) “ةجمرب ةغل :بلق and the Cultural Baggage of Computer Science,” Safiya Noble (University of California-Los Angeles) “Speaking Black, Speaking Back: Counternarrating the Erasure of African American ‘Technigrationists’,” Yoehan Oh (Seoul

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National University) “Algorithm Maintainers’ Dilemmas Resolved: When Trending Algorithm, Hidden Labor, and External Audits Caused a Great Search Portal Not to Fail,” Kavita Philip (University of California-Irvine) and Tom Mullaney (Stanford University) “Why Software? a keynote conversation,” Fabian Mauricio Prieto-Nanez (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Ignasi Meda-Calvet (Autonomous University of Barcelona) “Programe su Futuro: Printed Media and Translation in Spanish and Latin American Computing Histories during the 1980s,” Eva-Maria Raffetseder (Technical University Munich) “‘Digital Taylorism’: Working with Process Management Systems in Comparison to Management Practices in Taylor’s Scientific Management,” Joy Marie Lisi Rankin (Michigan State University) “Performing Gender on PLATO,” Erica Robles-Anderson (New York University) “Command Performance: Slideware, Power, and Presentation Culture,” Sreela Sarkar (Santa Clara University) “Away from the Doorsteps of the ICT Center: Youth, Technology, and Development in Global India,” Meredith Sattler (Virginia Tech) “Constructing Performance: Territories of Optimization in Willis and Associates’ CARLA Platform,” Nabeel A. Siddiqui (College of William and Mary) “Trouble in Cyborg Paradise: Johns Hopkins’ First National Search for Applications of Personal Computing to Aid the Handicapped,” Rory Solomon (New York University) “Wireless Infrastructures and the Politics of Connectivity,” Hallam Stevens (Nanyang Technological University) “Data Culture: Historical Methods for the Digital Age,” Melanie Swalwell (Flinders University) “Homebrew Game Development: On Illegitimacy in Software Production,” Mitali Thakor (Northwestern University) “Digital Apprehensions: Forensic Craft and the Policing of Child Exploitation Images,” Melissa Villa-Nicholas (University of Rhode Island) “Latinas On Line: Intersectional Identities at AT&T,” Madisson Whitman (Purdue University) “Scraping Glitches: Social Media and Marginalization,” Carlin Wing (Scripps College) “Touching You, Touching Me: Getting the Physics Right in EA FIFA,” Shari Wolk (New York University) “PEBDAC Error: Problem Exists Between Desk and Chair.” There were also three panel sessions: Daniela K. Rosner (University of Washington), Samantha Shorey (University of Washington), and Rose Paquet Kinsley (University of Washington) “Margaret Hamilton & the Core Memory Weavers: The Women Who Put Man on the Moon”; Laine Nooney (Georgia Tech), Brian McCullough (Internet History Podcast), Melanie Swalwell (Flinders University), and David C. Brock (Computer History Museum) “Tools, Techniques and Communities: Oral History in Software History”; Kilnam Chon (KAIST and Keio University), Chen Yu (President and Cofounder, Yeepay.com), and Camille Paloque-Berges (National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts [Cnam]) “Networking History Roundtable: The Net is Eating Software.”

Jeffrey R. Yost

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CHM’s Software History Roundtable, Honoring Burton Grad and Luanne Johnson On Friday, March 17th roughly twenty leading computer/software historians gathered at the Computer History Museum (CHM) for an afternoon workshop exploring methods, practices, ideas, and boundaries in the field of software history. Earlier that day, many in the group took a field trip to the new CHM Shustek Center—a home for the museum’s archival collections, and a laboratory for computer hardware and software restoration. The meeting was organized by Burton (Burt) Grad and Luanne Johnson, as well as by the Director of the new CHM Center for Software History, David Brock (who moderated the roundtable discussion). The event began with short talks by representatives from institutions focused in whole or part on software history. CHM Board Chair Len Shustek kicked this off by discussing the museum’s evolution as well as new initiatives, including its new exhibit on software applications and the recently opened Shustek Center. Next,

CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost spoke about CBI’s past, present, and future—highlighting sponsored research projects, archival collection development, oral histories, and publications. He expressed how helpful Burt and Luanne (and their many software and services history workshops) were to the research for his book, Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press, forthcoming September 2017). Brock discussed the new Center for Software History, which hosted and helped organize the SIGCIS “Command

Lines: Software, Power, and Performance” conference (see related article). Among the other speakers, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Editor-in-Chief Nathan Ensmenger spoke about the journal’s upcoming content (including former CBI archivist Arvid Nelsen’s cover article drawing on Ebony Magazine, and the possibilities for prosopography, in examining African-American history and computing), and SIGCIS Chair Andy Russell spoke about “Command Lines,” and other programmatic activities of the special interest group. The meeting also served the important purpose of honoring Burt and Luanne, the longtime leaders of CHM Software Industry SIG, and its predecessor, the Software History Center (they retired from this major volunteer leadership effort last year). Burt and Luanne helped facilitate important collection development for both CBI and CHM, and they donated many dozens of oral

A Xerox Alto under restoration by CHM

Burton Grad Luanne Johnson

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histories from software and computer services history workshops to both organizations. They also guest edited six special issues of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (Luanne was a longtime editorial board member and Grad a longtime advisor to the journal). Burt and Luanne were instrumental to Information Technology Association of America’s (ITAA) donation of the ADAPSO Records (the processor name to ITAA) to CBI. ADAPSO was the pioneering and longtime leading computer services and software products trade association, and its records document not only the organization’s development and activities, but also these two industries through the research reports it sponsored. Luanne Johnson was a past Executive Director of ADAPSO and Grad was also very active in the organization for decades. Prior to leading ADAPSO, Johnson had founded and served as president of a software products company, Argonaut Information Systems. Grad also had a distinguished career in the software field, working many years for IBM and later as a strategy and M&A consultant in software and services. A finding aid is now available for the Burton Grad Papers at CBI. Following the roundtable discussion, Len Shustek and CHM honored Burt and Luanne’s longtime contribution to the museum and software history with a plaque unveiling ceremony. Johnson attended in person and Grad through video conferencing. Like CHM, CBI is deeply indebted to Burt and Luanne for their many lasting contributions to the field of software history.

Jeffrey R. Yost

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News from the Archives Archival Momentum Winter 2016-Spring 2017 has been an exciting time for the archives at CBI. We’ve had a slew of international researchers, a number of distinctive new donations, and pushed forward with several outreach efforts within the University of Minnesota and the local community. I’m delighted with the progress that has been made in making more collections available to our research community and look forward to this summer when our Norberg and Tomash fellows will be visiting! Research in Focus Since October 2016, we’ve welcomed international academics from Austria, Scotland, and Japan, as well as a variety of local and regional historians to our Reading Room in Andersen Library. In addition, we’ve assisted 20 researchers remotely. Topics of interest include computer animation and human movement, magnetic drum storage units, early tech user groups, software consulting services, PLATO and computers in educational settings, and the history of the General Electric Computer Division. Collections that our visitors have been accessing include the Lockheed Martin Records (CBI 238), Carl Machover Papers (CBI 206), Alias | Wavefront Records (CBI 255), Michael Mahoney Papers (CBI 213), James W. Cortada Papers (CBI 185), SHARE, Inc. Records (CBI 21), National Bureau of Standards Computing Literature Collection (CBI 32), Control Data Corporation Records (CBI 80), the Burroughs Corporation Records (CBI 90), Engineering Research Associates (ERA)-Remington Rand-Sperry Rand Records (CBI 176), and Gartner Group Records (CBI 228). A number of our published works have also been accessed after being located through the University of Minnesota catalog. New Materials Available to Researchers It has been a busy winter and early spring for CBI staff processing collections. In the past few months, staff members have processed seven new collections, creating finding aids to connect researchers to important records relating to computer programming languages, user and industry groups, security, software development, and computer graphics. These collections include:

• AUTODIN Records (CBI 252) • Joan Collins Tapes (CBI 257) • Internet Legacy Institute Records (CBI 250) • Frederick Honhart Papers (CBI 260) • Dr. Madelyn (Lyn) Bates Papers (CBI 261) • Terry Benzel Papers (CBI 258) • Burton Grad Papers (CBI 262)

Along with the new finding aids, we’ve also updated a series of existing ones following new accruals to long-standing collections. These collections include the Charles W. Bachman Papers (CBI 125), the Data Processing Management Association Records (CBI 88), the Russian, Soviet, and Eastern Bloc Computing Collection (CBI 148) – Peter Wolcott Papers, and the Engineering Research Associates (ERA)-Remington Rand-Sperry Rand Records (CBI 176) – Abraham Franck Papers.

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In addition to the archival collection donations, CBI has also taken in an almost complete run of early Cryptologia periodicals, as well as two World War II-era field cryptography units. Books and periodicals also continue to be run through the University of Minnesota’s central cataloging division and we look forward to sharing with you two new Charles Babbage first editions, as well as a host of unique books and manuscripts that relate to our collection focus areas of social issues in computing and Cold War-era computing. This summer, staff members will work to complete processing of two major collections that came in last year – the Computer Image Corporation Records and the Stephen J. Lukasik Papers. We hope to have finding aids for these collections by the publication of next Fall’s newsletter. Outreach and Staff News While collection management and research support have been top priority this year, I have also assisted two professors in class outreach activities – teaching three undergraduate course sessions on the use of primary source materials in research efforts, how to handle archival materials, and untangling the contested nature of the historical narrative through careful analysis of primary sources. Publications are upcoming for CBI staff on the University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections blog “Primary Sourcery” about trends in employee benefits and clubs at tech companies through the years and an “Archival Elements” newsletter article about CBI’s rich computer graphics collections. “Archival Elements” is the newsletter for the Society of American Archivists’ Science, Technology, and Health Care section. Finally, on both a happy and sad note, we say good-bye to our long-time student worker AJ Gerick as he graduates this June. Congratulations and best of luck to AJ in all of his future endeavors!

Amanda Wick Interim CBI Archivist and Curator

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Babintseva Named Tomash Fellow for 2017-2018 Ekaterina Babintseva is a doctoral candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a M.A., with honors, from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a B.A., with honors, from Urals Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She has presented her research at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and SHOT’s SIGCIS. She has received competitive funding for conducting and/or presenting her research from SHOT, the University of Pennsylvania, and Central European University. In 2015 she co-organized (with Prof. John Tresch, Tabea Cornel, and Matthew Hoffarth) a conference at the University of Pennsylvania entitled, “Sorting Brains Out: Tasks, Tests, and Trials in the Neuro- and Mind Sciences, 1890-2015.” She is a past recipient of a CBI Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grant. Drawing on multiple repositories in the US (including CBI and the University of Illinois) and in Russia, Babintseva’s dissertation,“Self, Computer, and Society: The Development of Computer-Based Education in the Cold War United States and the Soviet Union,” examines the connections between Cold War science policies, behaviorist and cognitive psychology, and the development of the first computers designed for education in the US and the USSR. The first American teaching computer, PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960 at the University of Illinois’ Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL). Created by engineers and psychologists, the earliest versions of PLATO incorporated B. F. Skinner’s principles of programmed instruction, but as a growing number of cognitivists began to accuse Skinner and his followers of modeling human nature as totalitarian, PLATO’s developers began to deny connections between their computer and behaviorism. Instead, they claimed that PLATO’s algorithms concentrated on critical skills and creative thinking, rather than fact cramming. Babintseva’s research explores how during a period of political détente, Soviet psychologists and computer engineers were trying to equal and surpass the United States in computer-based education. Soviet scientists and government officials viewed PLATO as the “paragon” of the teaching machine, but for a range of administrative reasons, the USSR could not create an equivalent computer system. That led the Soviet Union to sign a 1972 agreement on technical knowledge exchange with the United States, and the USSR began a range of negotiations with the US government and Control Data Corporation, the owner of non-exclusive rights for PLATO, to import PLATO systems to the Soviet Union.

Jeffrey R. Yost

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Walter Bauer and the Birth of “Informatics” We were saddened to hear of the passing of Walter F. Bauer in February 2015. He was a pioneer of the software products industry, a close confidant and business associate to CBI founder Erwin Tomash, and a leader in the Charles Babbage Foundation that supported CBI in its early years. Bauer also jointly coined the term “informatics.” In a way, his story helps understand why the United States in the 1960s saw the rise of “computer science” while Western Europe experienced the rise of a similar technical discipline that is known as “informatik,” “informática,” “informatique,” or “informatics.” March 1962, as Walter Bauer recalled, was a fateful month in that both Bauer in the United States and a French entrepreneur named Philippe Dreyfus seized upon “informatics.” The linguistic exercise of combining the root of “information” with the suffix “-atics” which stands for “the science of” (such as mathematics or numismatics) was not particularly obscure. Bauer was in the process of forming and thus naming a pioneering software venture (with key support from Erwin Tomash). He and his associates had considered “datamatics” but there was already the large Honeywell mainframe computer Datamatic 1000, originally a joint venture with Raytheon. Ordinarily, you don’t expect exact synchronicity across the Atlantic. But in France that very same month a group around Dreyfus, who had previous experience working at Harvard with the Mark 1 computer and for Compagnie des Machines Bull, was launching a new software company called Société d'Informatique Appliquée. In this context they were searching for a term to describe the new field of computing and also fastened on “informatics.” It was soon blessed as an official French word by L’Académie française, and spread across Europe being adapted into the different language groups. A German scientist’s independent use of “informatik” added momentum to the phrase. Right from the start, Bauer decided to trademark “informatics” both as a proper noun for his company Informatics as well as a distinctive lower-case noun. “Through the years we stopped many organizations from using the name [informatics],” wrote Bauer. His logic was that words like “Xerox” and “Cellophone” had not been legally protected and had spread into common usage to the “detriment of their respective companies.”1 Bauer even related an inquiry by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to change its name to the Society for Informatics. To this day, “informatics” is rarely used in the United States to refer to “computer science,” while just the opposite happened in Europe. There is a revealing story of how Erwin Tomash and Walter Bauer became linked as business partners. Tomash, as readers of the CBI Newsletter should be aware, was a University of Minnesota electrical engineering graduate (1943) who went to work for the local Engineering Research Associates; then, after several business positions in the Midwest and Southern California, he took up leadership of Dataproducts (a spinoff from a Minnesota-based hearing aid

1 Walter Bauer told this story in several places, with this one coming out of the CBI files. See a published version as Bauer, “Computer Recollections: Events, Humor, and Happenings,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 no. 1 (2007): 85-89 at https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2007.2

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manufacturer) in 1962. Bauer was a mathematics Ph.D. from the University of Michigan who entered the computing field in the early 1950s. He moved to the Los Angeles area to work for Ramo-Wooldridge (two-thirds of the well-known TRW Corporation) in 1954 and rose to become director of computer operations. Wanting to start a company, he was having difficulties raising financing for a startup venture when Tomash offered to create a new division within Dataproducts. It became Informatics General Corporation. In the event, Dataproducts was solidly successful in the 1960s as a manufacturer of computer peripherals, such as highly regarded disk drives, printers, and core-memory units. Informatics rose in the burgeoning world of 1960s software. Informatics started as a software contractor, but within two years it purchased an entire software division from Hughes Aircraft; that division’s file management program led to the blockbuster file-management product MARK IV. Aimed at the IBM mainframe market, it was the first software product that crossed $100 million in sales. Informatics, spun off as an independent company in 1968, was eventually purchased by Sam Wyly’s Sterling Software in 1985.

Leonard Kuhi, Walter Bauer, and Clarence Spangle at the 1989 CBF Board of Trustees Meeting Charles Babbage was the namesake that Erwin Tomash adopted when he retired from Dataproducts and began casting around for a means to capture the history he had personally lived. The result was initially the International Charles Babbage Society (1978), the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Charles Babbage Foundation (CBF). From the start, Tomash and Bauer were partners in this venture, too. Bauer chaired the CBF in the middle 1980s.

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Informatics was at the center of my correspondence with Bauer, shortly after I arrived at CBI in 2006. Walter had unearthed a run of strategic plans from Informatics, and he’d kindly forwarded these to be archived at CBI. They are now part of our Market and Product Reports Collection (CBI 55). Documents that help give insight into the software products industry as a whole are rare, and a prominent company’s assessment of the market and strategically desirable directions can be of wide research value. American Federation of Information Processing Societies and Association for Computing Machinery were the principal professional societies that Bauer invested his time in, in addition to his business, philanthropic, and charitable activities. For AFIPS he was chairman of the 1961 Western Joint Computer Conference as well as on the AFIPS Governing Board. For ACM he served as chair of the Los Angeles chapter, chair of the Editorial Board, and was a candidate for ACM President. Naturally, with these contacts in the business and professional communities, Bauer’s Rolodex was of immense value for the Charles Babbage Foundation. His correspondence with CBI director Arthur Norberg reveals an “A list” of the movers and shakers in the computing industry, beginning with Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Ross Perot, John Diebold, Sam Wyly, and many other luminaries. It is remarkable to reflect today that CBI drew so fruitfully upon support from the computing industry, and Walter Bauer was a key person in bringing this about. “Southern California in the late ‘50s was really the most important place for software in the country, no question about it,” as Bauer related in his oral history with Arthur Norberg. In addition to Ramo–Wooldridge’s investing heavily in high-performance computing, other players in the region included the aircraft companies Douglas, North American, and Lockheed as well as the Air Force think tank RAND and soon enough the IBM user group SHARE and the “university for programmers” System Development Corporation. Aircraft, guided missiles, and satellites all had immense information processing requirements. It was from this context that Bauer developed his career in computing, and assisted in later years with the development of the history of computing through the Charles Babbage Foundation. We remain, standing on the shoulders of giants, in his debt today.

Thomas J. Misa

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2017 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients The Charles Babbage Institute awarded four Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grants for 2017 to help fund scholars in various disciplines and differing career stages to travel to the Institute to conduct archival research. The recipients are University of California-Davis Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies Gerardo Con Diaz, Harvard University Center for the Environment Ziff Environmental Fellow Evan Hepler-Smith, University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of Communications Studies Scott Kushner, and Harvard University Doctoral Candidate in American Studies Charles Petersen. Con Diaz will be researching how IBM’s staff conceptualized and evaluated legal strategies in the decade and a half prior to the company’s “unbundling” (separately pricing software and services) decision in 1969. Specifically he will use certain types of legal documents to identify targets for analysis within CBI’s voluminous Computer and Communications Industry Association Collection of Antitrust Records, a collection of over 100,000 pages of court records with many thousands of pages on IBM and antitrust. The research is in support of his book project, “Intangible Inventions: A History of Software Patenting in the United States” (under contract with Yale University Press). Hepler-Smith will be analyzing materials in both CBI’s Calvin Mooers Papers and the Auerbach and Associates Market and Product Reports Collection in support of his book project tentatively titled, “The Molecular World: How Molecules Became Digital and Everything Became Molecules.” Mooers is an important figure in this history as his information retrieval and processing systems were influential in the chemical information field. Kushner will be examining the Control Data Corporate Records on the company’s Ticketron system for his project entitled, “High-Tech Tickets: How Access to Culture Started to Compute.” He is particularly interested in the how ticketing systems evolved and the underlying algorithms of “inclusion, exclusion, and social sorting.” Kushner will also research materials on ticketing systems within the Burroughs Corporation Records. Petersen is conducting research for his dissertation on the history of meritocracy in America. Two of his chapters focus on meritocracy and rise and evolution of the Silicon Valley IT industry. He anticipates numerous CBI collections providing important context to analyzing meritocracy in Silicon Valley, and in particular plans to study materials in the Association for Women in Computing Records, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Records, and the Academic Computing Collection.

Jeffrey R. Yost

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University of Minnesota's Scholars Walk.

Computer History Outside The University of Minnesota recently unveiled its long-awaited “Wall of Discovery,” an illustration-rich installation on the north side of Keller Hall where the EE and CS departments are located. It connects the core part of campus with a walkway out to McNamara Alumni Center and beyond to the TCF Football Stadium. I took this route literally four times a week last semester when teaching in a nearby classroom. I expected to see Mark McCahill and Seymour Cray among the university’s luminaries. McCahill led the software team that developed Internet Gopher, a distributed means for people around the world to share multi-media content over the Internet prior to the Web’s dramatic expansion in the mid-1990s. McCahill also invented POPmail, used by my spouse today to access her email on Earthlink, as well as coined the phrase “surfing the Internet.” Seymour Cray, world famous as a designer of supercomputers, was the technical brains behind many of the early Minnesota computers, including those of the Engineering Research Associates, Univac, Control Data, and Cray Research. Cray’s schematic for the iconic Cray 1 is the chosen illustration on his plaque. Other computing figures along the walkway of University of Minnesota notables include Rolland Arndt, a lead designer for ERA–Univac (CBI papers); John Bardeen, assistant professor of physics during 1938-41, co-inventor of the transistor, and winner of two Nobel prizes (1956 and 1972); Bardeen’s co-inventor Walter Brattain, physics Ph.D. in 1929; information retrieval pioneer Calvin Mooers (CBI papers); polymathic inventor Otto Schmitt; Cray’s right-hand man James Thornton; and Earl Bakken, founder of Medtronic. I was pleasantly surprised to learn the technical biography of Minnesota native Reynold Johnson. Reynold B. Johnson (class of 1929) has several impressive claims to fame. The “Wall of Discovery” emphasized the colorful story of his inventing the classic machine-scored “bubble exam” complete with use of Number 2 pencils, while he was a high-school science teacher in Michigan. The soft pencils put down a track of conductive graphite that could be read electronically. In his childhood, he’d used such pencils to short out the ignitions of Model-T automobiles and play havoc with the social life of older sisters and their “gentleman callers.” IBM hired him to develop these insights at its Endicott Engineering Laboratory, and this work found its way into IBM’s model 805 Test Scoring Machine (see illustration of an early prototype). It was first used to tally the 1936 New York Regent’s exam, and successive waves of

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Johnson’s “mark sense” technology have been used in countless exams by innumerable students since then. In the 1960s optical means for reading student-marked cards became the dominant method for scoring. Johnson moved to California in 1952 and provided leadership for IBM’s newly founded laboratory at San Jose. His team of researchers initially followed Minnesotan’s lead in using magnetic media on rotating cylinders, but soon the San Jose researchers reconfigured the cylinders into rotating disks, much like oversize long-playing records. In 1956 IBM announced this invention as the model 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, or RAMAC. The first magnetic disk was bought by Crown Zellerbach, a West Coast timber concern, in 1956; it had 50 double-sided aluminum disks that were 24 inches in diameter, with a total storage of 5 megabytes. Johnson later developed, in cooperation with SONY, the basic technology of VHS videocassettes. He collected more than 90 patents and numerous technical awards, passing away in 1998.

Thomas J. Misa http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/18/business/reynold-johnson-92-pioneer-in-computer-hard-disk-drives.html https://www.nap.edu/read/10094/chapter/26 https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/builders_johnson.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/specialprod1/specialprod1_9.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/ramac/

Model 805 Test Scoring Machine. Photo Credit: IBM

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In Process: The Eric A. Weiss Papers In August 2016 the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) received the papers of Eric A. Weiss. Through a generous donation from the Weiss family, I have been given the opportunity to process the collection. Previous to my time with CBI, I volunteered in the Archives & Special Collections department at the University of Minnesota with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives for two years. I graduated from St. Catherine University this past December with a Master of Library and Information Science. There I took a course, Internet Fundamentals, which sparked my interest in the history of computing and the internet. If you have read IEEE’s Spectrum, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, or ACM’s Computing Reviews, chances are you have seen an article written or edited by Eric Weiss. He was a towering figure in the history of computing, a prolific author and editor, and a staunch supporter of historical research in the field and CBI. Weiss graduated from Lehigh University in 1939 with a BS degree and received an MS in electrical engineering in 1940. During World War II, Weiss first worked at the Radio Corporation of America and later, as a civilian, at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington D.C. and Pearl Harbor. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, he worked as a physicist performing laboratory work to develop and install instruments for the measurement of small magnetic fields. Following his work for the US Government, Weiss joined Sun Oil Company (later Sunoco) in 1945 as a research engineer where he would go on to be their principal computer advisor for 20 years. During this time he introduced the first stored program computers, managed the first experiments with computer control of refinery process, and chaired the company-wide computer committee that coordinated all computer use. From 1976 until his retirement in 1982, Weiss made a career change and became the public issues consultant for Sunoco where he assessed potential future social and political conditions and issues of importance. After working for Sunoco, Weiss returned to Hawaii where he lived nearly 35 years into his retirement. Weiss had always intended his papers come to the Charles Babbage Institute. He held CBI in great regard. In a letter to Evan Linick dated November 12, 1996, Weiss replied, “the only reliable repository for the documents of computing history is at the Charles Babbage Center.” Weiss then forwarded Linick’s letter to Kevin D. Corbitt, then assistant archivist, presumably asking where to send IV League proceedings. It is evident from the correspondence that Weiss had with CBI that this resource was invaluable to him and his research. As Weiss wrote biographies for IEEE Annals, he would often send a letter to the archivist asking what information they had on someone, frequently inquiring about any oral histories. As much as Weiss corresponded with CBI, the archivists got to know him and his preferences. In a letter dated 6 March 1996, responding to Weiss’s request for transcripts Corbitt states, “Although I know you despise electronic publications, you might refer readers to CBI’s website and MNCAT entries for current information.”

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Eric Weiss at Sun Oil Company

Additional materials in the Eric A. Weiss papers include photographs of Weiss at Sun Oil Company, Sun Oil Company records and correspondence, journals, newspaper clippings, patents, manuscripts, publication articles, his personal directory and business cards, personal items, Lehigh University materials, and most notably, numerous boxes of correspondence and subject files. The bulk of the material is correspondence Weiss had in regard to his work after retirement. What makes this most valuable is that he kept a copy of almost every letter he sent out and not just those he received. This provides a level of context and continuity that is often absent in correspondence collections, which are typically one-sided and only include letters received by the donor. The correspondence has been especially fun to read through because I feel like I am getting to know Weiss without ever having met him. Additionally, many times the correspondence goes from exchanging faxes and letters with a person to then reaching out to others for information about that person, as Weiss often compiled posthumous biographies. One correspondence of note is that with the computer scientist, Herb Grosch. There are at least a half dozen folders of letters which speak to the professional and personal relationship they shared. Altogether, Weiss’s papers fill 25 boxes and range in date from 1939 to2007. As of today, I have completed an initial survey of the material and am finishing up basic preservation work on the paper records. Publication of the searchable finding aid will be made online by early autumn—hopefully in time for the next issue of the CBI Newsletter.

Ashley Skwiera Processing Archivist, Eric Weiss Papers

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Recent Publications Aspray, William, and James W. Cortada. “Before It Was a Giant: The Early History of Symantec, 1982-1999.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016): 26-41. Copeland, B. Jack, Andre A. Haeff, Peter Gough, and Cameron Wright. “Screen History: The Haeff Memory and Graphics Tube.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:1 (January-March 2017): 9-28. Cortada, James W. “A History of Information in the United States since 1870.” Information & Culture 52:1 (2017): 64-84. De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016). DuPont, Quinn, and Bradley Fidler. “Edge Cryptography and the Codevelopment of Computer Networks and Cybersecurity.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016): 55-73. Friedman, Thomas L. Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Gazzard, Alison. Now the Chips are Down: The BBC Micro (MIT Press, 2016). Hicks, Marie. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Jones, Meg Leta. “The Right to a Human in the Loop: Political Constructions of Computer Automation and Personhood.” Social Studies of Science 47:2 (April 2017): 216–239. LeCavalier, Jesse. The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). MacKenzie, Donald. “A Material Political Economy: Automated Trading Desk and Price Prediction in High-Frequency Trading.” Social Studies of Science 47:2 (April 2017): 172-194. Mager, Astrid. “Search Engine Imaginary: Visions and Values in the Co-Production of Search Technology and Europe.” Social Studies of Science 47:2 (April 2017): 240–262. Misa, Thomas J. “Computer Security Discourse at RAND, SDC, and NSA (1958-1970).” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016): 12-25. Misa, Thomas J., ed. Communities of Computing: Computer Science and Society in the ACM (ACM Books/Morgan & Claypool, 2016).

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Mody, Cyrus C. M. The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science (MIT Press, 2017). Nelsen, R. Arvid. “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:1 (January-March 2017): 29-51. Narayanan, Arvind. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2016). O’Regan, Gerard. Introduction to the History of Computing: A Computing History Primer (Springer, 2016). Schlombs, Corinna. “A Cost-Saving Machine: Computing at the German Allianz Insurance Company.” Information & Culture 52:1 (2017): 31-63. Smith, Alvy Ray. “The Dawn of Digital Light.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016): 74-91. Stachniak, Zbigniew. “MCM on Personal Software.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:1 (January-March 2017): 52-64. Tanner, Adam. Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017). Toland, Janet, and Pak Yoong. “Using Historical Methods to Explore the Contribution of Information Technology to Regional Development in New Zealand.” Information & Culture 52:1 (2017): 85-113. Yost, Jeffrey R. [Special Issue Guest Editor] “Computer Security, Part II” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016). Yost, Jeffrey R. “The March of IDES: Early History of Intrusion-Detection Expert Systems.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 38:4 (October-December 2016): 42-54.

Compiled by Jeffrey R. Yost

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Featured Photo

The first “mobile” computer?

A rendering of DYSEAC (Second Standards Electronic Automation Computer) developed by the National Bureau of Standards.

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