History of Computing Class, Assignment 1

Students, comment on this post by writing a three-paragraph response to the following:

So far, we’ve discussed the precursors to electronic computing. What are the three most important things we’ve learned?

Please use formal English and write your response as you would a short academic paper. Include relevant, specific historical details to make your points, but remember to keep it concise: this should only be three paragraphs.

Fanny Bindon Bailey and her Remington no. 2 c. 1909
Fanny Bindon Bailey, a clerk at the US Coastal and Geodetic Survey Office, with her Remington No. 2, c. 1909.   From: http://www.officemuseum.com/typewriters_office_models.htm

Your comment will not show up right away: I will approve the comments after the deadline, once everyone’s had a chance to respond, so as not to bias your answers.

As noted on your syllabus, your comment is due by 10pm on Thursday, Sept. 6. There will be no credit given for late responses or technical difficulties (so don’t leave it until the last minute).

Have fun.

Note: If you see bracketed text in the comments, that represents text I added or text I corrected–in other words, alterations from the student’s original essay. My objective in correcting your posts is to make your blog comments a useful learning resource for the class and anyone else on the web who may come across them later. I want to ensure we put as little misinformation out on the web as possible.

Welcome, students.

It’s that time of year again, when we return to the classroom and try to make old lessons new. At least in history. Fortunately, that isn’t hard when you teach history of technology. There’s nothing like a rapidly changing contemporary landscape to put past technological developments into new perspective on a continual basis.

This year I’m doing a new course, somewhat cheekily titled “Disasters!” It looks at technological change through the lens of regulatory and social paradigm shifts caused by disasters: environmental, organizational, medical and more. It also shows students how to work with historical newspaper sources and databases, because as we discussed in class earlier this week, one of the key defining elements of a disaster is the public perception of an event as such. We are fortunate enough to now have the London Times Digital Archive for this purpose (prior to this year IIT had only very limited newspaper databases–I hope we’ll be able to get the historical New York Times archive sometime soon, despite its expense).

Sketch of early electronic (mostly) computing landscape doodled as a study aid for my students last fall.

I’m also teaching my History of Computing course (aka Computing in History), revamped with new articles and learning activities that incorporate just-opened primary documents from my summer trip to the UK National Archives. Later in the semester you’ll be seeing some blog commentary from my students as part of their class assignments.

In fact–students–this post would be a great time for you to test out leaving a comment. You don’t have to use your real name if you don’t want to, but be sure to pick one handle and stick with it for the rest of the semester. Answer this: how many unread messages do you currently have in your main email inbox? For me, it’s 9,607. Yikes.

Don’t worry if your comment doesn’t show up immediately: I need to approve them.

 

Digital humanities, tacit knowledge, and (re)making the world in whose image?

This year, I helped set up a digital humanities speaker series for our department, titled Goals and Boundaries in the Digital Humanities. The series will bring in speakers from inside and outside IIT to discuss the current state of the art in digital humanities and explore disciplinary issues associated with the field. The speakers come from many backgrounds–different academic humanities disciplines, library and archive work, computer science, museum studies, design, and public history.

As I was working on it, I ran into some articles that seemed especially apropos given that our speaker series is part of a larger effort to define what we should be aiming for as we try to create a digital humanities program within the department.

‘‘Another Bobby Pin.’’ This cartoon appeared in the British Tabulating Machine Company magazine Tabacus in January 1957 (p. 13). (Courtesy of the British Tabulating Machine Company)

The first looks at the implications of tacit knowledge and the “commonsense” divisions thrown up between being, thinking, doing, and discourse. It struck an especial chord with me because of what I work on–in addition to the implications of race and privilege the author points out, there is a subtly gendered order at work here as well. Framing the debate as being between those who do (hackers) and those who can only sit on the sidelines and talk (yackers) implicitly leverages a long history of gendered categories–from those surrounding masculine professional expertise, to those enabling and privileging amateur tinkering.

The second article is a response to the first that hits on many of my concerns, and additionally points out how queer and postmodern analysis may in fact be deprecated by the hack ideal. I like how this piece encourages us to think about the hidden issues at work in the creation of canonical knowledge in the digital humanities: what exactly do we know as we’re trying to create new knowledge? And how does this old knowledge in fact predetermine much of the new?

I’m sure we’ll discuss these issues (and more) as we proceed through our seminar series. Anyone at IIT (and other local universities) is welcome to attend. The first meeting is on September 20th, in Siegel Hall, room 218 conference room.

Bletchley Park’s Colossus Rebuild

This summer, while doing research at the UK National Archives, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a side-trip to the Bletchley Park historical site in Milton Keynes.

The site of some of the most important codebreaking of World War II, Bletchley Park now functions as a museum of early British codebreaking and computing. A dedicated team there has painstakingly constructed a working model of the Colossus, the 1900-vaccuum tube behemoth designed and built by London Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers in 1943 to speed “Tunny” codebreaking operations using codebreaker William Tutte’s statistical method. The Colossus rebuild is a sight to behold–and hear–as you can see from the video below:

Though Turing and his electromechanical Bombes get a lot of credit for wartime codebreaking successes (there is a working Bombe rebuild at BP too), it was Flowers’s Colossi that sped up British codebreaking to the point of maximal utility. They were the first digital, programmable computers to harness the speed of electronics for time-sensitive, mission-critical work. His team produced 10 of the massive machines between late 1943 and the war’s end, frantically working out of a factory-like workshop in Birmingham after building the first Colossus at the Dollis Hill Research Station in London. Colossus II, installed just days before D-Day, was so critical to the success of the D-Day landings that (as B. Jack Copeland reports) the operators had to keep the machine running despite the floor being flooded–they put on thick rubber boots so that they didn’t get electrocuted.

You can see an image of Women’s Royal Naval Service members working on a Colossus here. (From I. J. Good, D. Michie, and G. Timms, General Report on Tunny With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, 1945, 332, HW 2/25, TNA). The workers have been identified as Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right) by historian B. Jack Copeland.)

While I was at the exhibit, I overheard a father trying to explain to his young son what the Colossus was, in terms he thought the boy might understand. Brandishing his iPhone, he said: “See, this phone is millions of times more powerful than that big computer.”

Call me back when your iPhone wins a war, I thought.