Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers is a biography of and selection of Ada’s lettes by Betty Alexandra Toole (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1998). The work is, as the author writes in the Acknowledgements, “the result of more than twenty years of addiction to Ada.” (page ix) This addiction shows itself in, for example, Toole’s e-mail, “adatoole at well dot com”. Toole seems concerned to protect Ada from claims that she was a drug addict and addicted gambler, though she doesn’t so much argue the case as unleash it. The paperback version (and hardback) is published by Strawberry Press: “Strawberry Press publishes reference books for the succulent world …” and much is made of the cover designer, Leah Schwartz (whose book, Leah Schwartz, the life of a woman who managed to keep painting was also published by Strawberry Press.) I’m not sure I would keep painting covers like the one for Ada.

Despite the strange presence of the author/editor and cover designer, the book nicely gathers Ada’s letters and her notes on Babbages Analytical Engine with biographical context. The correspondence with Babbage is startling as it is clear how firm Ada was with Babbage about her publication of the translation and notes (she refused to let Babbage append a rant about funding and almost fell out with him over this). The annotated selections from her notes on the Analytical Engine also make clear how they were an original reflection on the Engine. I’m curious now about what they thought “analysis” was then.

What comes through about her personality is that she was a brilliant woman, constantly sick, struggling with her mother (who pushes her into mathematics), and socially connected to many of the leading scientists and mathematicians (like Babbage) of the day. Her last months as documented by Toole are heartbreaking.

The BBC has a nice interactive timeline on Fifteen years of the web. It includes such “firsts” as the first webcam to go online – watching a coffee pot at Cambridge University (picture of it being disconnected here). Apparently the coffee percolator went offline in 2001 and was sold to Speigel (who seem to have put it, or another one, back online.)

I suspect that dot.com crash was due to a lack of coffeecams. The timing of the disconnection is suspect.

Thanks to Matt K who pointed me to this essay about the history and historiorgraphy of software, The Hard Work of Software History. Henry Lowood documents the problems with studying the history of software including the problems of preserving software for study.

A new twist in the Silicon Valley Project has been the acquisition of software in various forms, accompanied by research projects that seek to tell the story of the Silicon Valley in its own medium. In the first instance, the libraries have acquired materials such as data tapes from Engelbart’s ARC projeects, hard-disk images along with collections of personal papers such as those of Jef Raskin and Mark Weiser, e-mail archives, … Each of these formats requires special strategies for evaluating, recovering, stabilizing, possibly reformatting, and indexing content. In some cases, the strategies do not yet exist … (p. 17)

The main problem is the medium of study. “Traditional models of access focused on the service desk and reading room as means of mediating complex systems of indexing and identification of materials, as well as supervised reading, fall apart in delivery contexts shaped by computer hardware and virtual libraries of born-digital materials.” (p. 18) The practices of historians are also formed by the medium of their archives. Software is used not read, and software archives are more likely to look like the historical woodworking shop at Williamsburg where tools are tried in traditional practices than library reading rooms.

This article cites two others that are important, Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century from Scientific American (1991) which talks about “ubiquitous computing”; and Kittler’s There Is No Software from C-Theory: Theory, Technical, Culture 32 (Oct. 1995). Lowood ends by countering Kittler to the effect that “Kittler’s admonition that ‘there is no software’ provides little relief to archivists and librarians who discover that there is more of it than they can handle.” (p. 20)