Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

How a chain of tea shops kickstarted the computer age

 

The Telegraph has a nice story about how How a chain of tea shops kickstarted the computer age (Christopher Williams, Nov. 10, 2011.) The story is about the 60th anniversary of the LEO which could be considered the first business computer. LEO was developed by the catering company J Lyons and Co which operated tea shops.

We came across an article in the Globe and Mail from Sept. 16, 1955, “Britain Leads in Office Automation” that talks about Ferranti and Leo. The article mentions that they and others “have not experienced much, if any, labour antagonism.” Automation putting people out of work was a major issue in those early years.

The Telegraph story sent me to a YouTube video of a BBC broadcast on the LEO that goes into fascinating detail about how it is “programmed” in hardware. They go from design to hardware as this is not a general purpose system that can be programmed in software.

The Arcade Flyer Archive

A great resource for game studies is The Arcade Flyer Archive. The archive includes high resolution scans of flyers for video games, arcade games and pinball machines. For example here is the flyer for the original arcade game Donkey Kong when Mario was still a carpenter.

EVERYONE’S GOING APE OVER DONKEY KONG!

“HELP! HELP!” cries the beautiful maiden as she is dragged up a labyrinth of structural beams by the ominous Donkey Kong. “SNORT. SNORT.” Foreboding music warns of the eventual doom that awaits the poor girl, lest she somehow be miraculously rescued. “But, wait! Fear not, fair maiden. Little Mario, the carpenter, is in hot pursuit of you this very moment.”

It would be interesting to do text analysis on the text or image analysis on the page images.

Every story has a beginning

Every story has a beginning is the text of a keynote by Tim Sheratt that nicely weaves individual stories together as an example of what we can do with information technology. I highly recommend it; he quotes Steve Ramsay and Tim Hitchcock to the effect that what is important are the stories of individuals like those he paints through the digital archives he has access to. He sets this humanistic view of how we can use the technology against the Culturomics approach which is trying to turn history and its archives into grist for cultural science. Sheratt calls the culturomic vision “barren” and I tend to agree. He ends by asking,

But who defines the problems?

His answer is Linked Data which “gives us a way to present an alternative to Google’s version of the world. We can argue back against the search engines, defining our own criteria for relevance, and building our own discovery networks.” (And his talk has a link for those who want to view the triples…) I would say that we can also build tools like Voyant (formerly Voyeur, which he uses) to help us begin to tell the stories.

Vintage computers and technology in Toronto

From Sean and Boing Boing I got to Vintage computers and technology in Toronto. Derek Flack went into the Toronto Public Library’s archives and scanned some of the photographs they have of vintage computers. Some of the pictures are of control systems that are not really computers, but none-the-less, they are cool. This complements the research we are doing going through the Globe and Mail looking at what was being written about computers in the 50s to 70s.

How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations.

Reading Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language I came across a discussion Thomas Sebeok’s work for the U.S. Office of Nuclear Waste Management on “Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia.” Sebeok was commissioned to figure out how to warn people about nuclear waste in 10,000 years. How do you design a warning system that can survive for tens of thousands of years? He proposed an artificial folklore with a priestly caste to maintain superstitions about the site. He ended up recommending

that information be launched and artificially passed on into the short-term and long-term future with the sup- plementary aid of folkloristic devices, in particular a combination of an artificially created and nurtured ritual-and-legend. …

The legend-and-ritual, as now envisaged, would be tantamount to laying a “false trail”, meaning that the uninitiated will be steered away from the hazardous site for reasons other than the scientific knowledge of the possibility of radiation and its implications; essentially, the reason would be accumulated superstition to shun a certain area permanently. (p. 24)

Slate Magazine has a great story on the issue of Atomic Priesthoods, Thorn Landscapes, and Munchian Pictograms: How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations by Juliet Lapidos (Nov. 16, 2009.) She surveys some of the interesting ideas like “Menacing Earthworks” that would warn people off, and talks about a 1993 SANDIA report titled, “Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.”

Father Busa is dead

From Humanist I just found out that Father Roberto Busa has died. See Stop the reader, Fr. Busa has died in L’Osservatore Romano (English) or Morto padre Busa, è stato il pioniere dell’informatica linguistica from the Corriere del Veneto (Italian). Father Busa was a pioneer in humanities computing who started a project in the 1940s with help from IBM to create a complete concordance of Acquinas. The Index Thomisticus was arguably the first (big) humanities project to benefit from computing methods. For that reason the author of Stop the reader argues that,

If you surf the Internet, you owe it to him and if you use a PC to write emails and documents, you owe it to him. And if you can read this article, you owe it to him, we owe it to him

While it may be an exaggeration to say that we owe hypertext and the web to Father Busa, he was certainly one of the first to use computers to manipulate texts on a large scale. He saw the

Father Busa was also involved in developing the humanities computing field which is why we have named a prize after him. (See ADHO Roberto Busa Award). He wrote articles for journals like CHUM and Literary and Linguistic Computing. He was generous with his time and ideas. He was influential in Italy; others will know more about this. I met him in 1998 at the ACH/ALLC conference in Debrecen, Hungary where he was awarded the first Busa Award. As I speak Italian I was asked to join an executive dinner and had a pleasant evening talking about his ideas about hermeneutical text analysis which he delivered in his Award talk and which were later published in “Picture a Man …” in Literary and Linguistic Computing (14:1, 1999). At the end of his talk he played with the Cinderella metaphor for interpretative text analysis,

Metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon: when the name of one reality is chosen to signify another and different reality, because of some similarity between the two. I in fact applied the name of Cinderella to hermeneutical informatics, the two having in common youth, health, beauty, and poverty. Cinderella eventually got married to a prince. (p. 8)

Busa was a prince or perhaps a Cinderella who has now left the party.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood | James Gleick

 

I just finished Jame Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. One of the best books I’ve read in some time. Despite its length (527 pages including index, bibliography and notes) it doesn’t exhaust the subject pedantically. Many of the chapters hint and more things to think about. It also takes an unexpected trajectory. I expected it to go from Babbage and the telegraph to computers and then Engelbart and information extensions. Instead he works his way through physics and math. He looks at ideas about how to measure information and the materiality of information explaining the startling conclusion that “Forgetting takes work.” (p. 362)

The second to last chapter “News News Every Day” is as good an exploration of the issue of information overload as I have read. He suggests that the perception of “overload” comes from the metaphoric application of our understanding of electrical circuits as in “overloading the circuits.” If one believes the nervous system is like an electrical network then it is possible to overload the network with too much input. That, after all, is what Carr argues in The Shallows (though he uses cognitive science.) None-the-less electrical and now computing metaphors for the mind and nervous system are haunting the discussion about information. Is one overloaded with information when you turn a corner in the woods and see a new vista of lakes and mountains? What Gleick does is connect information overload with the insight that it is forgetting that is expensive. We feel overloaded because it takes work not to find information, but to filter out information. To have peaceful moment thinking you need to forget and that is expensive.

Gleick ends, as he should, with meaning. Information theory ignores meaning, but information is not informative unless it means something to someone at some time. Where does the meaning come from? Is it interconnectedness? Does the hypertext network (and tools that measure connectedness like Google) give meaning to the data? No, for Gleick it is human choice.

As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. (p. 425)

LOGICOMIX: philosophical comics


Sean lent me LOGICOMIX (Doxiadis, Apostolos, et al. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and logic. The comic novel has a series of frames, the outer of which is a discussion between the real authors about logic and passion. They end up going to see Orestes and the novel ends with Athena’s judgement that brings the fates (passion and revenge) together with reason into wisdom in a city (Athens) through justice.

This frame echoes the main internal story which is Russell’s struggle to found math in logic. Much of the novel is a tour through the history of logic and important paradoxes. This tour runs in parallel with a biography of Russell. At all levels the novel seems to argue that you have to balance passion with reason. Russell tried to do it in his life, logicians discovered there was no logical foundation with paradoxes, and the graphic novel uses comic art to illustrate the story of logic (hence “logicomix”.) There is dog called “Manga” (which apparently in Greek means “cool dude”) who chases the owl (of reason.)

Webs and whirligigs: Marshall McLuhan in his time and ours

McLuhan and Woody Allen from Annie Hall

Today is the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth so there are a bunch of articles about his work including this one from the Nieman Journalism Lab by Megan Garber, Webs and whirligigs: Marshall McLuhan in his time and ours. I also found an article by Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky on Dead Simple: Marshall Mcluhan and the Art of the Record which is partly about the Medium is the Massage record that McLuhan worked on with others. Right at the top you can listen to a DJ Spooky remix of McLuhan from the record.

Some students here at U of A and I have been working our way through the archives of the Globe and Mail studying how computing was presented to Canadians starting with the first articles in the 1950s. McLuhan features in a number of articles as he was eminently quotable and he was getting research funding. The best article is from May 7, 1964 (page 7) by Hugh Munro titled “Research Project with Awesome Implications.” Here are some quotes:

If successful, they said, it (the project) could produce a foolproof system for analyzing humans and manipulating their behavior, or it could give mankind a surefire method of planning the future and making a world free from large-scale social mistakes. …

They (the team of nine scientists) have undertaken to discover the impacts of culture and technology on each other, or, as Dr McLuhan put it, to discover “how the things we make change the way we live and how the way we live changes the things we make.” …

The next stage in the technological revolution that will change man’s perceptions is the computer. But it may hold the secret to the communications problem. With these electronic devices, it is possible to test all manner of things from ads to cities.

The article describes a grant (probably Canada Council but perhaps a foundation grant) that an interdisciplinary team of nine “scientists” from medicine, architecture, engineering, political science, psychiatry, museology, anthropology and English. They were going to use computers and head cameras (that track what people look at) to understand what people sense, how they are stimulated and how what they sense is conditioned by their background. “The scientists at the Centre (of Culture and Technology at U of T) believe they can define and catalogue the sensory characteristics …”

The idea is that if they can figure out how people are stimulated then they can figure out how to manipulate them either for good or bad. “Foolproof ads could be designed. ‘Madison Avenue could rule the world.’ Dr. McLuhan said. ‘The IQs of illiterate people could be raised dramatically by new educational methods.'”

Oh to be so confident about research outcomes!