History time -- SHOT conference this week

SHOT stands for Society for the History of Technology.  This group, mostly historians of science and technology (and increasingly of Computer Science and Technology), has their annual meeting in Portland, ME this week -- think autumn colors galore.

I've joined, partially because The HP Phenomenon was well received (and even reviewed) by some in this group.  And, significantly, though I've had to learn some new jargon, they're allowing me to give a paper on the origins of HP in computing.

As I worked on the paper, though, and met one of my colleagues on our panel, I was startled to hear his view that Pasadena in the 1950's was a key hotbed for computing, nearly as much and maybe even more so than MIT.  And as I wrestled with this new thought, it hit me that I myself was in Pasadena in the 1950's, and boy, I surely didn't remember any of this.

True, we did have a Boolean algebra session in 10th grade (1955) that I remember well, and I did tour Consolidated Electrodynamics in 1954 as the guest of a sponsor of an Eagle Scout dinner, but I never thought of computing arising there in any significant way.

Well, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.  My colleague, it appears, is right.  Fueled by the aircraft manufacturers in the area (far more important than Seattle at the time -- Douglas, North American, Northrup, Lockheed, and Convair, to name a few), analogic computation was the way to solve tons of partial differential equations, whereas the behemoths being done at UNIVAC, IBM and CDC were not.

And the irony is that Beckman Instruments was a major player, due to its need for the same kind of analogic computation for its spectrometry equipments.  This led Arnold Beckman first to ask the exiled Wm Shockley if he'd consider trying to shrink the size of the backroom computer Beckman had built, using his newfangled transistor, and then when Arnold conceived the idea of using an 'instrument controller' to do industrial automation ala the Automation book by John Diebold in 1955, he funded Shockley in what was called the Beckman Shockley Laboratories.  Whereupon Shockley's mother became quite ill, in Palo Alto, and Shockley asked to move the new lab to the Bay area.  Beckman agreed, and the name 'Beckman' didn't make the move, although when the Traitorous Eight turned on Shockley a year later, they called Arnold first to get possible relief from their tormenting leader.  It was only after he tried to be conciliatory and then stiffened that they left and set up Fairchild.

There's a great little story here about how small companies deal with large ones, but the bigger story, I think, is that Silicon Valley could well have been in West Los Angeles instead of the Bay area.  And then I think about the old joke, "If your aunt had balls, would she be your uncle?"  Probably not....