Reflection on topics

 This InnovaScapes blog has been running for 13 years now, WHEW!

And what pearls of wisdom have appeared here?   Or, in other words, is it worth the time to read it?

The first couple years (2013-14) saw 100 posts, heavily driven by enthusiasms of the day as opposed to a thematic direction for InnovaScapes Institute itself.

2015 was only five posts, but they all considered the question of high-tech history, and they included notice of a new book at the time which described how to conduct 'amateur hour interviews' of friends and colleagues to try to capture more of the lore of this crazy discipline in which we are involved.  The book, written for and distributed to, the Trustees of the Computer History Museum, has been mildly successful, and in particular, was asked about just this past week--a decade after I penned it.

Scanning it, I realized that I have since conducted another 250 interviews or so, and learned a lot more about technique and values, and I almost withheld the book from the inquirer for that reason.  But, it does exist, and I had nothing else on hand for her questions.

Then a dearth.  Four years, and one post, which noted simply that it had been four years sans posts.

2020 fixed that, as I got caught up in the COVID pandemic--first, catching it, and then amassing a database and developing some graphical tools to understand it, and eventually posting fifty blogs in 2020 and 2021 about the findings.

A quick flurry in late 2022 outlined our decision to try to build a company, AstroVirtual Inc.  https://www.astrovirtual.com/  around the tools and methods that the COVID efforts had found valuable, and then we got busy enough that 2023 had NO posts.

But progress on that venue, and new assessments both last year, and half of this year, have generated  about 20 new posts, something like one per month for that period.  And finally, early 2025, we elected to start a new blog, available through our AstroVirtual website.  Again, not a heavy dose of material, but we have written a half-dozen posts for that site, mostly why we are doing it, and some "How" as well.

A recent entry, Envisioning data https://www.astrovirtual.com/astrovirtualblog/envisioningdata is indicative of some focused blogs that describe what we are trying to do, and why.

So, it is perhaps time to revisit the InnovaScapes Institute blog, and refocus it back on things that our Institute has been pursuing alongside and independent of AstroVirtual.  

First and foremost among those pursuits has been a long-standing effort to provide more in-depth interviewing of key individuals in the high-tech sector (mostly the computing and instrumentation sides, to be sure).  So we will be starting a series on PIPs--Previously Important People--and what they did and why, and how it all turned out.

Second, as a derivative of the COVID research, and efforts with AstroVirtual, we have been working on a potential contribution for the public health sector.   We have uncovered significant learning and even key mistakes made in the COVID pandemic processes and procedures across the globe, and we intend to try to give those findings a broad exposure, getting ready if you will for the next pandemic.

And third, we intend to periodically cover 'current enthusiams' and we'll do that in labeled posts also.

So--a new beginning for InnovaScapes Institute and its blog.   I invite you to join in and participate.

Joel Birnbaum case study

Have you ever had something like this happen?   

I was part of 'a front-page story' in the Denver Post some years ago for a situation with the Colorado Air Pollution Control Commission.   I brought some serious issues to the table around a violator and the state health standards, and a reporter put the contretemps into a front-page story.   But--I didn't recognize either the issue or the analysis as it was written.   He'd completely missed the point both with respect to the topic and the resolution.

Since then, I have repeatedly seen similar examples.  Truth, if there in fact is such a thing, is so often in the eye of the beholder, me included.   And errors of commission are often the lesser of evils--much more often they are errors of omission.

With that in mind, I went back to a pair of extensive Computer History Museum (CHM) interviews--the four hours of interviewing I did with Joel Birnbaum more than a decade ago.  Joel, with whom I had worked closely at HP for years, was uniquely qualified to talk about key contributions in computing history--he is the only person ever to lead the two largest computer research organizations in world history, IBM and HP.  Not surprisingly, he headed IBM Research when it was the largest computer company in the world by a factor of five.   Coming to HP when HP Computing was 14th in computing company size, and only four percent of IBM size, he led HP which eventually (after 27 years of trying) caught and passed IBM in total revenues in 2007.   Joel himself holds many accolades, including Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, NAE, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.   (see a bio, this one from Computing Research Association {CRA} https://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/birnbaum.pdf ).

The significance of the interviews is illustrated by the fact that the CHM CEO and founder Len Shustek attended for the entire set, something he very seldom did.    And, as you doubtless would expect from me, this was not the traditional 'techie' interview by a proper historian, but rather my Socratic Interview, described herein earlier--focused more on WHO and WHY rather than WHAT and HOW.

What did Joel say, and what have we done with it?

He named 96 people who represented in his mind the most significant factors in his own career, many of them were people that both Len and I knew, some of them only Joel and I knew, and some of the early ones from IBM and elsewhere were names that we'd heard but neither of us knew the individuals.   https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746891/ is the first interview;   https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102780991/ is the second.

We filed the transcripts, and some years later, I built a Btrieve index to find and analyze the folk he named, compared to their coverage in several compendia, including ACM awards, ACM Fellows, HP and IBM Fellows, and CHM Fellows and CHM oral histories.  

Out of 96 individuals (the best folk known and cited by the leading research manager in compute history)

    13 hold ACM Awards (11 Turing Awards and 6 Eckert-Mauchly Awards, two held jointly, plus one Grace Murray Hopper award and one Distinguished Service award).   Another has an ACM-SIG award.

    Joel named 16 IBM Fellows, 2 HP Fellows, an Intel Fellow, and a Nobel Laureate with whom he worked closely.  Of these, CHM has just one oral interview and 5 IBM Fellows as CHM Fellows (Fran Allen, Gene Amdahl, John Backus, Don Chamberlin, John Cocke).

    CHM Fellows include seven others that Joel named (Eric Bloch and Fred Brooks (IBM); John Hennessy and Don Knuth (Stanford), Dave Patterson (Berkeley), Ken Olson (DEC), and Raj Reddy  (CMU).

    ACM includes those seven (except for Bloch), plus Allen, Brooks, Chamberlin, and Ted Codd and Jim Gray of database fame, plus Dominic Ferrari.

    Joel named IBM CEOs Cary, Gerstner, and Opal, plus HP CEOs Hewlett, Packard, Young, Plat, Fiorina, Apotheker, and Hurd, and Jobs at Apple, and DG's DeCastro, none of whom were researchers, and they are represented modestly in CHM, and hardly at all in ACM.

    Astonishingly, 56 of the 96 names are essentially 'invisible' to all of the major computing archives that I have searched, never mind that Joel describes most of them in glowing terms.  Even more interesting, some of those 56 names are seminal in their respective arenas (e.g. Lew Branscomb, Ralph Gomory, and Jeff Katzenbach at IBM; John Doyle, Paul Ely, Dick Hackborn, Bill Terry, and especially Barney Oliver at HP, and even Jack Welch at GE.

    My purpose here is not to finger ACM or CHM for lack of coverage, but rather to illuminate just how big this computing world has been, and continues to be.   As one historian put it, "most of the creators are still alive, and their stories, if captured, will be irretrievable if we don't do it.  BUT, there are only about 400 computer research historians in the world.  It's an intractable task," she added.   

    What if we could feed all of the transcripts for the nearly 10,000 high-tech interviews into one corpus, and do a gigantic Btrieve on them, and even better, put these wonderful new AI tools to work, so that some of these associations and connections could be exposed, much like a gigantic word tag directory (ala this simple one from the ACM Turing page)?

ACM Annual Awards Banquet

 

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has a long storied collection of award winners, for a wide variety of contributions within the computing world.  Lists abound, and fame accrues, especially for the Big Awards, but also for each of these prestigious categories.

If you've been privileged enough to attend one of their formal black-tie award dinners, you will have doubtless glanced at the Awards pamphlet carefully placed at every seat.  It lists all new winners, as well as the names of every previous awardee for each award given.

As each award is announced, a brief video vignette describes the winner and thc cited work on big screens located at each end of the stage.  The honoree is handed a Plaque, a certificate, usually a check (sometimes for substantial funds), and a handshake before the obligatory photo-op with the extant ACM leadership.

Subsequently, a two- or three-paragraph notation about the person, the work, and the award will be posted to the person's ACM webpage.  This is truly a career highpoint for many awardees!!!

The audience is appreciative, even enthusiastic for some winners.   Attendees, some four hundred strong, are composed of the honorees and their family and friends (usually including the honoree's major professor), plus a significant number of past winners and ACM officers and ACM emeriti.  As an ex-ACM President, I usually garner an invite, and it is an incredible pleasure for my wife Jenny and me each year, revisiting old friends and meeting new ones.

Not surprisingly, though, for events of this type, not everyone in attendance is enthralled.  Here's a tongue-in-cheek ribald post from the outspoken wife of an ACM stalwart:    

      "Excuse me," I hissed to my husband, an ACM Fellow whom I was expected to revere.  But I was irreverent.  I cannot change my stripes at 62, and so I continued.   "Hello, I believe these beans were brought from a local farm to this table."  My point was that "farm to table" does not necessarily mean directly from the farm to the table by skipping the kitchen.           My husband was not pleased.  "Eat.  Show some gratitude," he growled.   So I drove my fork into another raw green bean the length of my elbow and forklifted it onto my tongue, and turned politely to face the gentleman speaking at the podium.                                                                                                                                                                             Over the course of the last few decades, I've been invited, on and off, to the ACM awards.  I feel honored--seriously, I do--for having been invited to partake of the banter, the banquet, and the work of the brightest minds in computing.  I'm genuinely thankful because some of us ordinary mortals can get to celebrate the gifts of someone else who has earned some honors.  Still, I'm mildly peeved that no one has thought to institute some kind of an award for those who endure the eccentricities of those honored by the ACM.  Consider some of the struggles of spouses or partners who attend these: We must listen to our better halves talk shop for eons while remembering to look terribly excited by the latest buzzword.  We must strive to remember the names of people we met years ago, maybe once, in formal wear.  We must also grin and bare our teeth as our partners take photographs--and more photographs--and still more.

My own wife, a bona fide Berkeley computer science and computer education PhD herself, howled when she saw this post.   I'm not sure why I showed it to her; I certainly did not send it to ACM headquarters.

My concerns over the years about this banquet have taken a different tack.  I want to know more about the winners, plus previous winners.  And I'd like the information in context.   I can listen to the two-minute high-quality YouTube video about the current awardee, and I can expect to view it again later on the ACM website after the event.  I can peruse my iPhone during the ceremony to Google about the winner, to learn more about their schooling, their current career path, their achievements, and even what courses they are teaching this year.  I can do this for every nominee, and for every previous honoree.

But what is harder, much harder, to do is to find apt comparisons--how many colleagues from their school or department have similar awards?  Or how many awards have been given for analogous contributions?  I can find the ACM Digital Library radio button on their ACM website page, and assess their publishing history, including their favorite co-authors, but I cannot find much about the passion that led them down this path.

Nor do the acceptance speeches give much clue.   Gracious and gratuitous, they almost always thank their major professor, a small team of colleagues, and usually, their parents and spouse.  But only a few honorees are even allowed to ascend to the podium--time is limited, since with 24 awards and fifty or more newly anointed Fellows, the evening inevitably is overlong, especially for the geriatric attendees.

Is there a way to serve these longings?  Somewhat surprisingly, the answer is YES.   And outlining elements of that answer will be our purpose in the next few posts, as well as encouraging the Socratic Interviews described in the last post.

Socratic interviews

 Say what?   Socratic interviews?    

I've just passed 1,000 PIP interviews--that's some kind of milestone, right?

A PIP is a Previously Important Person, someone who once had a major award given to them, or they held a high-profile job, or they did something remarkable enough to be noticed -- ahem, NOTICED -- as in the Andy Warhol observation that nearly everyone has their "fifteen minutes of fame".

When Ray Price and I first conceived of writing a Hewlett-Packard anthology, we wound up conducting about 120 full interviews, and another 400 episodic discussions in order to learn more about events and issues around the company of which we knew next to nothing.  I had the privilege of knowing nearly all of these interviewees prior to their interviews, having worked at HP for nearly thirty years.   So, in a sense, these were discussions between colleagues rather than formal interviews conducted by historians.

Those HP interviews, done between 2003 and 2008, were recorded and the files eventually stored at the volunteer HP Computer Museum in Australia (created by Jon Johnston).   After Johnston's untimely death in a mountaineering accident, the collection was ultimately sold to the HP CompanyArchives (HPCA), managed by Heritage Works, Inc. in Atlanta, GA.   I am not sure what has happened to 'our interviews.'  

For many years as well, I had been a Trustee for the Computer History Museum (nee Boston, now in Mountain View, CA), serving from 1991 through 2020.   CHM had been dilatory about oral interviews, doing a mere 43 in its first 30 years of existence through 2011.   When Jim Pelkey offered a trove of audio tapes with 81 interviews of networking pioneers from the 1960-1980 era to CHM in 2012, their initial response was that "we don't do oral interviews" for all the good and sufficient reasons that all reputable historians of the time espoused.   

Those reasons are manifold: 

1. Individual recollections are untrustworthy, either self-aggrandizing or denigrating others' contributions, not to mention short on details due to the passage of time.   As one wag put it, "my mother could remember things that never even happened."

2. No one can possibly understand the context of the situation, whatever it might be.   That is the job of the true historian, not one of many participants.

3. Only trained historians are qualified to do these kinds of interviews, and there are too few of them.

4. Decent (i.e. 'correct') interviews are expensive, requiring high-quality studio recording, heavy editing, and semi-infinite fact-checking.

Well, while those arguments have considerable validity, they do not sufficiently value what might be gleaned from 'amateur interviews.'   Which is what I have spent another decade learning how to do.

I, with others, was able to change the stance for CHM.  They have now done more than 1,600 video interviews in the past 12 years, going up by 100x the rate of ascension for the first 30 years.  This has included more than 900 'amateur' interviews, along with 700 conducted by 'proper computer historians.'

Turns out, that two simple techniques help the veracity factor a lot: 1. interviewing multiple individuals about any set of important events to get multiple perspectives, and 2. sometimes putting those folk into a 'group' for recollection purposes (where many times someone will say, somewhat with chagrin, 'ah, yes, George, I do recall now that you were the one who did . . .').

But back to the opening statement about Socratic interviewing--this isn't exactly how 'formal' interviews are done, but it is my approach.  Begin with something like "How did you become who you are?" rather than tell me about "the high-tech whiz-bang for which you're associated."   Ask open-ended questions, with undirected goals, to discover passions and motivations more than 'the facts' of what they did.  Why the quest in the first place, and what challenges rather than what successes resulted.   The highest complements that I get are of the form, "I didn't expect this kind of interview.  This was really fun, and it really made me think about things."

The net result is that I have persisted, and indeed tuned, how to do these interviews, and I believe that it provides an additional set of insights rarely collected in more traditional interviewing methodologies.   Not that it replaces them, but rather that it augments them.

Careful readers might recall that I sang this song once before, in the Blog Post on February 13, 2024, entitled "It's WHO and WHY, not just WHAT and HOW".   But now I know to call it "Socratic".

I now have done perhaps forty interviews for CHM, ditto for the Novim Group for their Science Communication Awards, a couple of hundred for the Cisco Foundation (mostly recollections of many early employees), and a couple hundred for the Association of Computing Machinery.  Other groups have included pioneers in ancillary fields, including Computer Education and Computer Law pioneers, not to mention other unrelated arenas like horticulture and United States history where I have considerable background as well.

And a recent count is sort of like that Hindu cultural saying about 1,000 moons:  The Sahasra Purna Chandrodayam ((सहस्र पूर्ण चंद्रोदयम) refers to a celebration marking the 1,000th full moon experienced by an individual, typically around their 81st birthday (yes, I qualify now for that).   This milestone is significant, symbolizing a long and blessed life, and a time to seek blessings for continued well-being and spiritual liberation.   

And of late, kind of in a spiritual liberation about these interviews, I have reflected on what has changed in terms of collecting these 'first-person' stories, and what hasn't yet happened.   What is good is that universities and professional societies have 'caught on' and the net result is that there are more than 10,000 decent video 'first-person' high-tech stories collected in about a dozen archives--a fantastic collection that has grown ten-fold in a decade.

And, for the most part, they have had decent transcripts produced, with AI-generated text helping considerably.   So, from a text-based search capability, we could do plenty.  But as of yet, these collections are stored individually, so a cross-transcript sort is not yet practical.   

The consequence is sad, in terms of nearly all of these transcripts remain unread, unused, and essentially unavailable.   And that, in part, has been my more recent focus.   How can we make use of this asset?

The next few blogs will describe thoughts along this vein.   Stay tuned.