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)?