SHOT and friends

I'm at the annual SHOT conference (SHOT stands for Society for the History Of Technology); this is the 58th meeting.  I attended the 12th meeting, in 1969, when I was contemplating a PhD in the History of Technology when I was completing a Master's Degree in Urban Studies and Technology at the University of Colorado.  I've also attended the last three meetings, one in Portland, ME, and last year at the Dearborn Museum, and now this year in Albuquerque coincident with the Albuquerque ballon races.

Ah, that brings back memories.  Jenny and I were invited in 1987 or thereabouts, to come to these same races, and we got a ride in the HP balloon, rising into a clear desert sky at dawn with about six hundred other balloons.  It was a major-league thrill--watching yesterday morning was also a treat.

For the conference, I was serving as Commentator for four papers by history researchers.  They concerned ACM topics.  One paper--a very good one--analyzed how has the approved curriculum for Computer Science evolved over the years--who drove it, in what direction, with what results, and where were the pitfalls and issues?  It brought back memories of how HP and our Logic team got involved in college curricula to teach about Algorithmic Design (and we didn't even know to ask Al Gore for his perspective).  It also evoked some of the Cisco Network Academy challenges.

Another paper described how Canadian computer scientists tried gamely to develop an indigenous industry and perspective, ultimately conceding that it was not practical.  Canadians have some great sayings, and this speaker trotted some out to our delight.  Such as McLuhan saying, "Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."

A favorite McLuhanism for me is this one: “Our permanent address is tomorrow.”  Especially when coupled with “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding.” 

A third paper addressed the legacy and contribution of George Forsythe, an early ACM president and the erstwhile founder of Stanford's Computer Science department in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  This work, by Joe November, was very insightful, and brought back significant memories for me--that on reflection gave me pause for just how Stanford built its reputation, and how awesome in retrospect some of the MIT programs were at the time.  

And then, a tuneup.  I was reading the program the night before, and to my utter shock, found my name listed as a speaker in another session.  Yes, I had submitted some proposals, but I'd been led to believe that they'd all been turned down.  Wow--had to pull a major talk together in short order.  

The topic: Wide-area network evolution, circa the Cisco / HP time.  Whew.  I think I did a pretty good job, but Mischa Schwartz was in the audience, a kindly-looking older gentleman who had a question of me--actually a pointed discourse on what I left out.  Turns out when I got to the Web later, he's one of the GIANTS of the telecommunications industry history, with Columbia University, a major book from 1987 on Network Design, especially Packet Networks, and so many honors it makes your head swim.  I met with him for a half hour later--talk about an edifying time!

I have often been told I have a thin skin for criticism, and I don't for a minute doubt that view.  In this case, after my initial 'defense' of my point of view (see the McLuhan quote above), I chose to listen, and the advice he preferred was stunningly helpful.  What a privilege if we can learn to listen more.

If I take nothing else home from this trip but a little dose of humility on this score, I'll be blessed.

A NEW BOOK, whoopee

I just received a package, from Lulu Press, which contained three draft versions of my NEW BOOK, Preserving Your Digital Revolution Heritage: If Not You, Who--If Not Now, When?

While it is not yet available for the excitable reading public {to my surprise actually this morning}, I am going to describe it anyway for you.   Here's the cover story:

Tips and techniques for IDENTIFYING, CAPTURING, and PRESERVING company histories from alumni--our Digital Revolution is too important to leave up to the few historians who try to cover it. 

Your history is OUR history. And too many companies have contributed too many ideas / products / services to the Digital Revolution for historians to keep up. While the participants are still alive, YOU must help to IDENTIFY, CAPTURE and PRESERVE the records for these people and these companies. This book tells you how to do that--simply, easily, with much emotional value in it for you. 

The events, people and companies that have created the Digital Revolution for the world are still living, but unless their thoughts and words are captured now, they;ll be lost forever. This book describes how YOU can take matters into your own hands, and with a few colleagues decide how to identify, capture, and preserve the key historical records of the company or organization with which you are most familiar. Historians can interpret and write the history later if the artifacts, moods, events, and personalities of the participants are captured now. Otherwise, history of the orgins of the most important revolution of civilization's long march will be irretrievable

The interesting thing for me was the difference in the three versions.

The first version is the way I usually create these small books--monographs, really--which is a standard-sized paperback with color covers and black/while interior for all illustrations.

This time I did a second book, still paperback with standard size, standard paper, but full-color pages as well as color covers.

The third book is hardbound, with 'better paper' and full color pages.

The first is priced at $12.95 with a 15% discount, ($11.01 net); the second for $14.95 with no discount, and the third at $39.95 with no discount.   All three priced thus earn the same royalty--says lots about the production cost profile!

There are twelve illustrations listed on the Figures page; only one is truly enhanced by using color, so it is dubious that there is enough value in the color version to make it 'the standard'

The hardbound book is nice to hold, but mygawd, at that price for 132 pages, you'd have to be nuts to think this is the way to go.

So, we'll probably 'tune' the standard version a bit. and then I'll let you know it is available.  Stand by with your prospective orders, and get ready to become a historian of sorts for your own career!

Point of View

I mentioned POINT of VIEW to close the last post, chiding Isaacson's Innovators for omitting any of the network contributors to the Digital Revolution, whilst including the topic of networking on one out of every five pages in the book.

Another example comes from one of my favorite History of Technology writers, Jim Cortada, whom I mentioned in the post last December about Dearborn's SIG/CIS meeting.

Jim's most recent 'big' book is The Digital Flood: the diffusion of Information Technology across the USA, Europe and Asia.  One would expect that the WWW, and the Internet, were a big part of that diffusion, right?  And Jim is writing about ICT--Information and Communication Technology--as the rest of the world titles it.  It is a terrific book, taking a big swath of territory, including the politics of cities, states, and nations as they encounter and embrace ICT issues.

There is simply no book like it, and I heartily endorse it.

Except...well, lessee.  There's that pesky Point of View issue.

Page counts for IT providers by name include IBM on 139 of 599 pages, Apple on 23, HP on 11

Page counts for WWW by name is 86 pages, so networks must have mattered.  But page counts for all networking companies of all stripes that I could find = 1.   Cisco is mentioned once, period.   No other company is mentioned, nor is any networking technology mentioned except Token Ring (from IBM) once.  No TCP/IP, no EtherNet, no X.25, no ATM, no anything.  Mostly WWW and IBM made all this happen.

You might recall that Jim was a 30+ year IBM executive, as well as a professional historian.

Point of View biases each of us, and it is easier to see in others than in ourselves.

But it is there, in everything we read, view, and embrace.

History is so much bunk

So saith Henry Ford, multiple times.  Reports from 1916 onward, when he began his diatribes against knowing or worrying about or learning from history, indicate that he was quite the character.  Donald Trump would find him a great fellow-traveler on his current quest to be certified.  

Is history 'so much bunk?'  Well, it certainly has some interesting sidebars if you study it just a bit.  I'm intrigued these days as much by what doesn't get said, as what does.  Take, for example, Walt Isaacson's two most recent books--the wildly popular best-seller Steve Jobs, and the much more nuanced Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.


The Jobs book was commissioned, almost as Jobs was dying, rushed to market to capitalize on Apple's strong brand and Jobs' near mythical status as its innovator/leader.  It was not well researched, it lacked important elements of 'the story,' but it 'caught the mood' and sold A LOT.

Fortunately, along comes Becoming Steve Jobs, so we have a better, more nuanced account.

Isaacson's Innovators, on the other hand, is a gem of his own desire, with years spent on it.  It shows. Isaacson is a gifted writer, no question about it, and he creates readable, page-turning prose.  And it is a great contribution, even though a few historians of science quibbled about some factoids.

What I found interesting, though, is the premise that "the Digital Revolution" is mostly about small computers and mobile phones, never mind the infrastructure that runs them.  So I did a check on words.  Internet, or WWW, appears on 98 of the 490 text pages--he must think the Internet is part of the Digital Revolution.  And the title is about the "hackers, geniuses, and geeks" who did it.  So who is listed, from the network side?  Bob Metcalfe, once.  His Ethernet idea, once.  Cisco as a name, once.  And no one else, and no other company, of the eighteen prominent and perhaps fifty also-rans who built the backbone for all of our mobile and connected world.  

So, it is not an indictment so much as an observation about POINT OF VIEW.  Point of view of the author is always the give-away.

And my guess is that Henry Ford understood at least a bit of that perspective when he blurted out his famous words 'for history.'

Lowood and Berlin

We met, all thirty or so of us, in the Texas Instruments' Sunnyvale auditorium (which can seat four hundred) on a rainy evening the second of December, 2014.   

To open the December 2014 meeting, Alan J. Weissberger, chairman of the IEEE SV (Silicon Valley) Tech History Committee, posed the question to Leslie Berlin and Henry Lowood, two of Stanford’s esteemed historians of technology: “What is the process, method and procedure for doing authentic, historical technology research?” 

Weissberger went on, though, to the observation that “Bad books, repeating obvious flawed stories, keep appearing.  What can the Stanford Archives project do to reduce these?”

What an opening for Lowood!    He seized the moment grandly, saying, “Bad books perhaps are a good thing—they generate more research and provide impetus to create good books.”

That riposte stopped the group, for a while.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it overnight.

Essentially Lowood gave voice to the same point that Jennifer Light made at Dearborn--there are too few of "us" and too many of "them" and there is little scaling capability at the moment in this field.

Berlin's book, "The man behind the microchip: Robert Noyce and the invention of Silicon Valley," drew appropriate praise.  It was a ten year (no, make that fifteen, the way she expressed it, growing out of her PhD thesis) project, and remains the only decent biography of the man.  There is no biography (yet) about his partner, Gordon Moore (think Moore's Law, the most important legacy in many respects of the integrated circuit world that has given us incalculable impact on society).  Arnold Thackray and David Brock are finishing their tome about Moore at the moment; they've been working on it (with full funding) for a decade.  

The snide asides, from Weissberger and several others, were about Mike Malone's The Intel Trinity, which emerged in August.  Some fifty Amazon reviews rate it 4.5 out of 5.0, very solid for such work.  Several reviews, though, slam it almost unmercifully for its 'laziness' or inaccuracies or blatant hucksterism.  A few take it on for its lack of solid or even correct data.  Emotions, amongst the aficionados, quickly run amok.

I know Michael, pretty well.  He wrote "Bill 'n Dave" about HP's founders around the time we wrote "The HP Phenomenon."   It was well written, as is The Intel Trinity.  Mike can write engaging, emotional, smooth prose--he's a novelist masquerading as a historian, what many call 'semi-fictional history.'  He's written some 25 books, mostly about Silicon Valley antics and folk.  We are much the richer for having his pen and his insight.  But, and he would probably agree, don't treat it as totally factual.  It is Internet-researched, almost never based on primary sources.  And much of it--in every book--is anecdotal, mythical, unsubstantiated.  He's a perfect foil for the question asked of Lowood.

But Lowood's answer was the surprise of the evening.  I've mostly come around to that view myself.  It's one way to rationalize the popularity of such works as Walt Isaacson's Steve Jobs, which is beautiful writing, about a fascinating individual, where the author believes himself that it is history when it is not--it is biography, and gets way too many things factually wrong about Apple and about Jobs' own actions.  And, no one has incentive to go 'right the wrongs'--it wouldn't get read, for one, and it wouldn't sell, for two, and maybe we could argue even that it doesn't matter.  But of course, it does matter.  For ethics, for truth, for trust in our histories, it matters.

HP and its 'historian' still cling to the wrong idea, prominent on their website, that HP started with selling eight oscillators to Disney, for $71.40 each.  Great start.  Wrong on all three factual counts.  Disney was not the first customer (Stanford and Caltech were); Disney bought nine, not eight, units; and they paid $57.50 per unit.  Primary sources reveal this; HP's own archives 'knew' this for 25 years, and then 'magically' it got changed.  Showing the facts to HP a few years back drew the threat of a lawsuit to stop our book--great support of truth-seeking.  Is there percentage in trying to 'right this wrong' at this point?  I think not--its like believing with Pandora that the "ills" can be recaptured, once loosed on the world.

This whole essay ducks the question of plagiarism--the Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose frauds still stick in my craw--made even worse because such "worthies" as Walt Isaacson can't wait to leap to their defense while they are being 'initially' skewered (sort of like Oprah jumping to defend Bill Cosby?).  

Is there an answer?  Not while historians are paid a pittance, and good novels sell in the millions.

SIG/CIS at Dearborn

Who does history?  Who should do history?  Why do we (they) do it?  How are the choices of what to study made?  Who vets the resulting work? 

These questions provoke widely varying points of view. 

Just prior to the annual SHOT (Society for the History of Technology) conference at Dearborn, Michigan in November, the Special Interest Group for Computers In Society (SIG/CIS) had a spirited e-mail exchange on this topic.  The topic centered on the perceived historical flaws in Walter Isaacson’s newly published book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and what should/could be or have been done.  Views varied widely, from solid enthusiasm for a truly well-written, engaging book about “our topic” to real concern for the lack of involving the SIG/CIS leadership as reviewers prior to publication—essentially vetting the book.

The keynote speaker at the SIG/CIS meeting, Jennifer Light, tackled the question of “who” head-on, averring that there are (at least) five different communities who are focused on the history of computing:

1.     Historians of technology (us, in that room, as SHOT and SIG/CIS members)

2.     Historians of science (them, having their annual conference the same week in Chicago)

3.     Practitioners in the computing design worlds (architecture, computer-aided tools, etc.)

4.     Practitioners in the communications/media worlds (movies, games, iPhones, etc.)

5.     Journalists, analysts, and amateur historians of many stripes and origins

Light’s key observation, for my taste, was that none of these five groups talk to each other.   Bernard Carlson, professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society department at the University of Virginia, lent special emphasis to this point when he mentioned that the head of the National Academy of Engineering  (unnamed at the conference, but it was Bill Wulf) asked to get the SHOT periodicals, but after a year of reading them, he reported to Carlson that “I don’t understand anything they’re talking of.”

Help me, please!  The chairperson of NAE for America, the premier group of eight thousand engineers in America, himself a pedigreed PhD with long engineering experience, numerous patents, business success and accolades, could not relate to the issues, debates, or even vocabulary of the leading historians of technology of the world?  It’d be hard to make up this story, it sounds so ludicrous. 

Light continued, noting that at most, there are perhaps four hundred practicing Historians of Computing Technology in the world today, versus an observation by the most popular author in that field (Jim Cortada) who recently wrote that “we will come to see this field as the most pivotal historical point in civilization.”

Cortada has a superb little book about 'our craft'--"History Hunting"--wherein he notes: "in the case of the world of computers, we have had the problem that so few participants have been interviewed and so many thousands could be.  Computing pioneers also have had the bad habit of dying, even if many have lived into their eighties and nineties.  Because doing high-grade interviews is so expensive and time-consuming, we needed to find another way to get that task done if we were going to scale up to interviewing many people rather than just staying content with a few.  Remember, there are only several hundred professionally trained historians in the world looking at the history of computing, and the number of people they can interview is low....   (After CBI, CHM and the Software History Center collaborated, got a $600K grant from Sloan, and built a website, sought lots of folk, etc....) the project proved to be a partial success."  And that overstates the success, measured against the original goal.

So... an opportunity awaits!  Or maybe multiple opportunities.  Historians are too few, amateurs are too amateurish, practitioners are too self-absorbed, etc.  But... meanwhile we're losing valuable stuff.

Capturing History

We've posted before in this blog about the importance of "Capturing History" for our High-Tech community.  See, for example, "An Added Focus for InnovaScapes Institute" posted 1/7/14, followed by "What have we learned via Oral and Video Histories" posted 7/19/14, and the sequel ""Why Collect Oral and Video Histories?"" on the same day.

Two recent events are worth noting in this regard:

First, the annual SHOT and SIG/CIS meeting in Dearborn, MI the second week in November

Then, the IEEE Silicon Valley chapter December 2014 meeting at the Texas Inst HQ in Sunnyvale.

The next two posts will report briefly on these events.  What this post does is introduce the topic that they have stimulated for me:

"History is too important to leave up to historians."

Seriously, we have a huge problem in this regard, and almost no one is aware of it, or more importantly, how they can help influence it.

For example, Christophe Lecuyer, an energetic, focused historical researcher long associated with Silicon Valley history recently was able to publish a small volume of "the Fairchild papers."  These are key notebook entries from the folk who famously bolted from Shockley Labs, pioneered almost all of the key technologies for silicon chip manufacture, and then created Intel Corporation.  It is a wonderful glimpse at "How it Happened"--where "It" is the crux of the digital revolution that will go down in history as probably THE epochal event for civilization's knowledge management.

The story, though, worth reporting is how closely we came to losing all of this historical record.

Fairchild Semiconductor eventually had more folk leave to start new companies than anything experienced at Shockley.  Intel, AMD, and National all spun directly out; Zilog was part of the second wave, etc.  Within a decade, more than 40 semiconductor companies were competing in what was just being termed "Silicon Valley."  Another decade, and most of them had disappeared, merged, or struggled against the Japanese 'onslaught.'  In fact, the irony is that Silicon Valley was no longer the home of much silicon by the time (1982) that National Geographic did its spotlight article re SV, and the Japanese had decimated the local firms by producing much higher-quality parts (as opposed to the dumping charges that U.S. manufacturers "manufactured").

Fairchild itself struggled, then was sold, first to Schlumberger, and then to National, its historical records boxed up and retained, but not examined at all.  Then National, years later, got sold to Texas Instruments, which had someone discover the historical records, start to dispose of them, and then thought to call the Computer History Museum to ask if they'd be interested in the corpus.

Wow!  What if they hadn't called, but instead dumped the records?  It urns out that we know most of the records of most of the companies in Silicon Valley history have been discarded, shredded, lost.  Irretrievably.

And we are losing the pioneers.  People are mortal, and our heroes are no exception.  So the leaders, the inventors, the creators--never mind the legions of helpers--are seldom recorded for their history, their experience, their perspective.

Does it matter?  We think so.  Can we got a grip on this?  How?  There are only an estimated 400 professional computer historians in the world--see the next post--hardly enough to do justice to the field reworking all of the world's societal infrastructure.  Moreover, most of those 400 are focused on the minutiae of a few people or companies, or even one or two specific machines (e.g. IBM 1401).

So--tell your friends, tell a CEO, tell your neighbors--SAVE THOSE RECORDS.  Preserving is the first step toward later interpretation.  Without it, nothing can easily be done later.