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2016 | Book

The Route Less Taken: The Homegrown Los Alamos Integrated Computer Network Read chapter Read first chapter

International Communities of Invention and Innovation

IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on the History of Computing, HC 2016, Brooklyn, NY, USA, May 25-29, 2016, Revised Selected Papers

Editors: Arthur Tatnall, Christopher Leslie

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book contains revised selected papers presented at the IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on the History of Computing, HC 2016, held in Brooklyn, NY, USA, in May 2016.
The 13 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to the history of computing and focus on the history of pre-existing relationships and communities that led to triumphs (and dead-ends) in the history of computing. This broad perspective helps to tell a more accurate story of important developments like the Internet and provide a better understanding of how to sponsor future invention and innovation. They reflect on histories that foreground the international community along four broad themes: invention, policy, infrastructure, and social history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
The Route Less Taken: The Homegrown Los Alamos Integrated Computer Network
Abstract
Between the 1970s and 1990s, Los Alamos National Laboratory built and utilized a largely custom computer network for the Lab’s supercomputers. Designed to support the unusual performance, storage, and security requirements of an American weapons lab, the Los Alamos Integrated Computer Network, as the focus of historical study, complicates and enriches the history of computer networking development, exploring the approaches and contributions to computer networking of an institution outside the better-known worlds of industry, academia, and the military. For example, the Lab’s reticence to adopt TCP/IP due to performance and security concerns further complicates the narrative of the ARPANET/Internet protocol suite’s adoption among advanced networking sites in the 1980s and 90s.
Nicholas Lewis
MONET – Monash University’s Campus LAN in the 1980s – A Bridge to Better Networking
Abstract
Monash University, Australia developed an in-house local area network called MONET during the 1980s to meet the needs of the university’s computer users. The Monash University Computer Centre team created and installed an economical computer access network across an extensive campus with distributed computer installations and a large numbers of users. MONET was an early implementation of a Local Area Network (LAN) at a time when LAN concepts were evolving and specific hardware and software for the purpose did not yet exist. MONET became a successful large scale system that was in development and then operation to support all the University’s computer services for over a decade. It was also commercialized and used by various other organizations.
Barbara Ainsworth, Neil Clarke, Chris Avram, Judy Sheard
Technology vs. Political Conflict – How Networks Penetrate the Iron Curtain
Abstract
In July 1977, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna organized an experimental data transmission line. This paper investigates this experimental data transmission line focusing on three aspects: first of all IIASA was an important location for Eastern and Western scientists for working with each other, secondly the team of computer specialists creating the network was remarkable, and finally the concept of combining computer technology with science cooperation and information transfer was very advanced in the 1970s.
Frank Dittmann
There and Back Again – Andrew Booth, a British Computer Pioneer, and his Interactions with US and Other Contemporaries
Abstract
This paper explores the interchanges between Andrew Booth, an early British computer pioneer and contemporary US and other pioneers. The paper records how funding from the US Rockefeller Foundation supported Andrew Booth’s research work in the UK and allowed him to refine his ideas on computer design by visiting US pioneers each year from 1946 to 1948. This led to the construction of an electronic drum, the world’s first successful demonstration of a rotating storage device connected to a computer, to his pioneering work on natural language processing and finally and most notably to his invention of the Booth hardware multiplier which is the basis of the multiplier used in billions of chips each year.
Roger G. Johnson
‘Machines à Comparer les Idées’ of Semen Korsakov: First Step Towards AI
Abstract
This paper is devoted to forgotten Russian scholar Semen Korsakov and describes his life and scientific activity. The particular attention is paid to Korsakov’s main achievement – invention of five “intellectual machines”. These machines could be considered as the very first attempt to design a mechanical device capable to perform such intellectual operations as data analysis, comparison, and selection.
Valery V. Shilov, Sergey A. Silantiev
Towards Machine Independence: From Mechanically Programmed Devices to the Internet of Things
Abstract
This is an historical account of the development of an aspect of technology and of machines, leading to information technologies, the Internet and the Internet of Things. It points to an increasing trend towards these machines and devices becoming more and more independent of human intervention and control. We have not quite got there yet, but a clear trend can be observed nevertheless from mechanically controlled machines such as Al-Jazari’s Castle Clock which a naïve 13th century observer could have thought had a life of its own to modern smart kitchen and household appliances (from the Internet of Things) that really could be said to have a degree of independence. The paper makes use of actor-network theory as a lens for understanding the human and non-human elements of this historical trend.
Arthur Tatnall, Bill Davey
The Global Virtual Museum of Information Science & Technology, a Project Idea
Abstract
Information Science & Technology (IST) has pervasively affected our everyday life, thus becoming a proper cultural heritage of humanity. The growing curiosity about IST history has determined the creation of important collections devoted to the conservation of IST relics. Physical relics are naturally located close to their origins, but they are only one aspect of preservation and dissemination of IST history. The whole knowledge about IST history has to go beyond the local boundaries and become a globally shared and worldwide accessible heritage. Our proposal is to establish a Global Virtual Museum of IST based on a knowledge base able to manage all the information of the domain, created and updated by museum keepers and other experts, and capable of offering new enjoyment opportunities to a wider public audience. It is a radical change in the idea itself of cultural heritage information management, up to now bound to the traditional cataloguing approaches.
Giovanni A. Cignoni, Giovanni A. Cossu
Why not OSI?
Abstract
This paper presents an argument that the OSI proposed standard is technically superior to the TCP/IP standard for network communications. An Actor-Network Theory approach is taken for analysis of the historical record surrounding the adoption of TCP/IP. The paper does not seek to create a new history of TCP/IP but to suggest this is a case where traditional explanations of adoption based on the nature of the technology do not explain the demise of the OSI model. Parallels are then drawn between this adoption and the possible problems with the implementation of IPV6. These parallels provide insight into the impediments that may arise with the adoption of the new standard.
Bill Davey, Robert F. Houghton
Flame Wars on Worldnet: Early Constructions of the International User
Abstract
Some of the earliest users of the Internet described their activities as predicting a widespread communication medium that would cross national boundaries even before the technical capability was possible. An analysis of conversations on Human-Nets, an early ARPANet mailing list, shows how users were concerned about providing a forum for open discussion and hoped that the network would spread to provide communication throughout the world. Moving forward to CSNET, one can also see a strong insistence that the network provide connectivity beyond the United States. Contrary to those who might tell the history of the Internet as a story of a technology that was first perfected by the military, adapted by U.S. academics and then brought to the rest of the world in the 1990s, these users reveal a strong ideology of international communication.
Christopher Leslie
The Code of Banking: Software as the Digitalization of German Savings Banks
Abstract
To the present day the history of banking software is nearly untold. While there is already some literature on the use of computers in the banking industry, most of it focuses only on the hardware and its restrictions (cf. Cortada 2006). The logic behind these machines remains untold. With the advent of the computer as a universal machine since the 1950s, business processes have been written into code, not hard wired into the machine. Furthermore, not the processor but the system software steered what was presented on the screen to the banking employee. Hardware got more and more exchangeable, while the real guiding principles of computing in action are to be found in software. This article analyzes how German savings banks used software to digitalize their business during the period of the Cold War.
Martin Schmitt
Electronic “Ambassador”: The Diplomatic Missions of IBM’s RAMAC 305
Abstract
This paper traces the “diplomatic missions” of the RAMAC 305 developed by IBM in California during the late 1950s and instrumentalized as an “animate” ambassador of American computing technology abroad. Specifically, this paper looks at IBM’s exhibit at the American National Exhibition in Moscow (July 1959) and Nikita Khrushchev’s tour to the IBM manufacturing plant in San Jose, California (September 1959) to argue that the RAMAC 305 was envisioned and designed as a modular system of combinable units and peripherals that could be easily—and quite literally—transferred around the world. Ultimately, this work demonstrates how the carefully choreographed exhibiting of Western computing power by American companies like IBM actively accelerated the participation of USSR in global treatises on the fair use of patented information technologies in the decades that followed.
Evangelos Kotsioris
The Birth of Artificial Intelligence: First Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Paris in 1951?
Abstract
The 1956 Dartmouth conference is often considered as the cradle of artificial intelligence. There is a controversy on its origin. Some historians of computing believe that Turing or Zuse were the fathers of machine intelligence. However, the first working chess-playing automaton was developed by Torres Quevedo by 1912. Moreover, there was a large and important (but forgotten) European conference on computing and human thinking in Paris in 1951.
Herbert Bruderer
The World’s Smallest Mechanical Parallel Calculator: Discovery of Original Drawings and Patent Documents from the 1950s in Switzerland
Abstract
The Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark invented the world-renowned mechanical pocket calculator Curta. The books and the papers on the history of computing mention two models, Curta 1 and Curta 2. In November 2015 original drawings and patent documents on a multiple Curta were discovered in Switzerland. This device is supposed to be the world’s smallest mechanical parallel calculator.
Herbert Bruderer
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
International Communities of Invention and Innovation
Editors
Arthur Tatnall
Christopher Leslie
Copyright Year
2016
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-49463-0
Print ISBN
978-3-319-49462-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49463-0

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