cpsr-history mailing list

>Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 02:32:32 -0700
>Reply-To: ben@dxcern.cern.ch
> >Sender: cpsr-history@Sunnyside.COM
> >From: ben@dxcern.cern.ch (Ben Segal)
>To: [...]
>Subject: Community Memory - a contribution
>
>This message was submitted by ben@dxcern.cern.ch (Ben Segal) to list
>cpsr-history@cpsr.org. If you forward it back to the list, it will be
>distributed without the paragraphs above the dashed line. You may edit the
>Subject: line and the text of the message before forwarding it back.
>
>If you edit the messages you receive into a digest, you will need to remove
>these paragraphs and the dashed line before mailing the result to the list.
>Finally, if you need more information from the author of this message, you
>should be able to do so by simply replying to this note.
>
>----------------------- Message requiring your approval ----------------------
>Sender: ben@dxcern.cern.ch (Ben Segal)
>Subject: Community Memory - a contribution>
>
>Just read the CPSR announcement of your interesting initiative. I will subscribe. As for a bit of "primary-source information", I can contribute a small history I wrote last year on the arrival of the Internet (and later the Web) at CERN - its URL is http://wwwcn.cern.ch/pdp/ns/ben/TCPHIST.html I agree with you that computer professionals should spend at least some of their time reflecting on the origins of the core ideas and directions of the information revolution: after all, they are propagating it!
>
>Ben Segal / CERN http:/wwwcn.cern.ch/~ben
> b.segal@cern.ch

Since announcing the creation of this list yesterday, about 500 people have already subscribed, which is an exciting indication of what's possible to accomplish in this shared endeavor. I want to just outline for the moment how messages will be distributed to the list, and your options for how to control message volume.

Messages should be sent to either cpsr-history@cpsr.org or to me at [...]. Since the list is moderated, any messages you send to cpsr-history@cpsr.org are forwarded to me first, and then resent by me. If you wish to control message flow so that incoming messages are bundled together into one larger message, send the following command to:

listserv@cpsr.org

that reads:

set cpsr-history mail digest

If you have URL links or archival material you want to contribute, pertaining to cyber-history, send them and I will make them available at the Community Memory web site which for now has a home page of:

http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html

My apologies if the message that precedes this one confused you; I forwarded it improperly. In the future messages won't have all the material that preceded the submission (above the ---- line).

Thanks for subscribing.

best,
db

Sender: John Ahlstrom
Subject: Greetings and Queries

How specialized is Comm Mem in "origins, history, and development of computer networks" as opposed to "computer hardware, software and computer science"

I work with and produce products for network but my real love is history of development of computers, software (languages, OS, DBMS, ...) Will my kinds of questions and posts be welcome here or will only time tell?

An example of a recent query I made to comp.arch is "What were the computers in the first IMPs and TIPs, how did they develop?"

In this kind of arena (Comm Mem) I would add something about their development into routers.

I was about to ask comp.arch or alt.folklore.computers if anyone has official or largely correct figures for prePC (BPC?) computer shipments and for the length of manufacturing single computer models. E.g. what was the production run of the 360/30, not of all 360s.

Any interest or am I barking up the wrong tree?

JKA

John Ahlstrom jahlstrom@cisco.com
408-526-6025 Using Java to Decrease Entropy

The Commercial - Non-Commercial Shift in Cyberspace

Missing from the cyber histories I have looked at is the story of the shift in 1991 (I assume 1991 from the general histories) from the Net *not* being able to be used for commercial purposes, to it supporting these endeavors.

If anyone has a focus story or references to this part of the timeline, I would be grateful.

Richard Wilkerson
rcwilk@aol.com

Prior to 1991, various regional networks were accepting commercial traffic within their networks and it became apparent that inter-network commercial connections were needed. The NSFNET backbone was restricted to research and education traffic. In 1990, Bill Schraeder (PSInet), Rick Adams (UUNET), and I (CERFnet at the time) got together and decided to form the CIX - the commercial Internet exchange (www.cix.org). Operational in early 1991 with the three founding networks, the CIX was the first time that commercial traffic could pass among networks -- without settlements.

Susan Estrada

Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense, can anyone say when and where the first intranet was created?

Rick Barry

Sender: Bryan Pfaffenberger
Subject: First use of term "netiquette"?

Hi - for a history of Usenet that I'm working on, I'd appreciate recollections on the approx. date of the first use of the term "netiquette." My working hypothesis is that the term surfaced sometime after the "fall" of the "Backbone Cabal" (late 1980s) and the migration of the 'Net to NNTP, which lessened the power of sysadmins to deal with rogue users - so that netiquette was an attempt to formulate established practice in the hope that users would self-police.
Many thanks
Bryan Pfaffengerger

Sender: John G Norman
Subject: early experiences of cyberspace

Many of the features of rich computer-mediated communication--communication over short and long distance; a very large user community; multiple venues for communication; the use of handles for anonymity; support for extended communication by email; etc.--were present in the early- and mid-1970s on CDC Cyber computers through the use of TALK (popularly known as "X,TALK") and PPC (written by Mike Huck?). X,TALK and PPC were forerunners to IRC. One of the home-brew email systems was called +WRITE+ and was written by someone with the handle Aragorn (I think).

Much of this early history is lost--but it was incredibly detailed and rich. The University of Minnesota had some kind of remote college campus / High School outreach program, so there were students communicating from all over Minnesota, Wisconsin, and, I think, the Dakotas. I got to know many people via this medium, and only met a few people face-to-face. I was a member of a group that called itself "Various Users" that imagined itself as a conclave within this larger community.

It has bothered me for a long time that the *experience* of early cyberspace has been located by early histories with the early bulletin boards when this kind of environment was out there with a large user base.

I've also wondered for a long time if the people behind X,TALK and PPC were aware of early experiments like the San Francisco 1970s Community Memory Project.

In any case, it seems to me that it would be a great article or even book to work up an ethnographic or anthropological account of this early community.

John N.
__________________________________________________________________
John G Norman http://denn14.cohums.ohio-state.edu/users/jnorman/
English Dept; Ohio State; 164 W 17th Ave Cols., OH 43210-1370

Sender: Steven Hodas
Subject: "Cerfing" the Net?

Hi-

Someone recently claimed to me the the term "surfing" (the net) originated as "Cerfing", as a kind of tribute.

This seems unlikely to me. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Steven

Sender: "Laurence I. Press"
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

> Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense, can anyone say when and where the first intranet was created?

What is the definition of an "intranet?" If IP is not a requisite, IBM's internal network may be a good candidate for the first major intranet.

Sender: "Laurence I. Press"
Subject: Re: CM> early experiences of cyberspace

> The University of Minnesota had some kind of remote college campus / High
> School outreach program, so there were students communicating from all over

People's computer club in Menlo Park and the Community Memory project in the bay area come to mind. (PCC had a storefront center by around 68 or so). I had teletypes in a few LA locations in the early 70s also. Plato was also around in those days.

Lar

Sender: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
Subject: Re: CM> Seeking Information and Reference on the Commercialization
of Internet

Reply to message from RCWilk@aol.com of Wed, 05 Jun
>
>The Commercial - Non-Commercial Shift in Cyberspace
>
> Missing from the cyber histories I have looked at is the story of the
>shift in 1991 (I assume 1991 from the general histories) from the Net *not*
>being able to be used for commercial purposes, to it supporting these
>endeavors.
>
I wondered why you are interested in this question.

It seems the fad these days, rather than looking at how the public, academic, and even the commercial sectors gained from the Acceptible Use Policy governing Internet traffic that helped the Net to grow
and flourish. (For example, I don't think compuserve had such a policy but rather it encouraged commercial activity and it didn't grow and flourish the way the ARPANET, Usenet and then the Internet did.)

If you are interested in this perspective at all, you may want to look at our online netbook "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet". The URL is http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ You can particularly look at the draft from Oct., 1995 which is at rh120 (the www gives you the choice of different versions of the netbook)

Chapter 12 "Imminent Death of the Net Predicted" documents the March 1990 By Invitation Only Workshop at Harvard that put ideology rather than public interest first in the policy for the Net. It also documents the Inspector General of the NSFnet's report in April 1993 and the problems that the commercialization was causing regarding the public obligations under the law of the NSFnet.

And it lists the AUP.

There is a real need to look at why the Net developed and flourished under the prohibitions against commercial abuse, and why there wasn't more of a public discussion and debate before removing these prohibitions so that the healthy public and education and scientific purposes the Net had come to serve wouldn't be jeopardized.

> If anyone has a focus story or references to this part of the timeline, I
>would be grateful.

My suggestions is that you look at the whole of the netbook that I have given the URL for above as it puts the commercialization into the bigger picture of the technical and social needs that the Net was built to serve.

>
> Richard Wilkerson
>rcwilk@aol.com
>
Ronda
au329@cleveland.freenet.edu
rh120@columbia.edu

--
Ronda Hauben "The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net"
ronda@umcc.umich.edu Anthology of Articles
free via ftp or on the History of Unix, the Arpanet, and Usenet
gopher or www and on the Impact of the Net

Sender: RICKBARRY@aol.com
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

Good point and good question. When I did a search at the local bookstore a couple of weeks ago for books with INTRANET in the title, they came up with about 15 titles, the earliest of which was March 96 and a number of which were post-June 96. Of course that does not tell us when the term was first used in a book without that in the title. I just picked up one of them and it may have the answer to the question I posed, at least it purports to. Let me quote from BUILDING INTRANETS, A HANDS-ON GUIDE TO SETTING UP AN INTERNAL WEB, by Tim Evans, Sams.net Publishing, 1996, ISBN 1-57521-071-1, p.16:

"This book uses the term *Intranet* to refer to organizations' use of World Wide Web and related Internet technology to do their essential work, that of helping to produce the goods or services the organization exists to produce.

"In the rush to ge on the Web, most organizations think in terms of making information available to people outside the organization. Many companies have installed Web servers and made them accesible on the Internet with the idea of making corporate information available to others or of selling things on the Web. Interestingly, though, the intitial objective of the Web pioneers at the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Geneva, was to create a means by which CERN scientists could more easily share information. Thus the first Web was, in fact, an *Intranet*, designed to distribute information *within* an organization to the organization's own people. Without detracting from the proven business value of World Wide Web services in making information available to those outside orgnaizations and companies, this book focuses on how purely within an organization, Web and realted technology may be used to further the purpose for which the organization exists."
[As to timing, earlier, on p. 8, the author describes how Tim Berners-Lee, then at CERN, invented the means for sharing data among colleagues using *hypertext*..."CERN users could view documents on their computer screens using new *browser* software...A researcher co7uld transfer a file from a remote computer to her local system, or log into a remote system just by hitting opna hpyperlink, rather than using hthe clumsy FTP or Telnet mechanisms."]

The book then goes on to explain the very different image and projection in an organizaton's public Web vs its 'behind-the-firewall' intranet. (I recently got an accidental hit on a WWW search of a paper I had co-authored that I didn't realize was even on the net. When I tried to access it, I was asked for a password! It turned out to be on an Australian university Web that must also have been connected to an internal intranet.) My own view is that intranets will become much more prevalent in the next couple of years and will help solve one of the intractable problems of long-term (technology-independent) access to internal organizatoinal electronic records/archives. Which is why I thought that this kind of technology ought to be monitored more from an historical perspective.

My apologies for raising a question that I was subsequently able to answer myself. I hope it will, nevertheless, be of interest to the other participants on this list.

Rick Barry

Richard E. Barry, Barry Associates
3808 North Albemarle Street; Arlington, Virginia 22207 USA
Tel:+703/241-3808; Fax: +703/241-7968; E-mail: rickbarry@aol.com
Welcome to World Wide Web Homepage: http://www.rbarry.com/

Sender: "David Norton"
Subject: Books regarding the social construction of computers?

Friends,
I'm wondering if anyone knows of texts (articles and books) that deal with how computers changed from being perceived as computational devices to be publication/media/social devices. I'm particularly interested in the way that GUI interfaces came into being and how they encouraged this perceptual shift. And I'm interested in anything that treats computer development from a social constructionists perspective.

Suggestions? Thank you in advance.
Dave Norton

Sender: "Bernie Cosell"
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

On 6 Jun 96 at 7:09, by way of [...] wrote:

> Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense, can anyone
> say when and where the first intranet was created?

Care to define "intranet" in this context? Current usage is something like "the rush for corporations to abandon the dead-end network protocols and switch to IP". Do companies that have had internal IP networks for decades think of anything that has happened recently as being a switch to an 'intranet'?

If it does mean 'internal IP net', then BBN is surely the first, since we were the only place back in the early days of the ARPAnet that had more than one IMP. Not long after, IBM, DEC and Honeywell [at the very least] all had massive [and world-wide!] corporate-internal networks.

/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--

Sender: (Peter Capek)
Subject: IBM's Intranet

I think the term "intranet" has come to mean a network which is entirely within a corporation or organization, and which uses Internet technology (protocols, routers, IP and UDP on up to HTTP). If one relaxes the definition to allow other communication technology, then indeed IBM had a large one (still does..), which had 1000 nodes attached in the early 80s, and 2500 by the mid-80s. "node" here means a computer, but ranging in size from a small System/370 up through a very large System/390 or 3090, with the balance most definitely toward the upper end of that range. The network from its earliest days supported e-mail and file transfer, as well as remote log-on shortly thereafter.

There is of course also an Intranet, but I'm less clear on the dates for this... certainly it was in place in the late 80s.

Peter Capek
IBM Research

Sender: OLmaniac@aol.com
Subject: Re: CM> "Cerfing" the Net?

In a message dated 96-06-06 11:36:31 EDT, Steven@review.com writes...

>Someone recently claimed to me the the term "surfing" (the net) originated
>as "Cerfing", as a kind of tribute.
>
>This seems unlikely to me. Any thoughts?

Well, since I am a user of a nation-wide provider, I think that it is entirely possible that surfing originated as cerfing, sice I have to work like a slave to pay of my HUGE bill.

8^)

Here's one for the list, where did the emoticon originate?

OlManiac

Sender: Jim Horning
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

Rick,

The term "intranet" is, of course, a recent one, a back formation from "Internet." So "the first intranet" is largely a matter of definition.

But I think that you could make a strong case for the Ethernet at Xerox PARC, circa 1973, as being the first system that was ubiquitous in an organization and that was net-centered, rather than mainframe/timesharing centered. Xerox was one of the first companies to link a network of Ethernets around the company; Digital Equipment was another. In 1977, Xerox PARC put on a show at Boca Raton for several hundred of Xerox's top executives, in which they demonstrated personal computers (with mice and bitmap displays) linked by a network across the country, WYSIWYG editing, laser printer servers, e-mail agents, file servers, and probably other technology I've forgotten.

If you would like a lot of relatively contemporary documentation, the best collection is probably "Xerox Parc: The First Ten Years," a volume Xerox put out in 1980 to celebrate PARC's 10th anniversary. Or, for a less flattering view, see "Fumbling the Future."

Jim H.

"Been there, used that."

Jim H.

Sender: Les Earnest
Subject: CM> "Cerfing" the Net?

Steven Hodas writes:
Someone recently claimed to me the the term "surfing" (the net) originated as "Cerfing", as a kind of tribute.

This seems unlikely to me. Any thoughts?

Aha! Another myth in the making. No, if it were meant as a tribute it would have been called "vinting."

"Surfing" in this sense is clearly derived from the earlier "channel surfing" that has been a favorite pastime of a certain segment of the population (mostly male) since TV remote controls became available in the early 1970s.

-Les Earnest

Sender: Les Earnest
Subject: CM> Date of first Intranet?

Rick Barry writes:
Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense, can anyone say when and where the first intranet was created?

If you want to know when and where the first intranet web system was created, I don't know. However, if you want to know when in-house shared data and discussions began, that was shortly after the emergence of timesharing systems in the mid-1960s. For example, we had an electronic bulletin board and various shared files on the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) computer in the late 1960s and email exchanges began in the early 1970s, about the same time we began using ARPAnet seriously.

-Les Earnest

Sender: ben@dxcern.cern.ch (Ben Segal)
Subject: Resending my contribution...
|
|
|Just read the CPSR announcement of your interesting initiative. I will
|subscribe. As for a bit of "primary-source information", I can contribute
|a small history I wrote last year on the arrival of the Internet (and later
|the Web) at CERN - its URL is http://wwwcn.cern.ch/pdp/ns/ben/TCPHIST.html
|I agree with you that computer professionals should spend at least some of
|their time reflecting on the origins of the core ideas and directions of
|the information revolution: after all, they are propagating it!
|
|Ben Segal / CERN http:/wwwcn.cern.ch/~ben
| b.segal@cern.ch |

Sender: Efrem Lipkin
Subject: Re: CM> early experiences of cyberspace

In terms of an actual sense of cyberspace, neither People's Computer Club nor Community Memory are good early examples. PCC was about computers and programming not communication. The Community Memory Project was very much about computer-mediated communication, but the emphasis was on placing terminals in a rich social space. The first terminal (a teletype in a cardboard box) had a full time-human attendant (barker & trainer) and frequently a line waiting to use noisy thing. The result was an interesting mix of cyberspace with flesh and blood, where the biological space was usually dominant. There were some fascinating exceptions to this which were the CM crew's first hints of the way Gibson's poorly imagined, but very accurately tagged "consensual hallucination" would develop.

My impression is that the Plato system was the first were a sense of cyberspace developed and then probably Murray Turoff's EIES system in NJ. I am not sure of the dates for USENET and it's news groups, but the size of its community in the late 70's makes me believe it was the first city constructed in cyberspace.

>
>> The University of Minnesota had some kind of remote college campus / High
>> School outreach program, so there were students communicating from all over
>
>People's computer club in Menlo Park and the Community Memory project
>in the bay area come to mind. (PCC had a storefront center by around
>68 or so). I had teletypes in a few LA locations in the early 70s
>also. Plato was also around in those days.
>
>Lar

In a message dated 96-06-06 20:10:11 EDT, bjander@ibm.net wrote:

>One of the earliest mail applications was on back to back PDP11/34's in New
>Zealand's first "cold type" NewsPaper,
>about 1974... again primative but an "intranet", in so far as the subeditors
>and readers shared a common resource of
>material, and could provde "layers" of security.

For a question that I thought I had mistakenly put on the list, it has certainly evoked some interesting responses. I'm not an expert in 'intranets' so I'm not really sure that all of the responses would qualify as intranets in the sense that the word seems to be being used today. E.g., I don't think it is synonymous with any groupware such as internal email, or I suppose that a new term like this wouldn't have been found necessary or desirable to talk about it; but I may very well be wrong. My impression was
that the term embraced Web technology and was created to distinguish it from public Internet Webs. I'll leave it up to some of the experts more directly involved in the movement to judge what does and doesn't constitute an intranet. Which brings me to a related question: does anyone know when the term was coined and by whom, or when it first appeared in the literature?

Rick Barry

Richard E. Barry, Barry Associates
3808 North Albemarle Street; Arlington, Virginia 22207 USA
Tel:+703/241-3808; Fax: +703/241-7968; E-mail: rickbarry@aol.com
Welcome to World Wide Web Homepage: http://www.rbarry.com/

Sender: Ted Nellen

>
> Here's one for the list, where did the emoticon originate?
>
> OlManiac

One source http://www.newbie.net/JumpStations/SmileyFAQ.html attributes the smileys to Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon U about 14 years ago. He devised a scheme for encoding and conveying one's feelings called "glyphs". His first two were :-) and :-(

More info if you are interested can be found at http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/referenc.html#smile

Cheers, __o
_-\<_
Ted 8-) (_)/(_)

http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us
http://www.dorsai.org/~tnellen

Sender:
Subject: CM> The Dawn of Emoticons =)

On Jun 7, 8:08am, by way of David S. Bennahum wrote:

> 8^)
>
> Here's one for the list, where did the emoticon originate?
>
> OlManiac

According to Raymond and Steele's Jargon Page, which everyone should check out (http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html), an "emoticon" was first used in 1980 when Scott Fahlman whimsically included his creation in a post to a bulletin board. He probably had no idea how quick the thing would catch on.

I think a lot of the *language* and _text modification_ that goes on on the Internet today is greatly influenced by the technical and programming-oriented core of users that first pioneered it. A lot of usages show clear connections to programming syntax /*e.g., in place of parentheses*/ and "quotations before periods". It's funny how easily a lot of it is so quickly picked up by newer users. I would argue that the combination of the technical nature of the original Internet users and the Internet's natural restriction to ASCII text- only communication has created a sort of written dialect specific to the Internet.

Brett Wetzell

There are now about 900 people subscribed to this list, which is wonderful.
However, as the number of subscribers grows, so does message flow. To
ensure that the quality of posts, and this list remains on purpose ("...to
explore the origins, history and development of computer networks, computer
hardware, software, and computer science, and the environment collectively
known as 'cyberspace.'"), here are a couple of guidelines for what *not* to
send to the list:

• Do not send questions all by themselves, without any additional information. Please "give" something in return for your question: a historical event you know of, a link to a resource document, i.e. some sort of info pertaining to the history of cyberspace.
• "I agree" or "I disagree" without any supporting information.
• Speculation without historical info, jokes without info.
• Speculation on the future of the Internet without any supporting historical info of why, given the past, we should expect this in the future.

In sum: whatever the message, please contribute some information to the list. That way the ratio of questions-answers will be balanced.

Thanks!

best,
db

Sender: Louis N Proyect
Subject: IBM/military links

In an article by Gar Alpervowitz that appeared in the October '94 Technology Review, he alludes to research that demonstrates that something like 11 out of the major 15 breakthroughs in computing since WWII were a side-effect of publically funded research efforts, many of which has ties to the Pentagon.

Does anybody know of a book that focuses on these types of connections between IBM specifically and the cold-war military machine? Or other big mainframe companies that are no longer around (Univac, etc.).

Thanks, Louis Proyect

Sender: Bruce Jones
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

[~snip~]

Try this:

*Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas Behind the Next Computer Revolution* by Howard Rheingold. New York : Computer Book Division/Simon & Schuster, c1985. 335 p. Includes index, Bibliography: p. 321-326.

Sender: szpak@ra.isisnet.com (Mark Szpakowski)
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

At 7:56 AM 6/7/96, "David Norton" (by way of davidso wrote:
>I'm wondering if anyone knows of texts (articles and books) that deal with
>how computers changed from being perceived as computational devices to be
>publication/media/social devices.

Computers and communications may have already been linked in the minds of the earliest pioneers. For example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start doing phone-phreak devices, and, according to something I read a long time ago (sorry, can't remember the source) the Apple I was meant to be a phone/computer device. In my case as well, in the early days of Community Memory in 1972, seeing the computer as a social device to enable communications seemed perfectly natural. Maybe we were just naive...

- Mark

-----------------
Mark Szpakowski
szpak@isisnet.com

Sender: henstell@ucla.edu (bruce henstell)
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

>Sender: "David Norton"
>Subject: Books regarding the social construction of computers?

Of course social construction covers a number of sins depending on your point of view. I'm doing my Ph.d diss in this area, on multimedia, and have a fairly good bibliography. Some relevant materials are (in no particular order):

Edwards, Paul N. The Closed world: compurers and the politics of discourse in cold war America. Cambridge: MIT, 1996.

Woolgar, Steve. "Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism." In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor Pinch, 311-328. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990a.

Woolgar, Steve. Science: The Very Idea. Chichester, England: Ellis Horwood, 1988.

Woolgar, Steve. "The Turn to Technology in Social Studies of Science." Science, Technology and Human Values 16, no. 1 (1991): 20-50.

Woolgar, Steve. "Why Not a Sociology of Machines? The Case of Sociology and Artifical Intelligence." Sociology 19:4: 557-572.

Woolgar, Steve, and Keith Grint. "Computers and the transformation of social analysis." Science, Technology and Human Values 16, no. 3 (1991): 368-378.

Woolgar, Steve, and Geoff Russell. "The social basis of computer viruses.". Brunel University: Centre for Research into Innovation, 1990.

Bardini, Thierry. "The Social Construction of the Personal Computer User." Journal of Communication 45, no. 3 (1995): 4065.

Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Bloomfield, Brian P., Rod Coombs, and Jenny Owen. "The social construction of information systems-the implications for management control." In Management of information and communication technologies: emerging patterns, edited by Robin Mansell, 143-157. np: ASLIB, 1994.

Brants, Kees. "The social construction of the information revolution." European Journal of Communication 4 (1989): 79-97.

Callon, Michel. "Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis." In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe E Bijer, Thomnas P. Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch, 83-103. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Graves, William. "Ideologies of computing." In Work and technology in higher education: The social construction of academic computing., edited by Mark A. Shields, 65-87. Hilldale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995.

Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other." In The Social Construction of Technological Systems, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Shields, Mark A. "The social construction of academic computing." In Work and technology in higher education: The social construction of academic computing., edited by Mark A. Shields, 1-18. Hilldale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995.

Winner, Langdon. "Social Construction: Opening the Black Box and Finding it Empty." Science as Culture 3, no. 3 (1994): 427-452.

Bruce Henstell
Grad Sch of Education and Information Studies
UCLA

Sender: Dean Esmay
Subject: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

Wozniac and Jobs did sell telephone "blue boxes" in college, while still kids, but I don't know if I would call that their "start." It was part of how they got to know each other, and they made a little money from it, but it was the kind of thing that college kids do as a lark more than anything. Back in those days, "phreaking" as it was called was just a thing technical wiz kids who were kind of bad boys used to do.

It wasn't until later that they got into computers and tried to start a company. They certainly didn't use money from selling blue boxes to get their start; they hadn't done that in some time. They sold, I believe, an old Veedub and an HP engineering calculator to get started, then sought out a venture capitalist.

Also, the old Apple I was not meant to be a "telephone/computer" device. It was meant to be a computer, period. It DID have a port on it that could output to a tape recorded for loading and saving programs, and that port worked at 1200 baud, which was very impressively fast for its day. It also had slots (I don't remember how many) for expansion. But it was not designed with playing with phones in mind.

The Apple IIs, which came after it, became the computer of choice for a while among people who did want to play around illegally with the phone lines, but that was mostly due to a third-party modem called the Apple Cat. The Apple Cat was interesting because instead of just generating standard phone tones, it had advanced (for the time) sound circuitry, so you could program it easily to make all the tones needed for modem connections, including touch tones, modem tones, etc... but because you could create sounds in any frequency, you could also therefore generate all kinds of tones to manipulate the phone system, if you knew what you were doing.

Eventually the phone companies got a court injunction against the old Apple Cats, so the later models had the sophisticated sound capabilities disabled so they could only generate standard modem and touch tones. And the world converted over to electronic switching anyway.

Still, those were heady days for kids who wanted to play games ripping off "Ma Bell," and an old Apple II was the phreaker's best friend. But that was never something Apple designed their machines to do, it was stuff that third-parties and shady individuals did with the machines.

Just someone who was there, at least in the later days. God I can't believe how long ago that stuff was. %-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean Esmay, esmay@syndicomm.com (313) 359-1704
Syndicomm Inc. Online Management http://www.syndicomm.com/

>From: burkett@haas.berkeley.edu (Dave Burkett)
>To: RICKBARRY@aol.com
>CC: errors@snyside.sunnyside.com (Multiple recipients of list
>cpsr-history@cpsr.org)
>
>The first Computer Reseller News article attached below credits a 1995
>Zona Research report for coining the Intranet term. However the next
>three article abstracts show that the term at least had prior roots in an
>April 95 Digital Review article, a 1988 company name (IntraNet) or the
>1977 IBM usage of the term.

Thanks Dave Burkett for your rich and excellent contribution to the question on the orgins of the word "intranet". I had earlier thought that the term was quite unique in its meaning, in the same sense that the term "hypertext" that was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 carried its special meaning from then through decades before it actually came into practical use to today. What I am learning from this list conversation is that the term "intranet" doesn't have that kind of lineage and has been used at various time with different meanings. What seems to be taking off in very large numbers today is the growing use of Web technology for internal information sharing and to support other business transactions or processes "behind-the-firewall" (whether within a single organization or among an invited membership of organizations with shared business aims and relationships) using the innovative (1965) hypertext, hypermedia, technology. Again fromTim Evans' BUILDING AN INTRANET (pp. xx-xxi):

"In a recent surbvey by Business Research Group, reprorted in the *Wall Street Journal* (November 7, 1995), nearly a quarter of 170 medium- and large-sized companies surveyed are already setting up corporate Intranets using World Wide Web technology, while another 20 percent are actively considering doing so....

"Zona Research projects the Intranet software market will more than double in the next two years from $488 million in 1995 to $1.2 Billion in 1996 (*Wall Street Journal* November 7, 1995). IBM has just upgraded it Lotus Notes groupware package to add Web capabilities, a defense against companies using teh Weeb as a poor man's Notes for collaborative purposes. Netscape Communications Corporation has acquired Collabra Software, Inc., makers of another groupware package, and plans to integrate it into its flagship Nestcape Navigator Web browser."

Thus, for this observer at least, the historical value and interest in the term "intranet" should be marked not be as a synonym for "groupware" or "computer-supported collaborative work" applications -- terms that have their own very important origins in the history of computing. Rather it should be remembered as the marriage of Web (hypertext and browser) technology with internal, not public, organizational information systems, which would suggest (as Evans postulates) that CERN, by definition, was the first to actually implement intranet technology in 1993. Whether it was called by that name then or not, I do not know. If not, possibly the Zona report in 1995 was the first usage of the term in the literature with the more specific Web meaning. If anyone has still further insights, it seems that there are many of us who would be interested to hear them.

This has been a very informative conversation on what I believe is going to be something worthy of historical bookmarks. Particularly if, as some predict, the next version of Windows will have a web face. Thanks to all of you who responded to my initial query.

Rick Barry

Sender: peter@baileynm.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: PCC and the seeds it sowed...

One of the projects at PCC was a program called "Public Caves". It was the ancient ancestor of today's "MUD"s -- Multi-user Dungeons. There were knockoffs of this program at Berkeley around 1980, and I did an implementation in C on the IBM-PC that I ran as a "virtual environment" themed BBS out of my house for a few years starting around 1984.

I think I have a copy of that code, ported to UNIX, lying around somewhere. It's a very primitive "MUD", with the social interaction limited to leaving messages on the "walls" of "caves", as it was in the original PCC "Caves".

The original "Caves" allowed, I believe, up to 6 messages up to 6 lines long. Connections between "caves" was limited to the 4 cartesian directions plus "up" and "down" (there's obviously a theme of 6es here). Mine allowed messages up to 1k, pretty much unlimited (they were stored in a token linked list on disk), and 10 directions... but was otherwise pretty true to the original. In its BBS incarnation you could also leave private messages for specific users (email)...

Every now and then I destroyed the database and let it build itself from a kernel of 3 or 4 "caves" I created to set a theme. Generally most players stuck to the theme, but there were one or two who would rebuild the same set of "caves" over and over again in each new database.

I don't know how much of this became part of the "MUD" environment, or what the relationship between "Public Caves" and Vernor Vinge's short story "True Names" is, other than the themes being similar, but I like to think that the old PCC project laid part of the groundwork for today's more ambitious virtual worlds.

Sender: lehtman@netcom.com (Harvey Lehtman)
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

[~snip~]

There are several books and articles that I can suggest.---------------

Howard Rheingold wrote an excellent book in 1984 called "Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas of the Next Computer Revolution." Howard looked at the early history of computing (with profiles of pioneers Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Boole, Turing, von Neumann, Weiner and Shannon) and focuses on the work of post-1950 pioneers J.C.R Licklider, the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Technology Office; Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, windowed displays, implementor of one of the first successful hypertext systems, NLS (later Augment), and creator of the first ARPANet Network Information Center among many other achievements; Bob Taylor, also of ARPA and later Xerox PARC; and Alan Kay, of PARC, Atari labs, and, since 1984, Apple. Howard ends the book with discussions of the work of Avron Barr, Brenda Laurel, and Ted Nelson, all of whom have built on the work of their predecessors to "enable people to do what they do best by using machines to do what they do best" or, as Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, and Doug Engelbart, intended, to "augment" human intellect.

Howard's book was published by Simon and Schuster in 1985. Unfortunately, it is out of print. Fortunately, rights reverted to Howard who has posted the complete text at his web site at:

http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/tftindex.html

A symposium called "A History of Personal Workstations" was held in Palo Alto on 9 January 1986 sponsored by the ACM. Many of the pioneers profiled in Howard's book spoke. The proceedings were edited by Adele Goldberg, formerly of PARC and then of ParcPlace Systems, and published in 1988 by the ACM Press (distributed by Addison-Wesley.)

An order form is at:

http://www.acm.org/catalog/books/701863.html

The following comes from the book description at that site:

"[...] This distinctive book presents their history as seen from the unique perspective of the people who pioneered their development. These computer scientists and engineers originally presented their papers at the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations. Historically significant papers by important computer scientists and researchers are also presented and complemented by many historical photographs."

There were also videos of Doug Engelbart's and Alan Kay's presentations distributed by ACM.

There are relevant historical notes in the book "The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design" edited by Brenda Laurel and published by Addison-Wesley. This book was initiated and sponsored by Apple's Human Interface Group under the sponsorship of Joy Mountford. (Both Joy and Brenda are currently at Interval Research in Palo Alto.) A description and order form is at:

http://www.aw.com/devpress/titles/51797.html

Also, check out the March 1996 issue of the ACM Journal Interactions for the proceedings of a symposium celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush's seminal work, "As We May Think," the inspriration for many who saw the new machines as devices to augment human intellect and interaction. The featured speakers included Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Robert Kahn, Tim Berners-Lee, Michael Lesk, Nicholas Negroponte, Raj Reddy, Lee Sproull, Douglas Adams, and Alan Kay. The chair of the program was Andries van Dam of Brown University.

I also recommend two pioneering papers by J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," first published in IRE (now IEEE) Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960; and (with Robert Taylor) "The Computer as a Communication Device", first published in Science and Technology, April 1968. Both papers were collected and reprinted on 7 August 1990 as a memorial to Licklider with an introduction by Robert Taylor, director of Digital Equipment's Palo Alto Systems Research Center as Research Report 61. Copies may be obtained from the Digital Systems Research Center, 130 Lytton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301.

Ted Nelson's pioneering book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, was self published in 1974. Quoting The Whole Earth Catalog quoting Nelson: "That reminds me. Nowhere in the book have I defined the phrase 'computer lib.' By Computer Lib I mean simply: making people freer through computers. That's all."

(Reprinted in 1987 by Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington.)

Engelbart's pioneering 1963 report, "Augmenting Human Intellect, a Conceptual Framework" was reprinted in "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings" edited by Irene Greif, published by Morgan Kaufman, San Mateo, in 1988.

An interview with Doug with an extensive discussion of history on the occasion of his being awarded the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in 1994 may be found at:

http://www.si.edu/perspect/comphist/englebar.htm

http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/englebar.htm

And by the way, the Smithsonian has a site concerned with Computer History at:

http://www.si.edu/perspect/comphist/computer.htm

http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/computer.htm

[…]

I found an interesting posting by Alan Kay (through Alta Vista) at:

http://polaris.biology.ucla.edu:8088/kayarchive/0047.html

*****************
Re: History of Computing: Acco

Kay, Alan (KAY2@applelink.apple.com)
25 Jan 96 23:26 GMT

Here are some (more accurate) additions and changes...

1950s Check out Whirlwind (at MIT) and other SAGE (air defence) projects. Graphical displays, light-pens (actually guns), etc.

1941 Konrad Zuse electro-mechanical computer with a store and a programming language (floating point binary machine with a 64 word store). The Z3.

1945 "As We May Think" Vannevar Bush introduces the MEMEX, a personal computer.

1960 "Man-Computer Symbiosis" J.C.R. Licklider

1961 R.S. Barton invents the B5000 -- the first modern computer architecture (more modern than any architecture now in vogue today).

1962 Sketchpad of Ivan Sutherland, the first real example of interactive graphics, windows (it had one), icons, (almost)-object-oriented models, GUI, etc. This was a landmark system.

1962 Engelbart's landmark proposal for "Augmenting Human Intellect", influenced by MEMEX, etc.

1963 Licklider starts ARPA projects to invent "Man-Computer Symbiosis".

1963 Wes Clark's LINC the first actual personal computer at Lincoln Labs

1963 RAND implements JOSS, the first great end-user programming system

1964 Engelbart and English invent the mouse (at SRI)

1964 Ellis, Sibley, et.al. invent the first tablet (at RAND)

1965 Papert, Feurzeig, Bobrow, et.al. first implement LOGO

1967 Alan Kay & Ed Cheadle invent the FLEX machine, a very early desktop computer, the first to be called a "personal computer", and the first to have OOP SW.

1968 Engelbart et.al. give a smashing demo of NLS to several thousand people in San Francisco, showing the mouse, hypertext, screen regions, interactive cooperative work with video, voice, and shared screen, etc.

1968 (1967-69) RAND shows GRAIL, the first complete penbased system, featuring end-user programming, and (almost completely) modeless editing.

1968 Alan Kay Masters thesis on FLEX machine

1968 Alan Kay idea for Dynabook, a notebook computer for children of all ages.

1970 Xerox forms PARC

1970 Alan Kay proposal for a "KiddiKomp"

1972 The MAXC at PARC (a fake PDP10) becomes operational (first computer to use IC RAM memory),

1971-2 PARC: Gary Starkweather invents first workable laser printer

1972 PARC: First font editor (Ben Laws and Alan Kay)

1972 PARC: First bitmap painting (Alan Kay and Steve Purcell)

1972 PARC: First Smalltalk interpreter (designed by Alan Kay; implemented by Dan Ingalls).

1973 PARC: The ALTO, by Chuck Thacker, a 6-MIP microcoded workstation with a mouse, bit-mapped screen, IC RAM, etc. Runs Smalltalk as its first system.

1973 PARC: Steve Purcell shows 10 frame per second "Disney style" 2.5D animation on the Alto.

1973-5 PARC: Bravo was an early word-processor (now called MS WORD) done by Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi et. al.

Shazam, an interactive animation authoring system was done by Ron Baecker et.al.

TWANG, an interactive music authoring system was done by Ted Kaehler, et. al.

Desktop publishing was initiated by Larry Tesler, Jeff Rulifson and by Bob Flegal & Diana Merry

And much much more.

I am too exhausted to try to correct the years 1976 and beyond.

Cheers,

Alan

*******************

My favorite Internet (hypertext) history timeline is Hobbes Internet Timeline at:

http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html [moved to www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/]

Pointers to other timelines and historical information may be found at the Media History Project run by Kristina Ross, a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado. (She's now at the University of Texas at El Paso and needs server support.):

http://spot.colorado.edu/~rossk/history/compute.html
http://spot.colorado.edu/~rossk/history/about.html

Enough for now......

[A personal note: I started working in Doug Engelbart's group, the Augmentation Research Center, at SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), in 1969 and stayed with that group until I joined Apple in 1980. I became associated with the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park in 1993. Many of my colleagues from SRI and Apple's early days have migrated through places key to the evolution about which David Norton inquires. For example, SRI-ARC was one of the first three nodes on the ARPANet in 1969.]

Harvey G. Lehtman Phone 415.854.6322
Institute for the Future Fax 415.854.7850
2744 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025-7020 U S A

Sender: "Bruemmer, Bruce"
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links

A book will soon be out on the contributions of the IPTO office of ARPA to computing. It does not define the number of computer "breakthroughs," but looks at networking, graphics, time sharing, and other major area in which ARPA placed much money. The book was the result of research conducted by the former director of the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. The citation is:

Norberg, Arthur L. (Arthur Lawrence), 1938-
TITLE: Transforming computer technology : information processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 /
PLACE: Baltimore :
|PUBLISHER: Johns Hopkins University Press,
| YEAR: 1996
| PUB TYPE: Book
| FORMAT: p. cm.
| SERIES: Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology NOTES:
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. | ISBN: 0801851521 (alk. paper)

Bruce H. Bruemmer
Archivist
Charles Babbage Institute
103 Walter Library
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

voice 612-624-5050
fax 612-625-8054
email bruce@fs1.itdean.umn.edu
http://cbi.www.umn.edu/

Sender: "Mike O'Brien"
Subject: Re: CM> The Dawn of Emoticons =)

Brett Wetzel says:
> According to Raymond and Steele's Jargon Page, which everyone should check out
> (http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html), an "emoticon" was first used in
> 1980 when Scott Fahlman whimsically included his creation in a post to a
> bulletin board. He probably had no idea how quick the thing would catch on.

That's one version. Actually, around the same time, on the Usenet newsgroup net.singles (which at that time included a large number of the most prolific correspondents on Usenet, ARPANET, Internet, or any other net), a woman popped up with her creation, the smiley. Others of my friends remember this too, but no one now remembers who the woman was. We lack sufficient motivation to grep through the magtape Usenet archives at UCSD.

It seems safe to say that smiley technology was probably invented multiple times by multiple people. Pinning down the first instance could be difficult.

Mike O'Brien

Sender: Nelson Winkless
Subject: CM: A Fragment of History

Since 1985, I've published a newsletter to keep my contact network alive, and some of the items deal with olden times in the technology business. (It's online now, too, at the URL in my tag, if yu have a taste for miscellany). I'll go back and mine the archives for items that might be of interest to this list. A fairly recent example:

ANTIQUE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS ...and speaking of history. back in 1977 Lee Felsenstein (renowned hacker who designed Processor Tech's Sol computer among others) stopped by the Personal Computing office to show us a treasure, "the first model of the first commercial modem," a box in which a phone handset could be placed, allowing a computer to say "beep beep" to another over long distances. Lee was almost right. He actually had the second model of the "magnetic/acoustic coupler," manufactured for Tymshare, Inc. by Climet Instruments about 1966.

I know it was the second model, because Communications Contact, Inc. (of which I was sometime president, trading off with Paul Honore) designed it, and produced the first forty or so devices. Tymshare (long since consumed by McDonnell Douglas) began as Tymshare Associates in 1965, when Tom O'Rourke and Dave Schmidt moved into an office next to us at 745 Distel Drive, Los Altos CA, to set up one of the earliest commercial timesharing services. It wasn't easy.

Their salesman, a skinny, hollow-eyed young guy named John Jerrehian, who lived on hamburgers, and slept in his car on the road, couldn't easily demonstrate timesharing to prospects, because he couldn't hook up a demo from their own offices to the remote computer. The fellows asked if we could make a coupler for them that John could carry with him. There were such things, but apparently no unit was available commercially.

Sure, our smart associate Terry Wilson worked out the circuitry, while Paul worked out the packaging, and with Bob Leeman's help, we produced several couplers (ten, I think). I recall that the urethane foam we poured into them turned a really odd purple, as well as stinking mightily. Whenever John did a demo, the prospect would ask: "If I had two of those, could I get two Teletype machines to talk to each other over regular phone lines?" The answer was yes. "How much are they?"...and Tymshare was in the coupler business before they were in the computer service business for real.

They sold the first batch, and wanted an improved version that would handle 300 baud. Wow! Terry designed, and the fellows built thirty more units, about as many as our little R&D operation could handle. With our agreement, Tymshare had Climet build the next couple of hundred ...of which Lee had found one. Terry designed another version, but Tymshare had growing pains and internal conflict, and the project never quite carried through. Anderson-Jacobsen developed a unit that dominated the market for some years...but we were there at the start.

Lee seemed a bit hurt that his hot discovery wasn't as surprising as he hoped. Ah well. Life is full of this and that. Among other things, Mr. Jerrehian became sleek and prosperous, and quit sleeping in his car.

Is this adequately historical?

--Nels Winkless

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432 Fax: 505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo

Sender: "Carpenter, Claire"
Subject: origin of term *surfing*

It seems that the pioneering librarian Jean Armour Polly launched the term *surfing* to mean exploring Internet resources. See the article in which she explains how she got the idea from an Apple memento that
said "Information Surfer": Surfing the Internet: Birth of a Metaphor at http://www.well.com/user/polly/birth.html

Claire Carpenter
Technical Editor/FACTS Center Seminar Coordinator

115 McVey Hall/Computing Center __o Phone: 606-257-2274 (pm best)
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY _-\<,_ FAX: 606-323-1978
Lexington, KY 40506-0045 (*)/ (*) E-mail: claire@ukcc.uky.edu

Sender: Alan Bawden
Subject: CM> The Dawn of Emoticons =)

Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 10:17:31 -0700
From: wbwetzel@eos.ncsu.edu
Subject: CM> The Dawn of Emoticons =)
[...]
According to Raymond and Steele's Jargon Page, which everyone should check out (http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html), an "emoticon" was first used in 1980 when Scott Fahlman whimsically included his creation in a post to a bulletin board. He probably had no idea how quick the thing would catch on.
[...]

In his column in the June 96 issue of "Fantasy & Science Fiction", Gregory Benford writes:

Most of the Net's "emoticons", typographical tricks read sideways to convey smiles, disapproval or a sardonic wink -- :), :(, ;) -- appeared in fanzines by the 1940s.

I had never heard this claim before, but it does seem possible that smileys leaked into electronic mail culture from sf fandom culture. Perhaps Fahlman was the conduit.

Sender: "Mike O'Brien"
Subject: Re: CM> early experiences of cyberspace

Ephrem Lipkin says:
> My impression is that the Plato system was the first w[h]ere a sense of > cyberspace developed and then probably Murray Turoff's EIES system in NJ. I

PLATO was probably neck-and-neck with the ARPANET. PLATO had been around since the mid-1960s but up until 1972, when deployment of PLATO IV terminals got underway, it consisted of a single "classroom" that looked like a language lab, with about twenty terminals. Several such classrooms existed at different physical sites but only one could be active at a time; the PLATO mainframe was sort of gang-switched between the different sets of terminals.

Once PLATO IV got going on a really big mainframe Cyber-series machine, simultaneous terminals at physically different locations drove the development of online communication systems such as Notes, talkomatic, and the wealth of multi-player interactive games which really were PLATO's greatest achievement. It's very un-PC to say so (no pun intended) but I had never seen games which could touch the ones on PLATO until nettrek and MUDs came along.

So the "PLATO community" probably began forming around 1972. As far as I know it's still going strong. It has always been extremely insular and inner- directed, only rarely taking inspiration from any other efforts in CS or networking.

Mike O'Brien

Sender: Ken_Pier.PARC@xerox.com
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

Re: Sender: "David Norton"
Subject: Books regarding the social construction of computers?

Try "A History of Personal Workstations" Edited by Adele Goldberg. ACM Press. 1988.

Sender: lehtman@netcom.com (Harvey Lehtman)
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

>Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense, can anyone
>say when and where the first intranet was created?
>

I found the following message (using Alta Vista) at:

http://www.brill.com/intranet/ijx/msg/1525.html

from Steve Telleen at Amdahl (slt50@juts.ccc.amdahl.com).

Posted by Steve Telleen on May 08, 1996 at 23:42:05:

In Reply to: Re: Intranet Definition posted by Heo, Hong on May 02, 1996 at 04:47:46:

Heo,

You might want to look at the previous reply to this question. But to summarize, the earliest use of the term Intranet to refer to the use of Internet and Web technology on a private network was in the summer of 1994 in my group at Amdahl Corporation. We actually did a search on the term in August of 1994 when IDC suggested that we trademark the term. We did not find any other users of the term at that time. However, we also did not register the name either. We did start using a (tm) after the term when it was spelled "IntraNet" and have notified people of copyright infringement when they use it that way. In the fall of 1994 we used the term with a lot of our customers, analysts and other companies. I also wrote a paper called "The IntraNet Methodology: concepts and rationale." We put an HTML version of the paper on Amdahl's external Web early in 1995. In the spring of 1995 the term began to creep into more widespread use outside Amdahl. As far as the definition: an Intranet is just a "private" Internet. For people on the Intranet it looks and acts like the Internet, but people outside the the Intranet are not able to gain access to the Intranet and its information.

"IntraNet Methodology: Concepts and Rationale" is at:

http://www.amdahl.com/doc/products/bsg/intra/

Harvey G. Lehtman Phone 415.854.6322
Institute for the Future Fax 415.854.7850
2744 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025-7020 U S A

Sender: Anthony Spataro
Subject: Re: CM> "Cerfing" the Net?

On Fri, 7 Jun 1996 OLmaniac@AOL.COM wrote:
> 8^)
>
> Here's one for the list, where did the emoticon originate?

I started BBSing during the summer of 1990. At that time, emoticons were a very well-established form of communication, although everybody tended to stick to the basics, such as :) and =). The fancier emoticons were regarded as jokes, or didn't exist at all. Also, nobody called them emoticons. Come to think of it, as much as we used them, it's sort of odd that nobody ever gave them a name.

[~snip~]

_/\_ In the French language "Hello, world!" is a perfectly valid greeting.
/ L \ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
\_ C_/ Humanity's resource-conservation policies can be summarized thusly:
\/ while(1) fork();

Sender: Anthony Spataro
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links

On Fri, 7 Jun 1996, Louis N Proyect wrote:
> Does anybody know of a book that focuses on these types of connections
> between IBM specifically and the cold-war military machine? Or other big
> mainframe companies that are no longer around (Univac, etc.).

The autobiography of Thomas Watson, Jr. (son, I believe, of the founder
of IBM) contains a great deal of information concerning IBM's work for the post-WWII government. In particular, I recall a chapter about a network of early-warning computers built to track radar contacts. Watson considers these computers a milestone because they did their processing in real time. (It has been four years since I read the book, so I would consult the original text before taking any of this information as Gospel truth.)

[Not from moderator: This network Anthony mentions was called SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Anyone out there with first-hand memories of SAGE? A good book on SAGE, but very hard to find:

The SAGE Air Defense System: A Personal History, by John F. Jacobs, Bedford, Massachussets: MITRE Corporation, (c) 1986, second printing 1990.]

This is an update to the "Posting Guidelines" that was sent out yesterday.

Questions that stand alone, without any other information around them (e.g. "Who was so-and-so?") will be compiled and placed in a single message, sent out once a day with a subject of: "CM> Questions of the day."

That way people who want to read questions can do so, people with questions can ask them, and list message volume will not grow excessively.

Sender: "Bill Anderson"
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

On Jun 7, 8:12am, Les Earnest wrote:

> Rick Barry writes:
> Before it is history in the age sense rather than the event sense,
can
> anyone say when and where the first intranet was created?

[~snip~]

It depends on what you call an intranet. When I started working on AUTODIN in 1968, it was already a full blown store and forward message system. In addition to messages, it was sending information to update other databases. For the life of me, I don't remember when AUTODIN became operational. I still have books in my library regarding digital communications that were published in the early 70's. Of course, I still have a book on vacuum tube design of digital computers.

Bill Anderson

Sender: Jay Hosler
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

[~snip~]

> [Note from moderator: This network Anthony mentions was called SAGE, or
> Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Anyone out there with first-hand
> memories of SAGE?]

[~snip~]

I worked for SDC on SAGE for 2 years as trainer then as programmer on SATIN (air-traffic control variant). Quite a few of the SAGE folks are still around and I think a SAGE sub-group might develop some interesting traffic. Is such a mechanism possible/necessary?

[Note from moderator: I think we'd all like to know more about SAGE, so please send your recollections to the list.]

Thanks

Jay Hosler
jhosler@cisco.com

Sender: Les Earnest
Subject: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

The moderator writes:
Anyone out there with first-hand memories of SAGE?

As one of the designers of that alleged air defense system in the late 1950s, I remember it well. The duplexed central computers in each of the two dozen or so control centers occupied the area of a football field with bays of vacuum tubes, magnetic drums and an early form of core memory. On the floor below was a comparably sized air conditioning system to get rid of all that dissipated power. On the floor above were rows of display terminals with large circular geographic displays and small storage tube displays for textual data and a large screen display for the Generals to gaze upon.

Never mind that SAGE constituted a classic example of the mis-application of computers. If Soviet manned bombers had attacked it would have been discovered that SAGE was close to useless as an air defense system. Fortunately that didn't happen, which allowed a myth to be perpetuated to the effect that it actually worked.

Under the guidance of the Pentagon that whiz-bang technological marvel subsequently gave rise to the so-called command-control-communications industry, which sucked down billions of dollars from the U.S. defense budget and is still sucking, even though the Strategic Defense Initiative finally seems to be fading away.

-Les Earnest

Sender: abostick@netcom.com (Alan Bostick)
Subject: Re: CM> The Dawn of Emoticons =)

In article <95813893595.LTK.014@cpsr.org>,
Alan Bawden wrote:
> In his column in the June 96 issue of "Fantasy & Science Fiction", Gregory
> Benford writes:
>
> Most of the Net's "emoticons", typographical tricks read sideways to
> convey smiles, disapproval or a sardonic wink -- :), :(, ;) -- appeared
> in fanzines by the 1940s.
>
> I had never heard this claim before, but it does seem possible that smileys
> leaked into electronic mail culture from sf fandom culture. Perhaps
> Fahlman was the conduit.

I'd love to see him cite specific instances.

I've been deeply involved in sf fandom since the early seventies and have a good knowledge of the history of sf fanzines; the first time I saw sideways smileys was when I got involved with Usenet in 1988.

I *have* seen faces constructed out of typed characters in fanzines, but they were all vertical, not horizontal, and were intended for decoration, not as inline emotional code. I would characterize them more as ASCII-art-equivalents than smileys. Things along the lines of:

(.) (.)
"
(_____)

It wouldn't be the first time Greg stretched the truth to make a point.

--
Alan Bostick | The Necronomicon was not written by the Mad Arab,
mailto:abostick@netcom.com | it was written by Scott Adams
news:alt.grelb | Alan Olsen
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~abostick

Sender: "Blair Anderson"
Subject: Re: CM> Date of first Intranet?

On Fri, 7 Jun 1996 08:00:21 -0700, "Bernie Cosell" (by way of
[...] (David)) wrote:

>If it does mean 'internal IP net', then BBN is surely the first, since we
>were the only place back in the early days of the ARPAnet that had more
>than one IMP. Not long after, IBM, DEC and Honeywell [at the very least]
>all had massive [and world-wide!] corporate-internal networks.

Could you "date" these events, ie guess a year?

Certainly Honeywell was functional via GEnet, but GEnet would therefore aguably be earlier. (Unless someone can confirm if it was Honeywell IS that delivered the Intranet solution to GE in the first place.) It behaved not unlike a Unix function list sitting behind what we now call a firewall. This was operational in Australia about 1977-78. Its use was limited, but functional..

As to its qualification as a true intranet, there was some "expertise" required to maintain a modicum of integrity of service.. there was little the common man could do with such as system...

The same could be said for the DEC systems, further compounded by the cryptic and disparate standards at the "keyboard" for edit controls commands.. and the speed available for telecommuting (300baud).

These attributes make the definition of the term intranet very subjective.

The James Coagar 1500, later the Singer 1500, and later still ICL 1500, distributed network topology, was IMHO the finest piece of programmable WAN able network, supporting an Intranet foundation on true highspeed (!megabit) co-axial. As a discrete componant "box" with screen, datastorage, keyedit, on-offline cpability, it represented the first "standalone" connectable desktop, plug to the wall computer... it fundamentaly remained the same thru its life cycle of over commercial useage for more than 12 years (1969-1981+)... Built in LAN support on the M/board. Some of the individual applications on this machine were years ahaead of anything on the Mainframe h/ware mkt, due to the terrific differnce in pricing.. software investment cycle was short for the 1500.

Email on it was searchable, which eas an innovation on list management..

despite the slow speed of dial in, I do however think the value per bit shifted, was higher than today, by an order or two!

Cheers

Blair Anderson (Blair_Anderson@ibm.net)
International Consultant in Electronic Commerce, Encryption and Electronic
Rights Management

Sender: "Blair Anderson"
Subject: Re: CM> Books regarding the social construction of computers?

On Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:57:01 -0700, "David Norton" wrote:

>I'm interested in anything that treats computer development
>from a social constructionists perspective.

Try "The Psychology of the Computer Programmer", a guide for management, 1970ish.

There is some veritable gems contained within..

Cheers,

Blair Anderson (Blair_Anderson@ibm.net)
International Consultant in Electronic Commerce, Encryption and Electronic
Rights Management

Sender: "Blair Anderson"
Subject: Re: CM> "Cerfing" the Net?

>Here's one for the list, where did the emoticon originate?

terminology seen on FIDONet about 1988 %-)

regular use of, variations on theme, first seen on ASR33 teletype circa 1969-70, and Burroughs Series E generated invoices.... on Nil Balance Statements! :- ) and 3 months overdue %- ( (1972)

Cheers,

Blair Anderson (Blair_Anderson@ibm.net)
International Consultant in Electronic Commerce, Encryption and Electronic
Rights Management

Sender: "Robert E. Maas rem@btr.com"
Subject: ARPANET

The first time I witnessed ARPANET online was when I got e-mail from Jan Kok in 1972 after he had visited SU-AI and we had met the previous summer. I thought he was back in town, but his message got to me 3000 miles from MIT, the first ARPANET message I ever received. Years later he disappeared and I wonder if anybody knows where to find him?

Sender: Carl Ellison
Subject: Re: CM> ARPANET.

[~snip~]

The first long distance mail I sent using ARPANET was by logging in on Multics from Utah back in the very early 1970's and then sending local mail -- to my friend Tom VanVleck. I don't remember when we started handling network mail at Utah. I'll have to poke around and see if I saved any of that earliest e-mail.

Alternatively, Tom might remember, so I've cc:ed him.

- Carl

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison cme@cybercash.com http://www.clark.net/pub/cme
|CyberCash, Inc., Suite 430 http://www.cybercash.com
|2100 Reston Parkway PGP 2.6.2: 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 |
|Reston, VA 22091 Tel: (703) 620-4200 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Sender: Katie Hafner
Subject: About those emoticons

While researching a book on the history of the Net (the book's emphasis is on the ARPANET--it opens with the story of how ARPA was created), my co-author and I did an archeological dig through thousands of messages on one of the earliest mailing lists, the MsgGroup list (dedicated to technical email issues, but the discussion often digressed), and we were intrigued to see a posting from someone in 1979 suggesting the use of punctuation marks in e-mail to express nuances/emotions etc. He had gotten the idea from a Reader's Digest article, but we would havehad to search through hundreds of old Reader's Digests to find what he was referring to, exactly. But it was intriguing to see that. His suggestion, btw, was pretty summarily shot down.

Sender: Jay Hosler
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

> Never mind that SAGE constituted a classic example of the
> mis-application of computers. If Soviet manned bombers had attacked
> it would have been discovered that SAGE was close to useless as an air
> defense system. Fortunately that didn't happen, which allowed a myth
> to be perpetuated to the effect that it actually worked.
>
> Under the guidance of the Pentagon that whiz-bang technological marvel
> subsequently gave rise to the so-called command-control-communications
> industry, which sucked down billions of dollars from the U.S. defense
> budget and is still sucking, even though the Strategic Defense
> Initiative finally seems to be fading away.

More significantly, SAGE played an important part in the formation of the software industry. By training thousands of programmers at a time when academic CS curricula didn't yet exist, SDC [Systems Development Corporation] seeded the programmer population everywhere. Computer Sciences Corp and Scientific Data Systems (Palevsky's company that became Xerox Data Systems), are two examples of software companies that I know to have been heavy with SDC alumni, and there are many more. Even now, almost 37 years after I went to work for SDC, I commonly encouter SDC people doing senior technical work.

Sender: footage@well.com (Rick Prelinger)
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

IBM (in conjunction with Boeing and DOD) made a fabulous film sometime around 1956 entitled _On Guard!,_ touting SAGE. It's a great artifact of the days when the military-industrial complex was riding high, and testifies to the depth of the relationship between the development of computer technology and the Cold War.

The film (with commentary) will be available on my forthcoming CD-ROM "Nuts and Bolts," part of the "Our Secret Century" series, published by Voyager.

Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives
430 West 14th Street, Room 403 / New York, NY 10014 USA
212 633-2020 / Fax: 212 255-5139
footage@well.com

Sender: Les Earnest
Subject: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

In response to my remarks about SAGE being a mis-application of computers, Jay Hosler writes: More significantly, SAGE played an important part in the formation of the software industry. By training thousands of programmers at a time when academic CS curricula didn't yet exist, SDC [Systems Development Corporation] seeded the programmer population everywhere.

There was an additional spin-off as well: IBM engineers learned how to build large computers as a byproduct of their reworking of MIT's design of SAGE. This contributed substantially to the evolution of their 700 series computers, which eventually superseded Univacs as the standard large system of that era.

However, far more could have been accomplished with the investment that went into SAGE if it had been spent directly on education, such as the education of computer engineers and programmers. Of course, that wasn't a real option given that the entire undertaking was fueled by anti-Communist paranoia rather than a desire to advance the state of the art.

Computer Sciences Corp and Scientific Data Systems (Palevsky's company that became Xerox Data Systems), are two examples of software companies that I know to have been heavy with SDC alumni, and there are many more.

Never mind that Xerox's purchase of SDS was one of their largest blunders, which they had to write off a few years later when they discovered their error. Max Palevsky came out smelling like a rose -- he became the largest shareholder in Xerox by selling them his useless company.

What Xerox apparently failed to understand was that the short term success of SDS was based on the SDS 940 timesharing system that had been developed by Dave Evan's group at U.C. Berkeley. The SDS programmers didn't really understand how the 940 software worked, so they hired graduate students from Berkeley and Stanford part-time to do installations. Meanwhile they claimed to be developing a much better timesharing system based on their forthcoming Sigma 7 computer, which was years late and turned out to be rather flakey according to reports at the time.

Let's see now, is there anyone I haven't smeared yet?

-Les Earnest

Sender: Jay Hosler
Subject: Re: CM> IBM/military links: SAGE.

> However, far more could have been accomplished with the investment
> that went into SAGE if it had been spent directly on education, such
> as the education of computer engineers and programmers.

Undoubtedly true, although speculative. SDC's accomplishments are fact: production of trained programmers in numbers that it took years for the early CS curricula to match; significant advancement of the state of practice of software tooling with JOVIAL, a very early (or the first) working implementation of an ALGOL-like language, and many other tools; use of simulated data for testing at all levels; many other examples.

I never thought I would find myself defending the record of SDC. But I see no need to spend energy now lamenting the money spent on SAGE so many decades ago. Not all of it was wasted.

Jay

Jay Hosler
jhosler@cisco.com
408-527-3122

[Note from moderator: Anyone with recollections of working at SDC? I'm sure we'd like to hear about them.]

Posted by David S. Bennahum
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