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This article examines the role of technology firms in computerizing psychological tests from the 1960s to 1980s. It focuses on National Computer Systems (NCS)'s development of computer software to interpret the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. NCS trumpeted their computerized interpretation as a way to free up clerical labor and mitigate human bias, even as psychologists cautioned that proprietary algorithms risked obscuring decision rules. Clinics, courtrooms, and businesses all had competing interests in the use of computerized personality tests. I argue that test developers promoted computerized psychological tests as technical fixes for bias, even as courts and psychologists pointed to the complex layers of technological and social mediation embedded in software programs for psychological tests. This article contributes to histories of computing emphasizing the importance of intellectual property law in software development; to the relationship between labor, technology, and expertise; and to scholarship on the history and politics of algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Write for the IEEE Computer Society's authoritative computing publications and conferences. GET PUBLISHED www.computer.org/cfp IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY Call for Papers Copyright of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing is the property of IEEE and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. [Extracted from the article]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first years of ARPAnet operations, computers were not highly reliable, but the network was built from standard computers and was expected to function as a utility with high reliability. We managed to achieve the desired reliability, as perceived by ARPAnet users, by making innovations in hardware, maintenance procedures, software, and network operations. This article draws heavily on the personal experiences of the authors, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature. Our focus is on the 1969–1975 time period when ARPAnet was the sole responsibility of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). A 2018 paper (Fidler et al., 2018) discusses ARPAnet maintenance after 1975. The preparation of this article was spearheaded by David Walden. David recruited the other 2 authors, prepared the outline of the paper he envisioned, and drafted some sections. Sadly David's deteriorating health prevented him from contributing his usual amount of energy and knowledge, but this article would not have been written without him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advertisement, IEEE. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is the first paper to discuss the Geromat III teaching machine developed at the Berlin Institute for Cybernetics in relationship to the Geromat III prototypes developed at Ulm School of Design in the 1960s. The Geromat III was an electro-mechanical teaching machine that could train up to three students at three separate multimedia consoles. The system required all learners to answer correctly in order to progress through the instructional program; if not, the students were required to speak to each other in order to reach agreement. The paper analyzes archival material and first-hand accounts with the Geromat III, as well as the social context of federal funding for research into computing and education in West Germany of the 1960s, in order to understand how this teaching machine, an early form of computer-aided instruction (CAI), came to be. The Geromat III, though utilized on a small scale, found an audience of enthusiastic supporters on the other side of the country, with artist-designers at the Ulm School of Design who created prototypes for consoles to be used with the system. While hands-on knowledge about the system was unavailable to the console designers, an ideological affinity between the Ulm School of Design and the Berlin Institute for Cybernetics bridged any technical gaps in knowledge; the resulting design prototypes, one for mass-production and one for DIY (do-it-yourself) construction, point to speculative futures for the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for contributions to the December 1995 issue of `IEEE Technology and Society Magazine' centering on the relationship between computers and society. Contact information.

Frame technology became a leading provider of technical publishing software within two years of its founding in 1986. Frame went public in February 1992, and by the end of that year, its flagship software, FrameMaker, ran on Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and all leading Unix workstations of that era. It was used by thousands of high-tech companies around the globe. The company was acquired by Adobe Systems in 1995 at a valuation of approximately $500 million. This paper is a personal remembrance by the founder who co-wrote FrameMaker 1.0, and lead Frame's product design and product strategy through its IPO. It tells Frame's founding story, and describes the key product and architectural features that contributed to its success. This paper also briefly describes Frame's early funding model, business and sales strategies, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory and practice of search results ranking, as currently offered by most web search engines, is older than one might think. The first proposal for a system of ranking was in a JACM paper in 1960. Through the remainder of the twentieth century, extensive research work was done on ranking systems—on devising methods of ranking, on the use of learning methods in association with ranking, and on the comparative evaluation of alternative methods. The web search engines of the tail end of the century made much use of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rockefeller Foundation shipped two Apple II computers with VisiCalc to the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture to address a grain shortage in the early 1980s. The foundation believed that VisiCalc would enable the speedy and complex analytical modeling necessary to improve the management and, consequently, the production of grain resources. The foundation also argued that VisiCalc would empower individuals in the Ministry of Agriculture, improving their own analytical thinking as they became more familiar with the modeling capabilities of the software. Even with the use of VisiCalc, Tunisia experienced violent riots due to high bread prices after the government's removal of grain subsidies. This paper explores the narratives and uses of VisiCalc in the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture in addressing this food crisis both before and after the riots. The work here contributes to computing history through an analysis of the historical relationships among governing bodies, nongovernment organizations, technology, and the global financial economy. It argues that the uses of VisiCalc in Tunisia were connected with financial austerity firmly aligned with Western interests. In doing so, this paper shows how a focus on postcolonial Africa can enrich the international history of computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the case of transgender Britons who tried to correct the gender listed on their government-issued ID cards, but ran up against the British government's increasingly computerized methods for tracking, identifying, and defining citizens. These newly computerizing systems show some of the earliest examples of transphobic algorithmic bias: explicit attempts to program trans people out of the system can be seen in the programming of the early Ministry of Pensions computer system designed to apportion benefits to all tax paying British citizens. Transgender citizens pushed back against these developments, attempting to hack the bureaucratic avenues and categories available to them, laying the groundwork for a coalescing political movement. This paper argues that uncovering the deep prehistory of algorithmic bias and investigating instances of resistance within this history is essential to understanding current debates about algorithmic bias, and how computerized systems have long functioned to create and enforce norms and hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on an article related to transistors, which has been published in an issue of the periodical "IEEE Spectrum." The May 2004 issue of the periodical "IEEE Spectrum" contains an interesting and educational illustrated five-page article by Michael Riordan recounting in semi-popular style how the silicon transistor was invented twice, independently and concurrently between 1953 and 1954. That article has been critically reviewed in the October 2005 issue of the periodical "Computing Reviews."

Calls for contributions of papers to the 1995 International Conference on Brain Processes, Theories and Models. Relevant topics to be discussed; Contact information.

Percy Edwin Ludgate (1883–1922) is notable as the second person to publish a design for an Analytical Machine, the first after Babbage's "Analytical Engine." We outline the initial results of the first new investigation into the work and life of Percy Ludgate since Randell's papers of nearly 50 years ago and nearly 100 years after Ludgate's death. First, we examine the principles of his machine and how it was constructed and worked. Second, we outline his life. We present a range of new material, including two significant discoveries, one concerning Ludgate's machine and the other his family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage drafted 26 code fragments between 1836 and 1840 for his unfinished "Analytical Engine." The programs were embedded implicitly in tables representing execution traces. In this article, we explore the programming architecture of Babbage's mechanical computer, that is, its structure from the point of view of a programmer, based on those 26 coding examples preserved in the Babbage Papers Archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the case of ELEA 9000, the first Olivetti computer series, to demonstrate the close relationship between industrial design, semiotics, ergonomics and the history of computing. A focus on the Olivetti ELEA series invites scholars to reconsider the history of computer interface design well before the emergence of HCI as a widely recognized field of research. The console and racks of the mainframe computer were designed in Italy by architect Ettore Sottsass Jr. (1917–2007) along with Dutch designer Andries van Onck (1928–2018) at the end of the 1950s. Aiming to launch the ELEA computer on the international market, Olivetti developed the idea of a visual language for human–computer interaction that could be learned by any operator, regardless of their native language. Sottsass and Olivetti assigned the task of designing this sign system to Tomás Maldonado (1922–2018), director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung design school in Ulm, Germany. Together with Gui Bonsiepe (b. 1934), Maldonado designed a visual language that incorporated grammatical and syntactic reasoning. Later discarded, the sign system for ELEA prefigured the contemporary use of icons in computer interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the National Commission on Electronic Fund Transfers to understand the emergence of electronic banking in 1970s US. Reviewing reports and papers prepared by the Commission and analyzing them in light of an influx of letters it received from the general public, this article explores how public interests were defined in debates over electronic banking, providing perspectives from both consumers and policymakers. Building on literature on the binding of collectives in relation to and through information technologies, including payment technologies, I demonstrate how certain visions of the public are formed to cohere with economic and technological desirable futures. I argue that the Commission reworked a number of public concerns—about automation, loss of privacy to the "databank," and the "checkless" society—into technical matters, resulting in a new vision of the "public interest" in a time of electronic connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the Lighthill Affair. The Lighthill Report, which formed the basis for the decision by the British government to end support of AI research in all but two universities. (Oral tradition paints a somewhat different and more colorful picture, with political ambitions and personal animosities that cannot be put into print.)1 In this paper, I describe the affair, put in print some of the things hinted at here, and elaborate on the issues that have remained topical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the history of, and addresses certain perceived procedural misunderstandings in, Hush-A-Phone v. United States (D.C. Cir. 1956) and its progeny In re Carterfone (F.C.C. 1968) to illuminate what the Hush-A-Phone Corporation actually did in its dispute with AT&T prior to the breakup of AT&T's century-long telephone monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the dominant narrative of the history of artificial intelligence (AI), this paper shows how, during the period considered to be second global winter (1987–1993), the AI field experienced spring in South Korea. Putting the Korean language processing problem at the center, researchers began to lay the intellectual and social foundation of AI in South Korea in the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, many software developers and enthusiasts reacted to software's unclear status within the U.S. copyright law by pursuing technical, rather than legislative fixes. This paper applies forensic methods to recover records of conflict between commercial software developers and the enthusiasts who sought to "crack" commercial programs' copy protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of papers presented to the Association for Computing Machinery Conference at Rutgers University on March 28-29, 1950, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 'Maddida'--General Theory,' by Floyd G. Steele; 'Maddida--Design Features,' by Donald E. Eckdahl.

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems heralded several of the technological innovations necessary to precipitate the emergence of desktop publishing as well as many features of modern office computing, digital media, and graphic arts. In this paper, Adobe founders Charles Geschke and John Warnock cover their professional history, the conception of Adobe Systems, and its growth. They also explain the technology behind the advances in computer printing, electronic file transfer, and digital art and photography. Adobe, its products, and its engineers played a key role in these developments, which enabled desktop publishing and the publishing revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ventura Publisher was the first desktop publishing software package to run on IBM PC compatible computers. Developed in the mid-1980s, Ventura was also the first desktop publishing application to incorporate features such as style sheets and automatic page layouts, allowing for long document formatting. This paper provides an autobiographical sketch of Lee Lorenzen, one of the founders of Ventura Software and developers of Ventura Publisher. Lorenzen outlines his early career in software and the founding story of Ventura Software and their innovative application. He also describes the early competitive landscape in desktop publishing software, including Aldus PageMaker, and then contrasts it with the key long document publishing features of Ventura Publisher such as style sheets, fast hyphenation and justification, automated layout algorithms, and database publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth and early twentieth century American governments—local, state, and national—profoundly shaped diffusion of novel mathematical instruments. The federal government ran an office that judged what inventions were patentable and a legal system for those who defended or challenged patent rights. Governments at all levels employed inventors. Sometimes new laws required extensive calculations promoting invention and sale of computing instruments. Governments were customers for mathematical instruments ranging from teaching apparatus to adding and calculating machines to harmonic analyzers to tabulating machines. They not only bought goods, but set standards for what they would purchase. Government buyers also offered testimonials to businesses. From the 1890s, ant.itrust legislation led to some federal government oversight of corporations. Historians usually rely on documents to tell this story. This paper begins from objects—a few known only from patent descriptions, but most surviving in museum collections. This perspective complements rich existing accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These reminiscences relate to the period that Brian Randell spent between 1964 and 1966 first at IBM Research working on Project Y and then in the IBM Systems Development Division on the resulting ACS Project--then-secret projects that aimed to build a supercomputer that would be 100 times faster than Stretch. Randell's account is based in part on his memory, but also makes extensive use of the small set of files that he had retained, mainly relating to patent applications. A scanned copy of one of these files, the paper "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling," that he coauthored with Lynn Conway, Don Rozenberg, and Don Senzig in February 1966, is available as an online Web extra https://s3.amazonaws.com/ieeecs.cdn.csdl.public/mags/an/2015/03/man2015030055s.pdf and in Newcastle University's online archive at www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/891.pdf. Because of space constraints just the initial three pages of this paper are included in the present article, which also includes the text from a section on "Interrupts" that was added to the 1969 IBM San Jose Technical Report version of the 1966 paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the cultural climate faced by women in the American computer industry from the 1960s to the early 1980s, a period in which the percentage of the industry workforce that was female almost tripled. Drawing on a comprehensive study of articles and advertisements in the trade journal Datamation, sources from IBM, Control Data, and the Burroughs Corporation, and the records of the user group SHARE, Inc, the study argues that the cultural climate of the industry shifted radically in the early 1970s, from hostility in the 1960s to a more open one in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on the author's background in computing. His history goes back to the late 1950s. His trek toward both entrepreneurship and technology began with a youth misspent playing with explosives and electronics, while simultaneously developing a string of neighborhood mini businesses that let him indulge his taste for gadgets. He had the all-American paper route, sold handmade items door-to-door, ran a penny arcade for neighborhood kids, collected and sold scrap paper and discarded bottles and did whatever else seemed lucrative and achievable at the same time. He went to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York at the ripe age of 16 to study engineering, graduating with a combined BS and MS in 1962. He joined International Business Machines Corp. after grad school, which served as a training ground and let him pick the entrepreneurial thread begun in my childhood. In January 1970, he and his partners launched Task/Master, our first true software package and the first commercial telecommunications monitor.

Although computer scientist Robert W. Floyd, was born in New York City on June 8, 1936, his parents moved more than a dozen times before he went to college. A child prodigy he read every book he could get his hands on. His first grade teacher used him to teach fractions to the older children, in the small Southern schoolhouse where his education began. He received a scholarship to enter the University of Chicago at age 15, in an experimental program for gifted children, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953. In essence, Floyd had introduced the notion of productions as an organizing principle for programming, anticipating to a certain extent the future development of so-called expert systems. That was his first major paper. This paper is a significant step forward in the field of automatic programming. Floyd has developed a new notation which lets the trees be distinguished from the forest, and which admirably points out what is really going on in a translation process. An algebraic compiler can be described very precisely and compactly in this notation, and one can design such a compiler in Floyd's form in a few hours. In 1962, he became a Senior Project Scientist at Computer Associates Inc., in Wakefield, Massachusetts, an early software firm that specialized in creating compilers.

These instructions give guidelines for preparing papers for this publication. Presents information for authors publishing in this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1988, when he published his first paper in the history of computing, until his death in 2008, Michael Sean Mahoney was one of the leading international figures in the history of computing. This biography focuses on Mahoney's contributions to computing history and how he came to study this topic. His research in other areas of the history of science and technology is covered here only to the extent that it helps to explain the context for his work in computer history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

People from Bolt Beranek and Newman and others have extensively documented the Arpanet technology, including the Arpanet Interface Message Processor (IMP). This paper sketches the history (not the previously described technology) of the IMP program as originally written in 1969 for the modified Honeywell 516 computer. A sequence of other systems, evolving from the original software system and running on a variety of hardware platforms, are also enumerated. In 2013 a faded 1973 line printer listing of the IMP program was run through a special OCR program optimized to process such historical artifacts; an assembler was recreated to assemble the IMP code (looking like the modified PDP-1 Midas assembler used in 1973); and a software emulator of the original IMP hardware platform was created. This article also describes the methods used to recover a digital copy and assemble and run again the 1973 IMP code. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Events and Sightings department article covers the Edward Feigenbaum Personal Papers Collection made available by the Stanford University Library, the UNIVAC 120 exhibit now on permanent display at the Museum of Science at the Tokyo University of Science, and recent events surrounding the Kyoto Computer Gakuin 50th anniversary celebration. This issue also includes an obituary of Douglas C. Engelbart, best known for his work on pioneering work in human-computer interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]