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This article focuses on several meetings related to computer industry. The Charles Babbage Foundation held its annual meeting on 16 and 17 May 2003 in Palo Alto, California. The Babbage Foundation is a philanthropic organization, founded by Adelle Tomash and Erwin Tomash, that funds research into computer history, the computer industry, and the effects of computer technology. On Tuesday, 28 January 2003, the Royal Institution of London hosted an early evening presentation titled "Max Newman: Forgotten father of computing?" Janet Delve and David Anderson from the History of Computing Group of the University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, England gave the talks and about 40 people attended.

Discusses various notes, events and conferences focusing on the history of computing. Progress report on the NCR archive; Information on the Evolution of Technoscience seminar held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool on March 29, 2003; Fire at Artificial Intelligence Library of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland; Information on the 2002 meeting for the Society for the History of Technology held in Toronto.

Presents news briefs on the computer software industry as of January 2002. Details of the seminar 'Program Verification and Semantics: The Early Work,' held at the Science Museum in London, England; Mission of the Software History Center; Highlight of the @digital.au exhibition on digital technology at Melbourne Museum in Victoria.

Focuses on the debate about professionalism in the computer industry during the 1950s and 1960s. Occupational and educational backgrounds of computer programmers; Labor shortages in the industry; Importance of computer science to professionalism; Limits of professionalism.

The article discusses the influences of technological innovations in commercial firms and government agencies in the U.S. It outlines the factors affecting the availability of internet services including social, economic and scientific developments in electronic digital computing. A historical background on the development of astronomical tables is also explored.

The article presents information on open source movement in the history of computing. Of all the recent developments open-source software movement has attracted the most widespread attention, in part, due to the remarkable successes of such open-source projects as Linux, Sendmail and Apache. Despite these apparent successes, however, the lessons of the open-source movement are not necessarily those that its proponents might hope or imagine. They suggest more about new methods and questions for historians to grapple with than obvious conclusions about a new "one best way" to manage software development. At its most basic, open source refers simply to software that is made publicly available as uncompiled source code. Such openness is unusual but hardly unprecedented. There can be compelling reasons for making source code available, even in competitive commercial environments in which intellectual property rights are generally fiercely protected. The appeal and power of open-source software goes beyond these notions of openness and freedom.

Editor in chief Nathan Ensmenger introduces the articles in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this issue of the Annals, we are pleased to provide very different but equally unique contributions on the history of design in computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I give lectures on the history of the software industry for my informatics and computer science students, I often ask them before I begin if they know which are the top ten largest software companies in the world. Rarely can they name more than one or two (typically Microsoft and Oracle), and even after I reveal to them the full list they often do not recognize most of the companies or have any idea what kinds of products they develop. This is in part because even aspiring software developers underestimate the degree to which most software is either custom-developed or marketed to organizations rather than individuals. And generally speaking, they do not even imagine that some of these firms might have originated outside of the United States. This popular bias towards consumer-oriented and American firms is too often shared in the historical literature as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This issue features articles on history of the computer networks and networking. David Hemmendinger uncovers two early and previously undocumented computer networks that predated the Arpanet by as much as a half-decade, and participant-historians John Day and Craig Partridge masterfully demonstrate just how important it is that we unpack intimidating sets of acronyms (both technical and organizational) to reveal the people, practices, and politics that lie behind them. Lastly, in the second of their two-part series on visual representations of the Arpanet, Bradley Fidler and Marie Currie explore the ways in which the original Arpanet maps are anything but straightforward depictions of the physical or spatial "reality" of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This issue features articles on software in the context of the history of intellectual property, the first in a two-part series on the challenge of writing contemporary history by James Cortada, an exploration of the transition from analog to digital methods in the modeling of electrical power distribution networks, an article on computing prime numbers on the ENIAC and EDSAC, and a firsthand account of the IBM Advanced Computer Systems (ACS) project of the mid-to-late 1960s by Brian Randell. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the issue regarding the history of software. According to Michael Mahoney, the history of software is hard because software itself is hard to design, develop, use, understand, and maintain. It is stated that software does not wear out or breakdown in the traditional sense, and its maintenance involves enhancements which required strictly technical measures and responses to changes in the business environment. Moreover, considering the software as a heterogeneous system can help the people understand why the software maintenance problem has historically been so complex.

The author reflects on the computing history. The author argues that the beginning of invention, innovation, and various concepts of computing and communications network was a result of the computing history. It explores the views of James Contada on computing, and the relationship of automotive to computing.

Presents various events and issues related to information resources as of July 1, 2002. Highlights of the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations Reunion in Washington D.C.; Workshop on using history to improve undergraduate computer science teaching hosted by the Computing Research Association; Discovery of the portrait of Benjamin Babbage at Totnes Elizabethan Museum in Great Britain.

This article presents information on the celebration of the 40th anniversary of Moore's law by the Chemical Heritage Foundation on 12-13 May 2005. The focus was on ways in which the semiconductor industry was not just a product of developments in electrical engineering or physics, but was also, a chemical industry. The conference opened with a public reception and lecture by Rodney Brooks, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, on the larger social and cultural influences of Moore's law. The next day witnessed a full program of presentations on a broad range of topics. Overall, the conference made a compelling argument for the importance of chemistry and materials science in the history of computing. It's often tempting to think of the computer in the abstract terms of intellectual history rather than as a concrete artifact with inescapable material characteristics. By highlighting the role of chemists and chemical processes in the development of semiconductor technologies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation conference reminds us of the pragmatic challenges posed by the mass production of electronic computers.

From Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (a product of an increasingly global British maritime empire) to Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine (designed to solve the problem of "seeing like a state" in the newly trans-continental American Republic) to the emergence of the modern petrochemical industry, information technologies have always been closely associated with the human desire to understand and manipulate their physical environment. More recently, humankind has started to realize the environmental impacts of information technology, including not only the toxic byproducts associated with their production, but also the polluting effects of the massive amounts of energy and water required by data centers at Google and Facebook (whose physicality is conveniently and deliberately camouflaged behind the disembodied, ethereal "cloud"). This paper grounds the history of information technology in the material world by focusing on the relationship between "computing power" and more traditional processes of resource extraction, exchange, management, and consumption.