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The interdisciplinary Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information & Culture recently held a major symposium, “Automation by Design.” This short article discusses the event, CBI's new fellows, editorial leadership, and other programs and services of the institute.

Presents corrections to the paper, From the Editor's Desk.

Recounts the career and contributions of Martin Davis.

Since its release in November 2022, OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT has aroused great interest because of its very impressive ability to provide well-formulated and detailed natural language responses to queries about a huge variety of topics. These responses are based on an immense set of training data, obtained from the Internet in 2021, and on information gained from interactions with its users. However, ChatGPT's users soon found that the answers they received to their queries were not always trustworthy. Indeed, OpenAI itself lists as one of ChatGPT's limitations that it “sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers, [i.e.,] confident responses that cannot be grounded in any of its training data.” [4] (The term “hallucination” has come into use by the AI community for such responses, which are not unique to ChatGPT [5].)

The Special Committee on History of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) accredits annually several computer museums in Japan as a part of its distributed virtual museum. The accreditation had been withheld in the last three years because of COVID-19, however, it revived this year. On the afternoon of March 3, 2023, the second day of the National Convention of IPSJ held on the campus of the University of Electro-Communications, we celebrated two museums as the new members of our distributed museum and gave the certificates and plaques.

James Lee Pelkey was a unique combination of entrepreneur, investor, and historian at a pivotal time in the evolution of early networking technologies. A business executive who led both hardware and software startups and later managed funds investing in early networking startups, Pelkey turned a passion for discovering emerging markets for new technologies into a lifelong pursuit of documenting the early history of computer communications. He died on February 16 on his home island of Maui, Hawaii at the age of 77.

This article presents information related to a prototype distributed programming project that provides cheap distributed computing in a form that facilitates experimenting with techniques for shared computations. Although networks of computers have become common, it is still not easy to experiment with their use for distributed computing. The use of the tuple space frees the programmer from having to think about the physical structure of memory, though the implementation of Linda operations will necessarily have to take that into account. Since the application uses a network of workstations, there is no physically shared memory. The Linda system is used to represent the relevant portions of the file system in a convenient fashion. Implementing Linda on a network requires some tuple space management processes to run alongside the application programs that use tuple space. Compilers, assemblers and loaders are all time-consuming facilities that must be used when developing software. In a network of workstations with a file server, the actual files are the shared objects.

Using a Global Name Space for Parallel Execution of UNIX Tools Although networks of computers have become common, it is still not easy to experiment with their use for distributed […]

The LEO Computers Society with its partner, the Centre for Computer History, Cambridge, has published a second edition of its anthology of very personal memories about the earliest days of business computing: LEO remembered—by the people who worked on the world’s first business computers. This new paperback more than doubles the size of the original 2016 version and includes the testimony of over 85 of LEO’s people, illustrated with contemporary photographs. It introduces the reader to the excitement and challenges of working on a massive mainframe computer at the dawn of the business computer age. It gives vivid glimpses into the social history of the period—the clothes, the food, the pay, two royal visits, the often-neglected role of women in early computing, off-duty activities—even the London smog. The computing world of the 1950s and 1960s is portrayed as it was—the frustrating task of locating and mending faults, the joy and triumph when obstacles are overcome irrespective of one’s actual job, the camaraderie built from working together on never-before-tackled programming problems, the ethos that LEO instilled, which stayed with its people in their later, often very distinguished, careers.