Volunteer Information Exchange Sharing what we know with those we know Volume 5 Number 7 August 17, 2015 Contribute To The VIE Fellows Nominations Open to the public through An exciting issue in many ways: some great articles, August 31. new news, and informative links. The Computer History Museum Fellow Awards publicly Karen Kroslowitz writes on a major milestone -- recognize individuals who have made outstanding 100,000 artifacts cataloged in our Mimsy data base. contributions to computing in areas as diverse as What a huge effort that represents. Thanks to all who artificial intelligence, networking, programming helped achieve it and thanks to Karen for writing it up languages, computer graphics, microprocessors, and for us operating systems. If you know someone that fits this One of those 100,000 was a Dyseac artifact – who description please nominate them today! among us has heard of that early computer. But Sue Click here for more details. The next class of Fellows Mickel has written up that new acquisition for us. will be inducted on Saturday, April 16, 2016. Thank you Sue. (From Carina Sweet) Chris Garcia writes up still more of those new acquisitions—from phones to computer terminals. In VIE 5.06 we re-printed a first hand account of a CHM Blog person who had attended the “announcement” Recent CHM Blog Entries (revelation?) of Colossus. The author's account had some inaccuracies that Dave Levish points out. Kirsten Tashev keeps us up-to-date on new CHM blog Thanks to Dave. entries. CHM staff and volunteers were invited to attend an • Len Sushtek on acquisition of the source code for information session on July 15, 2015, about current Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint early source code. and upcoming exhibitions. Wynne Dobyns writes on • Senior Curator Dag Spicer recapping the 2015 that session in "Make Software: Change the World" CHM Fellow Awards. and "On You." Thank you Wynne. • David Laws history rich blog post on TTL and Also, in VIE 5.06 we erred in the name of Collections Fairchild. specialist Gretta Stimson. (We said Simpson.) Our apologies to Gretta. As always, send us your stories, anecdotes and Contents adventures in computing. Contribute To The VIE 1 Jim Strickland [email protected] Links You Might Enjoy 1 2016 CHM Fellow Nominations Open 1 Links You Might Enjoy CHM Blog 1 • Commodore Amiga 1000 at 30-- the computer that 100,000 Records…and Counting! 2 made the UK games industry. DYSEAC: The First Portable Computer? 3 • Claude Shannon, from the bit to wearable. Dyson Talk at PARC 4 • 1913 "computer" in New York's Grand Central Recent Acquisitions 5 station. Navlab / Sutherland Walker Video on YouTube 5 • TRS 80: The computer that beat Apple—for a while. Colossus Announcement Article: 6 • History of icons Where and when did graphic icons Response come about? "Make Software: Change the World" and "On 6 You" Computers are not intelligent. 7 They only think they are. CHM Audio Tour Coming Events 7 1 100,000 Records…and Counting! KAREN KROSLOWITZ, Director of Collections We embrace technology here at CHM and, thus, we post The Computer History Museum recently hit a major many of our videos to YouTube. But we’d prefer that milestone: More than 100,000 artifact records in its online visitors stay on our website and explore it further collections management database, Mimsy XG!1 rather than to be redirected. Editor & Content Manager However, creating that many records and presenting Jenny de la Cruz identified and researched various them in such cool ways didn’t happen overnight. means of delivering video content online. She and Web Developer Edward Lau (and several other staff), On June 5, Oral History & Media Coordinator David concluded the best way to achieve the goal is to Braught (the newest member of the Collections & continue posting our videos to YouTube then utilize that Exhibitions Department’s team) entered record YouTube url in the published Mimsy XG record to 102740113, the moving image of “Cisco's Padmasree provide more direct access to viewers. CHM’s videos Warrior in Conversation with NPR's Laura Sydell.” This remain protected, and files load and play with ease and particular type of catalog record is demonstrative of just speed. You can enjoy the video of Padmasree Warrior how hard CHM strives to make its collection accessible with Laura Sydell here: to a worldwide audience. Record 102740113 is not a http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274 static record with text and a photo or a scan; it’s a record 0113. for a moving image and that actual moving image can be played directly from the search result page. An accurate collections management database (CMS) is truly the most essential tool any museum with a How did CHM achieve this? Many readers of VIE collection can have. So I must give very special “shout already know that building the database has been an outs” to all the C and E staff, past and present, who have ongoing team effort spanning a few decades. If you made this achievement of 100,000 records possible over know CHM history, you know that when the Boston-era the years. Their professionalism and dedication to The Computer Museum (TCM) closed and the creating and maintaining the CMS is valued and collections were shipped to Moffett Field’s TCM History appreciated. Center, those collections were combined—and so were their respective databases. Over the years, the database Last but never least, I want to thank all of our collections was upgraded to the latest and greatest collections volunteers who helped with this over many, many years, management software and more records were added. from the first days at TCM up until today. Without your Mimsy XG was selected and implemented in 2006 for its contributions of knowledge and collaborative spirit the many features that allow CHM to customize fields, Museum could not achieve the monumental task of reports and user views, and the conversion yielded a processing, photographing and digitizing our physical total of 26,500 combined records. and archival collections. You are amazing and we’re so happy you choose to spend your time with us. The interface used to publish the Mimsy XG database records to the online catalog pages requires several As long as CHM’s collection continues to grow, there will “work-arounds.” As with any relational database, the always be more material to process. The good news is data in Mimsy XG is organized in and retrieved from two prestigious grant projects are currently underway: a different tables. However, the image files are merely two-year cataloging project to eliminate the backlog of linked to the database—the actual files are stored on hardware will end this October, and an archives one of CHM’s servers. That makes it a bit more processing project started in April to halve the backlog of complicated to pull the data, reformat it and publish it text continues through 2017. The up-and-coming online. Software History Center and Preservation Lab will read and digitize our vast software collection in all its formats. You’ve likely noticed that CHM produces a wealth of We recently partnered with Google to digitize a collection videos, from those in our exhibitions to public programs, of more than 100 videos and publish them to CHM’s such as Revolutionaries and oral histories. (Bonus YouTube channel. Similar small-scale projects to digitize bragging rights go to the Media Lab’s team of Jon Plutte our media collection are in the works, which will support and Eric Dennis for creating such beautiful productions!) long-term preservation while increasing public access. Each is an artifact worthy of a collections database Volunteer opportunities will be announced following the record. While most published records are only a few move to the Shustek Center—stay tuned. kilobytes (including the static image) and are easy to load in a browser, moving image records like the 1 If you happened to notice that the online catalog aforementioned with a runtime of more than an hour search lists only 92,000 records or so, that’s correct too. present numerous challenges, including file size, The CHM, like all museums, is often unable to publish all copyright protections, and media player requirements. records online due to copyright and other confidentiality issues. 2 DYSEAC: The First Portable Computer? Sue Mickel Collections volunteers working on CCARP (the two-year grant-funded Collections Cataloging and Reconciliation Project) quickly learn that the museum’s collections are full of interesting surprises. On a recent Tuesday, we arrived to find that staff Collections Specialists Gretta Stimson and Sarah Schaefer had some very old logic modules for us to catalog. After more than a year of CCARPing, most of us can quickly spot a really old object. They are heavy (metal, not plastic). They are black, beige, or gray. And they feature vacuum tubes or at least the sockets that used to hold them. These modules passed all 3 tests. The excitement level rose. Just how old were these objects? The curators had left us a one-word clue on a Post-it: “DYSEAC.” Well, we knew about ENIAC and JOHNNIAC and a lot of other “IACs” but had never heard of “DYSEAC.” Was it a mistake? A quick Google search showed that our curators were right as usual.The DYSEAC was the second Standards Electronic Automatic Computer built. Where did the “dy” come from in the acronym? Well, as a guess, “dy” is a prefix (from the Greek) that means “two,” so that may be the origin. “SEAC” is actually the name of the first Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, an earlier computer built in 1950 by the U.S.