Jake Feinler (SRI)

Voir notamment le témoignage de Jake Feinler – recueilli par Marc Weber (p. 52), qui oeuvra au SRI avec Engelbart au développement d’Arpanet et d’Internet (notamment du Whois).

Sur Jake Feinler voir également

ELIZABETH JOCELYN FEINLER: An Interview Conducted by Janet Abbate for the IEEE History Center, 8 July 2002. Interview # 597 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

In this interview, Feinler describes her work with FORTRAN, her initial interest in Chemistry, and her work at SRI. At SRI, she was involved in several projects including developing an Resource Handbook. She describes in great detail her time and her involvement in these projects at SRI and the transition of the Internet from military use to commercial use. She highlights the ongoing learning process involved in working with computers and programming. Feinler also described her time at NASA at the Ames Research Center after leaving her long career at SRI.

Nous signalons également le billet sur le blog du national Air and Space Museum dédié à Margaret Hamilton.

Séminaire Codes sources

L’objectif du séminaire Codes sources est de présenter la pensée informatique là où elle s’exprime le plus concrètement : dans les textes
que sont les codes sources.

 

Portrait de E. Dijkstra Source manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra, University Texas at Austin Author Hamilton Richards CC BY-SA 3.0

Portrait de E. Dijkstra
Source manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra, University Texas at Austin
Author Hamilton Richards
CC BY-SA 3.0

Séance du mercredi 23 mars 2016 (14h-15h30) :

Yann Régis-Gianas (PPS, IRIF, Université Paris-Diderot, Pi.R2, INRIA) : « CallCC, un coup d’état sur le contrôle »

Lorsque Dijkstra publie son article “Go To Statement Considered  Harmful”, une fronde de programmeurs – dont Knuth – s’est élevée contre les restrictions d’expressivité proposées par l’informaticien néerlandais : en effet, la structuration du flot de contrôle par les seules procédures et boucles while interdisait certains idiomes de programmation fort utiles et répandus.

Cependant, les motivations de Dijkstra étaient légitimes : puisque  l’on ne peut pas prédire les prédécesseurs d’un point de contrôle en présence du “goto”, on ne peut pas raisonner localement sur les instructions d’un programme et cela interdit toute ambition de passage à l’échelle de la preuve de programme.

Seulement, l’expressivité du “goto” peut être retrouvée à l’aide d’opérateurs de contrôle inventés par Peter Landin plusieurs années auparavant : en présence de ces opérateurs, les points de contrôle deviennent des objets de première classe appelés continuations. En
tant qu’objet du calcul, les points de contrôle du programme sont alors l’affaire du programmeur. Grâce à l’abstraction de type, il peut alors choisir de légiférer comme bon lui semble pour spécifier leur bon usage.

Lieu : Salle 24-25/405 du LIP6 (rotonde 24 ou 25, 4e étage)
4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris
métro Jussieu (lignes 7 et 10)

Prochaines séances du séminaire Codes sources
Continuer la lecture

Because of the pixels …

My own rage comic, about a dog, Wout 159 CC BY SA 3.0

My own rage comic, about a dog, Wout 159
CC BY SA 3.0

Découvrir ou redécouvrir l’article

Davison P., Because of the Pixels: On the History, Form and Influence of MS Paint, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Visual Culture, December 2014, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 275-297. 

Abstract

This article focuses on the history, formal properties, and cultural role played by MS Paint, a widely available graphics program that has been used to make countless internet memes. The author examines the technical limitations of the program, and the visible consequences produced by a mouse-driven bitmap-based graphics program. He uses MS Paint as a context to discuss two new pieces of graphics software – Fresh Paint and Rage Maker – each of which embody radically different orientations to the concept of remediation. These three approaches to understanding MS Paint help us to reconsider the culturally suppressed media that have nonetheless had significant effects on the visual culture of the contemporary participatory internet.

Windows

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_showcase

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_showcase

This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Une collection Internet Archive à découvrir 

Lire le billet de Jason Scott sur la collection: Internet Archive Does Windows: Hundreds of Windows 3.1 Programs Join the Collection

ENIAC in action

Conceived in 1943, completed in 1945, and decommissioned in 1955, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer. But ENIAC was more than just a milestone on the road to the modern computer. During its decade of operational life, ENIAC calculated sines and cosines and tested for statistical outliers, plotted the trajectories of bombs and shells, and ran the first numerical weather simulations. ENIAC in Action tells the whole story for the first time, from ENIAC’s design, construction, testing, and use to its afterlife as part of computing folklore. It highlights the complex relationship of ENIAC and its designers to the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture and coding first documented by John von Neumann in 1945.

Within this broad sweep, the authors emphasize the crucial but previously neglected years of 1947 to 1948, when ENIAC was reconfigured to run what the authors claim was the first modern computer program to be executed: a simulation of atomic fission for Los Alamos researchers. The authors view ENIAC from diverse perspectives—as a machine of war, as the “first computer,” as a material artifact constantly remade by its users, and as a subject of (contradictory) historical narratives. They integrate the history of the machine and its applications, describing the mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who proposed and designed ENIAC as well as the men—and particularly the women who—built, programmed, and operated it.

Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century

9780262029261Edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter

Since the turn of the millennium, the Internet has evolved from what was merely a new medium to a true mass medium—with a deeper and wider cultural reach, greater opportunities for distribution and collaboration, and more complex corporate and political realities. Mapping a loosely chronological series of formative arguments, developments, and happenings, Mass Effect provides an essential guide to understanding the dynamic and ongoing relationship between art and new technologies.

Mass Effect brings together nearly forty contributions, including newly commissioned essays and reprints, image portfolios, and transcribed discussion panels and lectures that offer insights and reflections from a wide range of artists, curators, art historians, and bloggers. Among the topics examined are the use of commercial platforms for art practice, what art means in an age of increasing surveillance, and questions surrounding such recent concepts as “postinternet.” Other contributions analyze and document particular works by the artists of And/Or Gallery, Cory Arcangel, DIS, Cao Fei, the Radical Software Group, and others.

Mass Effect relaunches a publication series initiated by the MIT Press and the New Museum in 1984, which produced six defining volumes for the field of contemporary art. These new volumes will build on this historic partnership and reinvigorate the conversation around contemporary culture once again.

Copublished with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

En savoir plus

CFP: SHOT Special Interest Group for Computers, Information & Society Workshop 2016

Under the Harbor E. Kilby CC BY-SA 2.0

Under the Harbor
E. Kilby
CC BY-SA 2.0

The Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS) welcomes submissions for its 2016 annual workshop, to be held on June 26 and 27, 2016 in Singapore. This is immediately after the end of the regular annual meeting of its parent organization, the Society for the History of Technology.

Workshop Theme: Convergence and Divergence
The terms “convergence” and “divergence” are opposite to one another, but they can both be used, sometimes simultaneously, to study information and computing technologies in their social, cultural, and political contexts. For instance, an individual computer may serve as a site of convergence for raw materials sourced around the world. At the same time, the journey of each of those materials from their extraction sites to the manufacturers’ factories may itself be a story of divergence—that is, of how resources and ideas scatter away from their point of origin.
Convergence and divergence also occur beyond the material cultures of computing and information. The technical standards, social conventions, and legal frameworks that shape how people can engage with information technologies can vary wildly across the globe, or even from one local context to the next. People working in different national or local contexts may develop similar frameworks by following entirely different paths and, conversely, ways of conceptualizing, using, and regulating computing and information in a local setting may gain global appeal.
The theme for this year’s SIGCIS meeting is “Convergence and Divergence,” broadly conceived. Possible lines of inquiry include:
– Comparative or international studies of governance and regulation
– Local and regional cultures of computing
– Changes in computing technologies and market structures (such as digital convergence)
– Global systems of resource extraction and equipment manufacturing
– The movement of information technology within and across national borders
– The convergence and/or divergence of disciplinary perspectives in the history of computing and information.
As always, we welcome submissions even if they do not align with the workshop theme. Our membership is international and interdisciplinary, and our members examine the history of information technologies and their place within society from a variety of scholarly perspectives including the history of technology, business history, labor history, social history, the history of science, science studies, communications, gender and sexuality studies, computing, and museum studies.

Submission Procedure: All submissions should be made online via the SIGCIS website (http://www.sigcis.org/workshop16). The deadline for submissions is February 12, 2016.