David Alan Grier

A social history of Bitnet and Listserv, 1985-1991

After the engineers had built computer networks, users had to build the social networks that made them useful. Listserv, the combined mailing list and file server, was an important tool for those interested in building network-based organizations. It first appeared on Bitnet, an academic network based on IBM computers. The early versions of Listserv became operational in the mid-1980s and its early archives show how network users learned to use the software and, perhaps more importantly, how to manage network-based organizations.

Time to Push the Cloud

Cloud computing is a transformative technology with significant potential to solve data-related problems. Cloud computing is a very flexible concept that that includes three major service models - the most well known being software as a service (SaaS), which includes Web services. These Web services perform functions traditionally done with software installed on an individual computer. The second service module is platform as a service (PaaS). This model provides computing services as Website.The final service model is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It includes business-to-business (B2B) services that are usually invisible to customers.

Learning from the Best

Entrepreneurs need encouragement but also training and experience. The featured Web extra is the latest installment of the Forward Slash podcast.

Uncharted Territory

Although they might bring great utility to the world, innovations always involve fundamental challenges to the way we think.

Not for All Markets

A t times, especially following a major crisis in the nuclear industry or an attack on the global cyberinfrastructure, our office becomes a little media market. Reporters contact us seeking a comment that’s provocative, insightful, or counterintuitive, depending upon their tastes. In exchange, they offer a brief moment of fame, a boost to the ego with a personal appearance on Great Day Pocatello! or a quote in an obituary for someone who might once have been famous. My colleagues and I generally try to approach these transactions rationally, attempting to provide informative answers for educational and policy purposes. However, when the choice is difficult, especially when we’re facing deadlines or working on other tasks, we throw the request onto the trading floor and ask if this question is truly worth our time and effort.

Graphical techniques for output analysis

This tutorial gives a summary of current research in graphical statistical analysis and shows how to apply these techniques to a range of problems in simulation output analysis. The tutorial is not tied to a specfic software package. It covers methods that may be found in many different products. The examples in the tutorial were done by the S system from AT&T Bell Laboratories.

The wave of the future

Since technology tends to move in unexpected directions, visions of the future are often more about today than tomorrow.

The Math Tables Project of the work projects administration: the reluctant start of the computing era

The Mathematical Tables Project, one of the last large human computing groups, began operation in 1938 as a WPA project in New York City. Unlike preceding computing organizations, the Math Tables Project mass produced calculations using unskilled labor. Prior to 1938, most hand computing organizations used well educated computing assistants who could operate independently. Over its 10-year history, the Math Tables Project completed 28 published volumes of tables and calculations for dozens of scientific and war projects. During World War II, it acted as a general computing contractor for the Office for Scientific Research and Development and prepared LORAN Navigation Tables for the Navy. After the war, it was absorbed by the National Bureau of Standards. It proved to be a transitional institution in the history of computing, promoting mass scientific computation and developing the numeric methods that would eventually be used on electronic computers.

The Ethical Dimension

All administrative decisions can be factored into two different kinds of elements: factual and ethical. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/Dojn05hJNWs is a video segment in which author David Alan Grier expands on his Errant Hashtag column by discussing the potential confusion Internet postings can cause when information posted in the past still seems new today.

Dirty electricity

Debugging has been one of the crucial skills of computer science.