Eric A. Weiss

Konrad Zuse Obituary

Early Life Zuse was born in BerlinWilmersdorf on June 22, 1910, his parents’ second child. His father, Emil, was a Prussian beamter; or civil servant, a lifelong post office administrator. His mother, Maria Crohn, was his father’s niece. From the age of two he was brought up in Braunsberg in East Prussia. After three years at the Evangelische Hoheve MadchenSchule he was enrolled in the Gymnasium Hosianum at the age of nine. For his entire school career he was always about two years younger than the rest of his classmates which he said made him feel physically inferior. In his fifth year at the Gymnasium his father was transferred to Hoyerswerda where Zuse went to the more modern, progressive Realgymnasium which stressed modern languages, mathematics, and science. Being both artistically and technologically talented, he was torn between these two fields, but in the end engineering won out and he postponed serious sketching and painting until much later in his life.

Biographies: Eloge: Arthur Lee Samuel (1901-90)

Arthur Lee Samuels (1901-90) early life, education, and career are described. Before World War II, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was a leading designer of microwave tubes, of which his TR radar switch, the Samuel tube, was the most widely used. At the University of Illinois he launched the ILLIAC team. He was one of those who guided IBM into computers and into real research, and he initiated its solid-state laboratory. He made a major improvement in the Williams storage tube. He invented hashing. He was chairman of the Defense Department Advisory Group on Electron Devices for 18 years. He started IBMs Zurich Laboratory and was instrumental in founding the IBM Journal of Research and Development. >

Events and Sightings [including an obituary for Tadahiro Sekimoto]

Conference—History of Nordic Computing; IT History Society; Norsk Data—40th-anniversary celebrations; Control Datas 50th anniversary; Obituary—Tadahiro Sekimoto

Information Theory: 50 Years of Discovery [Book Review]

from code crackers and hackers to those exploiting telegraphy’s informational asymmetry to make a few bucks in the race track or, more importantly, to amass a stock market fortune. The chapter on the telegraph’s development and associated “information overload” points to a problem familiar to all Internet users. Last but not least, Standage seems to have a powerful message: that revolutionary speeds in message transmission failed to fulfill the promise of a global environment more conducive to peace. As Armand Mattelart indicated in The Invention of Communication, viewing communication technologies as a panacea did not start, as Standage believes, with the telegraph. Instead, it’s an idea endemic to all capitalist technologies harkening back to the era when the construction of roads and canals promised improved communication. Standage could also be more critical of the popular rhetoric about how the electric telegraph annihilated space and time. Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, observes that the incredible increase in communication speed brought about by the telegraph had a paradoxical effect. By increasing the gap between places accessible by the new technology and the rest of the globe, telegraphy intensified the relative backwardness wherever communication speed was still determined by boat, horse, mule, or legs of man. In an age where sending a telegram from New York to Tokyo required only a few minutes, despite all the technology available to the New York Herald, it still took eight to nine months before David Livingstone’s letter (1871–72) from Africa made it to the pages of that newspaper. Myths such as the one about “savage” Africa were, as Hobsbawm suggests, to a considerable extent, the product of the widening and the deepening of informational gaps by telegraphy’s development. Aristotelis Tympas Georgia Institute of Technology

Biographies-eloge: An Wang, 1920-1990

The life, education and career of An Wang, originator of the essential concept on which the magnetic-core memory was based and astonishingly successful computer entrepreneur, are discussed. Wangs early life in China, his education at Harvard, and his development of magnetic-core storage systems are reviewed. The start, growth, and decline of Wang Laboratories are also discussed. >

Comments, queries, and debate

professionals, died in the summer of 1988 at the age of five of a lack of subscribers and advertisers. The child of Anthony Ralston and the late Walter Kaufmann-Btihler, Abacus was born in 1982 and nurtured through its short life by Springer-Verlag and a small group of editors, contributors, friends, and supporters. It traced its ancestry to an earlier aborted AFIPS proposal of the same name. In attempting to be the Scientific American of computing, it contained several notable articles, the best of which are collected in A Computer Science Reader, edited by Eric A. Weiss, published by Springer Verlag. It is survived only by its grieving friends. No services.

The Number 2-B Regrettor

The pompous formality and rigid stuffiness of official documents often tempt humorists to write parodies, but rarely do engineering parodies have either long life or wide circulation. The anonymous underground paper, “Number 2-B Regrettor, Description and Procedures, For People Who Think They Think,” is an exception. Although written more than 45 years ago, it was liberally copied at a time when copying was far more costly than it is today. It was circulated informally through the engineering parts of the telephone, radio, audio, and electronics industries for years. Many now-elderly electrical engineers affectionately recall the 2-B Regrettor and keep copies of its description in their nostalgia files.* The quality of its humor can be appreciated only by reading it, and its full impact will be felt only by those who knew and were subject to the conditions of its origin. I first saw the 2-B Regrettor paper (probably a copy of the second edition) in early 1941 and encountered the third edition on a visit to MIT, probably in 1944. From time to time in the next 40 years, I asked about the author’s identity, directing my queries mostly to friends associated with Bell Labs. In the 1960s I made one or two formal letter requests to the laboratory library but was unable to learn any more about the paper’s origin. My serious search started in 1983 when I realized that the paper described a forerunner of the computer and that the Annals of the History of Computing might be willing to reprint it. A short notice appeared in the July 1983 issue (Vol. 5, No. 3, p. 306) of the Annals, asking for information. It brought a single response, and I found the paper’s fourth edition reprinted in Harry Hershey’s Automatic Telephone Practice. I then prepared similar information request notices that appeared in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Institute, Computer, and the Newsletter of the IEEE Center for the History of Electrical Engineering. Of the 70 responses, all but 10 were prompted by the notice in the IEEE Institute.