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NEWSLETTER
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Every day I see signs of healthy expansion in computer history. When the Charles Babbage Institute was organized in the late 1970s, it was safe to say that CBI was the leading player in the field, though the field was pretty small at the time. Since then, the number of scholars, professional societies, and regular activities has “grown like topsy” and with no sight of a let-up anytime soon. CBI Archives. To encourage research in computing history, we launched the Arthur Norberg Travel Fund five years ago. Thanks to 20 generous donors, we’ve been able to create a fund that will support research for years to come. In these five years we’ve funded 12 scholars to make research trips to CBI and use our unparalleled collections of archival materials. This year, we had an unexpected bonanza and we made double the usual number of awards, owing to unusual strength in the number of applicants. Amateur computer clubs, the patent system, the origins of OCR (optical character recognition), and digital humanities are the topics that Norberg Fund awardees will be investigating with CBI archival materials (see related article on this year’s awardees). Professional societies. The major professional societies are expanding their efforts also to sponsor research in computing history. The IEEE History Center awards its annual fellowship in electrical and computer history, while the IEEE Computer Society has renewed its History Committee’s activities in the field, sponsoring research and publications. IFIP regularly publishes conference volumes with history content, while ASIS&T has begun sponsoring history research as well. The Association for Computing Machinery’s History Committee has been sponsoring research fellowships in the past several years. Networking, hypertext, transnational computer science, data surveillance, computing in the federal government, and various aspects of ACM’s storied history—these are just some of the topics being researched today at CBI and elsewhere, too.
In this newsletter, we try to keep our community of colleagues, supporters, and well-wishers up-to-date with our activities at CBI. If you’d like additional information, you can always visit our website at <www.cbi.umn.edu> or keep current by “friending” us on <Facebook.com/BabbageInstitute>. If you have a friend or colleague who is interested in computer history, please pass along their name and contact information. I’d like to send them a personal invitation to join the CBI Friends, an amazing group of people who have been supporting us for three decades. (If it happens that you aren’t yet a member of CBI Friends, send me your name, too!) For a basic membership of $100 we are pleased to send our CBI Friends the quarterly issues of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing when they arrive straight from the publisher. You’ll have the additional satisfaction of supporting CBI’s leadership in the field.
Thomas J. Misa
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IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. At CBI we were immensely proud when our own Jeff Yost was named as Editor in Chief of Annals. He recently completely a busy and rewarding four-year term, increasing the depth and breadth of scholarship published in the Annals as well as building new ties to the IEEE community. Jeff made Annals the #1 choice for scholars seeking to publish historical research in the field. Now, with the Annals editorship in the capable hands of Lars Heide of the Copenhagen Business School, Jeff will have a bit more time to devote to his own research, including a book-length project on the history of the computer services industry.
