Computers/Information Technology

Alan Turning HomePage

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

Author:

Andrew Hodges - Wadham College

Excerpt:

Alan Turing would probably have laughed at the idea of being called a great philosopher, or any kind of philosopher. He called himself a mathematician. But his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence has become one of the most cited in modern philosophical literature. This is principally because he brought the new and rigorous mathematical concept of computability to bear on traditional problems of mind and body, free-will and determinism.

Annotation:

Alan Turning (1912-1954) was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher of the mind who most famously worked on breaking Nazi codes and presaged developments in artificial intelligence and computer technology. This site conveys Turning's biography, providing a timeline and short prospectus of Turning's life. There is also a scrapbook that includes many photographs of Turning, diagrams of his mathematics and logic, and a large glossary of related historical terms and context. In the scrapbook, you will find a discussion of the code-breaking effort in England in the second World War and the techniques used by Turing and others in detail. Photographs of the locations and machines involved are also included, as are links to other sites with related historical and contemporary material.

Automatic Speech Synthesis & Recognition

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/sloan/ASSR/assr_index.html

Excerpt:

Mechanical devices to achieve speech synthesis were conceived of in the realm of fiction, and first devised in the early 19th century. The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, and the subsequent efforts to reduce the bandwidth requirements of transmitting voice, led back to the idea. In the 1930s, the telephone engineers at Bell Labs developed the famous Voder, a speech synthesizer that was unveiled to the public to great fanfare at the 1939 World’s Fair, but that required a skilled human operator.
Fully automatic speech synthesis came in the early 1960s, with the invention of new automatic coding schemes, such as Adaptive Predictive Coding (APC). With those new techniques in hand, the Bell Labs engineers again turned their attention to speech synthesis. By the late 1960s they had developed a system for internal use in the telephone system, a machine that read wiring instructions to Western Electric telephone wirers, who could then keep eyes and hands on their work. Further progress led to the introduction, in 1976, of the Kurzweil Reading Machine which for the first time allowed the blind to "read" plain text as opposed to Braille. By 1978, the technology was so well established and inexpensive to produce that it could be introduced in a toy, Texas Instruments’ Speak-and-Spell. Thus, the development of this important technology from inception until fruition took about 15 years, involved practitioners from various disciplines, most of whom are still alive, and had a far-reaching impact on other technologies and, through them, society as a whole.

Annotation:

This site was established to record the history of artificial voice machines, software and research. Most notably, the site contains numerous oral history accounts by engineers and programmers who developed this field in the second half of the twentieth century, and it is looking to add more of these recollections online. A timeline provides an outline of the major advances in automatic speech synthesis and recognition, and visitors are asked to add their historical notes, photographs and audio clips from early voice technologies. The site maintains an extensive list of links to institutes of higher education and companies that have been at the forefront of artificial speech research and development. Short biographical outlines of important figures are also available, as are citations to seminal papers and reviews from this area of electrical engineering and computer science.

History of Programming Languages

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

Computers/Information Technology

URL:

http://www.csis.american.edu/museum/sloan/html/prog_lang.htm

Annotation:

American University hopes to use this site to capture the history of the fast moving and ever-changing field of computer programming languages. As the home page notes, many of these languages have come and gone with little historical record left by their creators and users. Early programming languages developed from the 1960s through the 1980s, including Algol, Apl, Apt, Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Gpss, Joss, Jovial, Lisp, PL/I, Simula, Snobol, Ada, 68, C, C++, Discrete Simulation Languages, Formac, Forth, Icon, Monitors and concurrent Pascal, Pascal, Prolog, and Smalltalk are now fading away quickly as newer object-oriented and visual languages take center statge. Computer programmers can add their recollections and other notes about the history of these early languages in the site's discussion area or by emailing the site's producers. The "Visitor's Lounge" includes links to other history of computing sites.

MouseSite

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite

Excerpt:

WELCOME to the MouseSite, a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.
As a graduate student in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley after World War II Doug Engelbart began to imagine ways in which all sorts of information could be displayed on the screens of cathode ray tubes like the ones he had used as a radar technician during the war, and he dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces.

Annotation:

This wide-ranging site explores the history of many of the technologies that form the basis of modern personal computing. Many of these advances came from the pioneering work of Douglas C. Englebart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California in the 1960s. Using primary sources from Englebart and others this site recounts the story of an innovative decade. The computer mouse, the notion of "windows" and the graphical interface associated with them.

Eyewitness: Finite Element Method

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.asme.org/eyewitness/fem/femintro.html

Excerpt:

Welcome to the FEM Eyewitness site
The Eyewitness Project is an on-line catalyst, funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. On these pages, we have poked at a few points and are standing back to listen to those who have made it happen. On-line gathering of information offers unprecedented opportunities for sharing and disseminating information. Part of our task is making the interaction easy for participants. The other part is encouraging the stories and reminiscences and, hopefully, identifying and locating significant records and reports, which demonstrate the evolution of specific areas of technology.

Annotation:

This site, produced by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, displays a timeline of events ocurring between 1941 and the present day relating to the finite element method, a powerful and important computational scheme. People who were involved in the research and application of the finite element method are asked to add their memories to the timeline. The site also reproduces a bibliography of books and monographs on the finite element method published by A. K. Noor in ASME Applied Mechanics Review in 1991.

Digital Audio Recording

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/sloan/DAR/dar_index.html

Excerpt:

The use of digital encoding in telecommunications and the other advances in DSP (digital signal processing), such as in speech synthesis, led to the use of DSP in recording. In 1972 Nippon Columbia began to digitally master recordings, and in the same year the BBC began using pulse code modulation for high-quality sound distribution in radio and television and in its studios began using an 8-track digital audio recorder with error correction. By 1975, it was demonstrated that DSP could improve old recordings (in the first case, by engineer Tom Stockham, historical recordings of Enrico Caruso), and digital audio tapes began to be widely adopted by audio engineers. Music synthesizers incorporating digital recording also began to proliferate. But then the technology took an interesting turn.

Annotation:

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has established this site to record the history of digital methods of sound recording and playing, the technology behind compact discs and digital audio tape. A brief historical essay prefaces the site, and a timeline beginning in the late 1950s and running up to the present day details the milestones in the technology. An extensive bibliography of digital recording accompanies the essay and timeline, as does an international list of educational institutions involved with the original (and continuing) research in the field. In addition, there are links on the site to other histories of the compact disc, CD-ROM and recording technology in general. The distinguishing feature of this site is its interest in collecting (via input forms) the personal recollections of those who worked on the research and development of digital audio recording and its associated technologies. Visiting engineers are asked to submit photographs, audio clips and other memorabilia to the site for its historical archive.

History of Software Engineering

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

Computers/Information Technology

URL:

http://www.csis.american.edu/museum/sloan/html/soft_eng.htm

Excerpt:

Typewriter patents date back to 1713, and the first typewriter proven to have worked was built by Pellegrino Turri in 1808 for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Commercial production, however, began only with the "writing ball" of Danish pastor Malling Hansen (1870). This device looked rather like a pincushion. Nietzsche's mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Annotation:

American University has established this site to explore the history of software engineering from the 1950s to the present. Discussion groups have been set up to recall how computer scientists, companies and programmers have attempted to make the complex process of developing and improving software applications better and more efficient. A short historical essay introduces the topic and notes prior conferences on the history of software engineering, including perhaps the most significant effort, the 1996 International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science in Dagstuhl, Germany. The essay links to that conference's site. In addition, the "Visitor's Lounge" includes links to other history of computing sites.

Development of Process Simulation Software

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.historiesofengineering.org/project/projectdisplay_aiche.asp?PID=2

Annotation:

This site, produced by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, is dedicated to collecting oral histories based on the software used to plan, direct and optimize large, multi-stage chemical production, such as those in a chemical factory. This complex software was developed beginning in the 1960s by a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers working with computers to simulate the temperatures, movements and mixing involved in chemical processes. Different discussions cover simulation and technical issues, and historical participants are asked to join in the creation of an archive of recollections and materials relating to process simulation software.

Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.hfmgv.org/

Author:

Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

Excerpt:

The Henry Ford is widely recognized as one of the country's premier historical attractions and has been cited as having "the finest collection assembled documenting the American experience." Each day, thousands of children and adults from down the street and around the world are inspired by their experiences at this wonderful place.

Annotation:

This site is dedicated to exhibiting the treasures of the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village that include a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park complex. The site is rich in details and images relating to the history of invention in America. Online exhibits include Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion House," the 1811 Dickson Steam Engine, the Showroom of Automotive History, biographies of famous inventors, and the first Kodak Camera. These exhibits provide a useful introduction to various inventions. The site also provides information about the archives and collections contained in the research center, most of the materials have not yet been digitized. Collections include: the Ford Motor Company archives, the Edison collection and Edison Institute archives, and the archives of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, Stickley Brothers, the D.S. Morgan Company, and the Gebelein Silver Company. Teachers and researchers will find the site useful.

Internet and American Life

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 20:19.

URL:

http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp

Author:

Pew Research Center

Excerpt:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project produces reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The Project aims to be an authoritative source on the evolution of the Internet through collection of data and analysis of real-world developments as they affect the virtual world.

Annotation:

An excellent resource for those interested in the impact the Internet has made on the lives of Americans. The site holds reports written by staff members and experts, multimedia presentations, data sets covering a variety of topics, press releases and a comprehensive set of links. Incredible amount of primary and secondary source material for researchers.