In John Vardalas' book "The Computer Revolution in Canada" (MIT Press, 2001) we learn about DATAR, an attempt by the Canadian Navy to find and exploit a high-tech niche to trade to the British and US navies for prestige and other technologies. After their success hunting U-boats and protecting conveys across the Atlantic in WWII, DATAR was concieved to be a real-time decentralized system to track targets and transmit information between allied ships. It was much more advanced than the centralized UK proposal, but they had a hard time selling it to either the UK/US. Eventually, the US decided to build their own, with a crash-program and millions on dollars that the Canadians couldn't keep up with.
But it wasn't just a mouse that came out of it:
Eventually, the real-time experience from DATAR begat the worlds first electronic digital postal sorting computer (a prototype built for Canada Post years before anything similar); the first check sorting computer for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York; the first real-time airline reservation system (beating SABRE by a few months with a much simpler, cheaper, and faster system); and the Ferranti FP6000 (eventually the British ICT1900 series).
It's a great story and a great book. Not much has been written about the history of computing in Canada, but Vardalas is the best here.
Xanadu. What you're asking about is what Ted Nelson had in mind 35 years ago with his vision of hypertext. Not only would documents be hyperlinked together, but versioning was an inherent part of the system, and deleting was strictly verboten. After all, it's no good for a link to point to a deleted page, or a document that has changed. Solution: don't delete anything, and keep every version around indefinitely so that links aren't broken. Of course, storage might be a problem....
Note that Xanadu does not exist, being the king of vaporware. Nelson might have been the first to use the word hypertext, but it's too bad he never managed to finish anything...
While it's all fair and well to discuss copyright in terms of profit-making capability for the artist or scientist, or "IP protection" handed down by gov't, or whatever, one aspect that/. consistantly misses is that copyright creates credibility.
This is any easy one not to see because we're already embedded in it, but the whole notion of copyright originates with printers and booksellers (17th century) who faced huge (we're talking rampant) amounts of piracy. It wasn't always true that you could assume that the book you were holding was in fact written by the author it says, or that the publisher on the cover really did publish it, or that the contents weren't stolen from somebody else. Which means some serious problems when you're a natural philosopher trying publish your ideas about laws of motion or the existence of a vacuum and there's ten unauthorized and incorrect copies of your work floating around with your name on it! By using a system of copy rights, publishers (to anachronize things for a moment) could govern the books being printed, try to prevent piracy, and create some credibility for what was being printed. Their motive was, of course, related to profit, as we are today, but that doesn't change to problem.
(This is part of Adrian Johns' argument in "The Nature of the Book", UChicago Press, 1998)
In any case, imagine what would happen if suddenly there was no copyright today: how could you be sure that you were listening to the actual London Symphony, (or Bubble-head Spears, for that matter), and that somebody didn't put that name on some junk instead. Or what if you didn't know that your copy of Linux was in fact a copy right from the kernel team, and not joe-blow loading it with a backdoor or a trojan? You can't expect everybody to read the source and make sure, so we have to expect some measure of credibility when we purchase or otherwise obtain a copy of something of creative value.
There is a small, but growing, collection of historians of science and technology exploring the history of computing/computer technology (I'm just halfway through my master's program here: The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. There's only a couple of us doing computers, but it's a start:)
Historians of computing have looked at Babbage, Turing, and Wozniak, but you can start just about anywhere. The field has barely been touched - there are plenty of unexplored areas. And the great thing about the history of technology is that everybody can help: from engineers to economists.
Myself, as a recent University of Waterloo CompSci grad, I thought I'd return to my roots, and write my MA thesis about the early computer science program there. In particular, I'm thinking about looking at the birth of WatFor and the related successes achieved in undergraduate education. Hint: if you have a story to tell about Watfor, email me!
Slashdot Mirror
In John Vardalas' book "The Computer Revolution in Canada" (MIT Press, 2001) we learn about DATAR, an attempt by the Canadian Navy to find and exploit a high-tech niche to trade to the British and US navies for prestige and other technologies. After their success hunting U-boats and protecting conveys across the Atlantic in WWII, DATAR was concieved to be a real-time decentralized system to track targets and transmit information between allied ships. It was much more advanced than the centralized UK proposal, but they had a hard time selling it to either the UK/US. Eventually, the US decided to build their own, with a crash-program and millions on dollars that the Canadians couldn't keep up with.
But it wasn't just a mouse that came out of it:
Eventually, the real-time experience from DATAR begat the worlds first electronic digital postal sorting computer (a prototype built for Canada Post years before anything similar); the first check sorting computer for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York; the first real-time airline reservation system (beating SABRE by a few months with a much simpler, cheaper, and faster system); and the Ferranti FP6000 (eventually the British ICT1900 series).
It's a great story and a great book. Not much has been written about the history of computing in Canada, but Vardalas is the best here.
Note that Xanadu does not exist, being the king of vaporware. Nelson might have been the first to use the word hypertext, but it's too bad he never managed to finish anything...
This is any easy one not to see because we're already embedded in it, but the whole notion of copyright originates with printers and booksellers (17th century) who faced huge (we're talking rampant) amounts of piracy. It wasn't always true that you could assume that the book you were holding was in fact written by the author it says, or that the publisher on the cover really did publish it, or that the contents weren't stolen from somebody else. Which means some serious problems when you're a natural philosopher trying publish your ideas about laws of motion or the existence of a vacuum and there's ten unauthorized and incorrect copies of your work floating around with your name on it! By using a system of copy rights, publishers (to anachronize things for a moment) could govern the books being printed, try to prevent piracy, and create some credibility for what was being printed. Their motive was, of course, related to profit, as we are today, but that doesn't change to problem.
(This is part of Adrian Johns' argument in "The Nature of the Book", UChicago Press, 1998)
In any case, imagine what would happen if suddenly there was no copyright today: how could you be sure that you were listening to the actual London Symphony, (or Bubble-head Spears, for that matter), and that somebody didn't put that name on some junk instead. Or what if you didn't know that your copy of Linux was in fact a copy right from the kernel team, and not joe-blow loading it with a backdoor or a trojan? You can't expect everybody to read the source and make sure, so we have to expect some measure of credibility when we purchase or otherwise obtain a copy of something of creative value.
There is a small, but growing, collection of historians of science and technology exploring the history of computing/computer technology (I'm just halfway through my master's program here: The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. There's only a couple of us doing computers, but it's a start :)
You might want to start at the library reading the Annals of the History of Computing. Off the top of my head, Michael Mahoney (who started in the History of Mathematics) has done a lot.
Historians of computing have looked at Babbage, Turing, and Wozniak, but you can start just about anywhere. The field has barely been touched - there are plenty of unexplored areas. And the great thing about the history of technology is that everybody can help: from engineers to economists.
Myself, as a recent University of Waterloo CompSci grad, I thought I'd return to my roots, and write my MA thesis about the early computer science program there. In particular, I'm thinking about looking at the birth of WatFor and the related successes achieved in undergraduate education. Hint: if you have a story to tell about Watfor, email me!