Director’s Desk
Fall finds CBI in a familiar rhythm of preparing for the SHOT meeting and the Annals board meeting, drafting articles for the Newsletter, and, not least, creating our annual fundraising appeal. In the midst of adding personal notes to the nearly 200 letters we send out, it struck me. I was writing a note to one distinguished industrial leader, striving for a pithy way of capturing CBI. How best to describe to a newcomer what we are all about?
“At CBI,” I wrote, “we build the infrastructure for computer history.” That’s it! We have a number of valued activities. When you look at them as building blocks for an intellectual and material infrastructure—amazingly varied resources, professionally arranged and permanently housed, all publicly available and ready for research—for the next generation of computer history, all the pieces suddenly make a great deal of sense.
The big news we’re crowing about is the flood tide of book collections that we’ve recently taken in (see the article by CBI archivist Arvid Nelsen describing them). The four huge collections were remarkable themselves in private or company hands, but soon these valuable publications will be accessible to the public. We estimate that the donations neatly tripled the size of CBI’s book and journal collections, to over 10,000 titles.
In the past year, we also received several large archival collections, including patent applications and semiconductor industry data books from Lockheed-Martin and a unique collection from Carl Machover documenting the early history of computer graphics. Researchers are already using the new ACM archive. CBI’s oral history collection is growing steadily in number. What grew unexpectedly quickly this past year is its use. A year ago, our oral histories were downloaded at a rate of 20,000 per year. When I asked Stephanie Crowe to look up recent numbers, she found a consistent average of 15,000 downloads per month. (CBI’s expanded profile in Wikipedia is likely at play.)
CBI is actively publishing top-drawer original scholarship. CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost is in mid-stride as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, being recently reappointed to a second two-year term. The recent special issue on computer gaming is (we hear) “the talk of Silicon Valley.” Jeff also published an article in the new issue (September 2009) of History and Technology on the history of semiconductor strategy at mainframe firms. Papers from CBI’s May 2008 workshop on gender and computing are in production at IEEE–Computer Society Press. We crafted a volume that mobilizes the insights of computer history to address a serious problem in the profession: Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing will be appearing soon from the publisher John Wiley.
In the past year we have conducted public outreach through the monthly lecture series, “Minnesota’s Hidden History in Computing” (see slides at <www.cbi.umn.edu/resources/MHHC/>). Recently we discovered that CBI staff members are doing five public talks in three weeks, starting with Stephanie Crowe’s presentation for the SHOT session “Web 2.0 and the History of Technology.”
And, probably, CBI wouldn’t be CBI without a funded project or two. Jeff and I continue work on the NSF-funded history of FastLane, the agency’s key computer system for grantmaking. And we are beginning digitization of a unique resource in computer and business history, a set of 550 speeches given by Control Data’s Robert Price over nearly 30 years.
So, taken together, the pieces add up impressively. Sizable print materials, unique archival collections, well-cited oral histories, active publishing, public outreach, and funded projects—CBI, as I mentioned, is building an infrastructure for computer history.
We worked extra hard this past year, during challenging economic times, to keep our fund-raising steady and our finances solid. For this, we depend on the wonderful support we receive from the CBI Friends. For a basic membership of $100, we send you the four quarterly issues of Annals hot off the presses <www.cbi.umn.edu/about/friends.html>. Archives through the latest publications: that’s CBI. Please drop me a line if you’d like to hear more!
Thomas J. Misa