Dec 15, 2008

MEDICHI - IEEE Annals (3)2008

I realized that the special issue of the IEEE Annals on "Methods and Challenges in the History of Informatics" has been published. The editorial and Mike Mahoney's article are available at  www.computer.org/portal/site/annals/

Well done.

Jun 23, 2008

Bucherscheinung: Mensch-Computer-Interface

Mensch-Computer-Interface

Frisch erschienen ist von Hans Dieter Hellige (Hrsg.):

"Mensch-Computer-Interface. Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der Computerbedienung"


Die gegenwärtige Interface-Krise bei digitalen Medien nehmen Informatiker und Informatikhistoriker in diesem Band zum Anlass für eine Langzeitbilanz der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion. Sie legen sowohl Gesamtüberblicke der Entwicklung aus technik- und geistesgeschichtlicher Sicht vor als auch spezielle Studien zur Bedienproblematik einzelner Epochen. Dadurch entsteht ein großer Bogen von den Bedienschnittstellen der frühen Mainframe-Welt über die interaktiven PC-Interfaces bis zu den neuesten Entwicklungen des Wearable Computing und der proaktiven Ambient Intelligence. Die historisch-genetischen Analysen münden in theoretische Betrachtungen und kritische Rückblicke auf die Forschung zu Mensch-Computer-Interfaces sowie Ausblicke auf die Zukunft.


Das Buch hat 400 Seiten und ist in der Reihe Kultur- und Medientheorie des transcript Verlags erschienen.


Inhaltsverzeichnis und mehr...

May 15, 2008

Meilensteine der IT-Revolution als Poster

Die Financial Times hat ein Poster mit den wichtigsten Eckdaten der IT-Revolution zusammengestellt:



ftd.png

(PDF)


Dazu gab es im März/April auch eine zwölfteilige Serie: Die Geschichte der IT-Revolution.


Apr 30, 2008

Alan Kay's mustache vs. James Gosling's beard

Here's a convincing theory on the success or failure of programming languages. Statistical data seems to indicate that there is a correlation between market adoption and the beards of the inventors. See Computer Languages and Facial Hair.

Apr 20, 2008

Intertwingularity. When Ideas Collide.

Ted Nelson's lecture to his 70th birthday at the University of Southhampton, video (90') at: ecs.soton.ac.uk/podcasts/video.php?id=76) [More at Ted Nelson's bibliography.]

Mar 26, 2008

BBC interview with Alfred Hitchcock

BBC part 1: BBC part 2: on cut and assembly and montage and orchestration:
Technorati Tags: ,

Mar 20, 2008

mprove aggregation

After launching a bunch of blogs, I consider ways to aggregate the information for those who like to get the whole picture. Feedburner offers the nice feature to register feeds and get some scripts back to republish the content on web pages of your choice. This is what I did on mprove: blogs.
Furthermore, yahoo pipes is a visual programming system to merge, and sort, and filter feeds and information from other sources into new feeds. My first pipe takes my blogger feeds, my flickr stream, my del.icio.us updates and my Xing messages and assembles the content into mprove pipes. (BTW- does anyone know how to edit the pipe content on the fly? I like to change the title for the del.ici.us entries and maybe add the tags to the content.)
Now it is your choice to read, subscribe and republish the information you like.

Feb 7, 2008

Playstation 3 Home Promo Video


found via

SlideShare | View

Jan 19, 2008

From DynaBook 1972 to XO 2008

Alan Kay's paper "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" from 1972 has just been mentioned in the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) news forum: "I just came across this amazingly insightful paper by genius Alan Kay detailing his vision of the 'DynaBook' something that took more than 30 years to finally becoming a reality in the form of the XO."

Jan 11, 2008

Ultra Mobile PC

UMPC - a vision video by intel: 3 minutes 6 minutes See mprove: HCI Vision Videos for more.

Jan 8, 2008

Joe Weizenbaum in Linz, 2007


Joseph Weizenbaum at MEDICHI 2007
Originally uploaded by mprove

Klagenfurt Campus TV recorded the keynote from Mike Mahoney What Makes the History of Software Hard and Why it Matters, the read-out talk for Niklaus Wirth A Brief History of Software Engineering, Tibor Vamos' presentation Nothing is More Practical than a Good Theory, and Joseph Weizenbaum's closing keynote Social and political impact of the long term history of computing at MEDICHI 2007.
Watch the videos here.
Find more videos at mprove: webcasts.
PS: Happy birthday Joe, to your 85th birthday today!

Jan 3, 2008

Lessons to learn from Newton's failure

No one would defeat that Apple's iPod is a new lifestyle device that became a tremendous success in the market. Yet, the success of the iPhone is not a given; esp. if you keep in mind the failure of Apple's Newton a decade ago. Read more about the Newton in RoughlyDrafted (Dec 2006): Newton Lessons for Apple's New Platform.

Jan 1, 2008

human reason

Image of Computer power and human reason According to Joe Weizenbaum, the single most important paragraph of his book Computer Power and Human Reason is the following on page 276:
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of our mundane existence.
I met Joe at MEDICHI in Klagenfurt last year. A great moment where he touched me.