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Intel CEO Paul Otellini Draws the ‘History of the Computer Industry’ in 1 Chart

jointhec — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:20:53 +0000

Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

The Nostalgic, Dangerous Appeal of Vintage Vacuum-Tube Amps
May 15, 2013

Article source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/intel-ceo-paul-otellini-draws-the-history-of-the-computer-industry-in-1-chart/275919/

Family allowed to adopt 3 kids despite sexual assault history in home

jointhec — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:54:37 +0000

A grandmother is expressing outrage, saying the state missed an alarming red flag for a family allowed to adopt three children.

The family adopting the children failed to admit to a sexual assault inside their home and Channel 2 Action News has learned a background investigation also missed the crime.

The adopting family’s home was the site of a sexual assault by an 18-year-old family member on a younger family member.

The molester is now serving 25 years in prison. But the family wasn’t fully forthcoming about the assault.

“The things they’ve done to me and my grandchildren and my family are horrendous,” grandmother Flora Richardson told Channel 2′s Richard Belcher.

Richardson is angry because she lost custody of her three grandchildren whose father was in prison.

The Department of Family and Children Services won’t talk, but Belcher learned the agency asked a judge to give custody to another local family even though the adopting family initially withheld shocking information.

“I have done adoption law for about 37 years,” said James Outman, who is Richardson’s lawyer.

“Ever seen a case like this?” Belcher asked Richardson.

“No,” he replied

What shocked Outman was that 18-year-old Otis Jemison Jr., had been charged with aggravated child molestation against a younger family member in the adopting parents’ home.

But when the private agency families first interviewed the Jemison family, they never mentioned the assault.

Richardson said DFCS dropped the ball.

“If I could find it out not two hours after we left court, surely DFCS had to know this,” Richardson told Belcher.

Richardson says she left an adoption related hearing at the Fulton County Courthouse last fall, went straight home and got on her computer.

“And that’s when I found there was that the man’s name, I put in, had an open case for child molestation, aggravated child molestation and sodomy,” Richardson said.

Richardson thought DFCS or the judge would oppose the adoption when it became clear the Jemisons hadn’t disclosed the assault.

At the last minute, the family confessed.

“It came out actually under oath that the adoptive parents stated that they intentionally withheld the information from the department, intentionally withheld information from the agency that conducted their home study,” Outman said.

And the adoption went through.

Virtually no officials will talk, but Belcher has learned that five DFCS workers were investigated for misconduct.

Article source: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/family-allowed-adopt-3-kids-despite-sexual-assault/nXrKR/

‘Cyberwar games’ used more by companies to thwart hackers

jointhec — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:30:44 +0000

sjohnson@mercurynews.com

Clusters of corporate techies hunched over their laptops one recent evening in Mountain View, feverishly trying to figure out how RK Industries hacked into and stole critical information from its rival, EntraDyn.

It’s a common occurrence, but in this case the firms were fictitious, and the event — a simulated exercise put on by security firm Symantec — featured rock music, a buffet and an open bar for the participants. Even so, it had a serious purpose: Increasingly under Internet attack, more and more businesses are using “cyberwar games” to learn how to spot and counter the tricky tactics used by hackers.

“It keeps you on your toes,” said Michael Scheck, an information security investigations manager at Cisco Systems (CSCO), which hosts its own war games and takes part in others. In the fast-evolving combat with computer-savvy antagonists, he said, “you have to play cat and mouse.”

Getting bested by the bad guys can be expensive. A study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last year concluded the average cost of a cyberattack on a U.S. company was $591,780 — and rising. In response, companies are

sending their employees to so-called cyber ranges and other venues to engage in make-believe hacking scenarios.

In a survey of about 1,400 businesses last year, management consultant McKinsey Company said it found that 3 percent of them had conducted “cyberwar games to help ensure they are ready to manage a cyberattack.” McKinsey wouldn’t identify the respondents or say how many were from the Bay Area, but noted, “most were in high tech and financial services.”

Although several of those attending Symantec’s event at the Computer History Museum didn’t want their employers identified, companies represented there included Intel (INTC) subsidiary Wind River Systems, Tesla, Google (GOOG), Workday and Fujitsu.

Many firms also routinely test their ability to withstand attacks, including PGE.

Using employees he calls “my ninjas” who periodically attempt to hack into the utility, James Sample, its chief information security officer, said “we do mock-up scenarios” to assess the company’s vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Firms find the war games especially helpful, where they compete against other companies to see who can best respond to hypothetical cyber incursions.

Mountain View-based Symantec, which sells widely used Norton anti-virus software, puts on these “cyber readiness challenges” worldwide. It contends the games help participants think like hackers, so they can better recognize and respond to their corporations’ vulnerabilities.

“Every day you hear about new attacks,” said Samir Kapuria, Symantec’s vice president of business strategy and security intelligence. “What we try to do is take that knowledge of what’s happening to companies and organizations around the world, and weave that into the scenarios.” That way, he added, they can “hone their skills so the first time they are up against something, it’s actually something they’ve practiced.”

In Symantec’s virtual contest, which was akin to a video game, participants were given hints that helped them hack into the fictional RK Industries and figure out what RK stole from EntraDyn.

“Think of it as a giant scavenger hunt, where you are given a riddle or clue about how to find something,” said Josh Chin, executive director of Southern California-based Net Force, who placed third in the competition. Besides teaching him how to better guard his client’s data, he said, such exercises offer a way to “show how good you are” when pitted against other security experts.

During an earlier challenge Symantec hosted for its own employees, one grandstanding prankster even surreptitiously hacked into the game’s scoreboard, according to spokeswoman Pamela Reese. She said she wasn’t sure what the person was up to, but figured it was “either to improve their score or mess around with players’ names.”

Cisco’s Scheck said his company also has taken part in war games put on by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, some of which had the businesses work together to blunt cyberattacks. That’s been helpful, he said, because to counter sophisticated and organized hackers, “corporations are realizing they need to share more information with each other to make life more difficult for their adversaries.”

Finding skilled workers for that fight is another priority.

In March, Cisco, Workday, McAfee, PGE and other companies sponsored a cyberwar game in Pomona for college students, during which several of the firms recruited the players for their security departments, according to Daniel Manson, a computer information systems professor who helped organize the event.

Given the shortage of employees skilled in dealing with cyberattacks, he viewed the effort to hire the students as indicative of a major shift in corporate thinking. Although many businesses failed to take cybersecurity seriously in the past, with so many of them getting hacked these days, he added, “it’s a risk I think they are starting to appreciate.”

Contact Steve Johnson at sjohnson@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5043. Follow him at Twitter.com/steveatmercnews.

Article source: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23228195/cyberwar-games-used-more-by-companies-thwart-hackers

A short history of hacktivism – Canberra Times

jointhec — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:54 +0000

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Hacktivist: n. a person who uses computer crimes to further social or political ends – Australian Oxford Dictionary.

Hacking: A long and complex history.

Computer hackers aren’t an especially earnest bunch. After all, lulz (a corruption of the phrase “laugh out loud” and a reference to hackers’ penchant for tomfoolery) was the primary objective of the hacker collective Anonymous before it graduated to more serious cyberoperations in the latter half of the 2000s. But if the hacking community likes to flaunt its glib side, it also has a rich history of political activism – or “hacktivism” – that has come to define it in the era of WikiLeaks. If there’s one thing that unites hacktivists across multiple generations, it’s dedication to the idea that information on the internet should be free – a first principle that has not infrequently put them at odds with corporations and governments the world over.

1950s-1980s

A culture of “hacking” springs up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term is coined by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club as they play around with track circuitry. The original “hacks” are mostly harmless pranks and practical jokes perpetrated by students in early artificial intelligence labs. Hackers soon discover that toy whistles produce the right frequency for them to “phreak” Ma Bell’s telephone system, allowing them to place long-distance calls for free. Among those who make names for themselves as “phone phreaks” are Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the future founders of Apple.

October 1989

Computers at NASA and the US Energy Department are penetrated by an anti-nuclear “WANK” worm, which alters computers’ login screens to “WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS … Your System Has Been Officially WANKed.” The malware, believed to have originated in Australia, is the second major worm deployed in history, but the first with an explicitly political aim. (The genesis worm was released a year earlier by Robert Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate, who said he wanted to approximate the size of the internet but ended up running afoul of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.)

November 1994

A mostly British activist group known as the Zippies launches an “email bomb” and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against British government websites to protest against Prime Minister John Major’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which outlawed outdoor raves featuring music with “a succession of repetitive beats.” The attack, known as the “Intervasion of the UK,” knocks out several government websites for more than a week. It is the first known use of DDoS (denial of service) – which takes down a website by overwhelming it with communication requests – for political purposes.

1996

“Omega,” a member of the Texas-based computer-hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), coins the word “hacktivism” in an email to the cDc listserv. Although somewhat tongue in cheek, the term aptly characterises the group’s increasingly political ethos. Founded in 1984 for the whimsical goal of “global domination through media saturation,” cDc is by the mid-1990s an explicitly political organisation, one that leverages technology to advance human rights and protect the free flow of information. In subsequent years, cDc members team up with a group of dissidents calling themselves the Hong Kong Blondes to hack the computer networks of Chinese government agencies and companies with poor human rights records in China.

July 2001

Hacktivismo, an offshoot of cDc, issues a code of conduct for online civil disobedience that draws on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This “Hacktivismo Declaration” affirms the right to “freedom of opinion and expression” and declares the hacker community’s intent to develop technologies to challenge “state-sponsored censorship of the internet.” The declaration, which can be read as a disavowal of hacking techniques such as DDoSing that interfere with free speech, largely falls by the wayside as the next generation of hacktivists increasingly seeks to take government and corporate websites offline.

2003

Christopher Poole, 15, sets up the website 4chan.org from his suburban New York bedroom. The site receives attention primarily for its proliferation of humorous feline memes (LolCats) and gag hyperlinks (Rickrolls) to Rick Astley’s insufferable 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, but over time it attracts a global army of anonymous hackers, many of them politically minded, who exchange coding tips and eventually plot cyberops. What begins as a series of pranks carried out for idle amusement gradually evolves into systematised cyberwarfare or, as one Anonymous member puts it, “ultra-coordinated motherfuckery.” Anonymous is born here.

April 2007

Estonia removes a Soviet war memorial from its capital, provoking a series of cyberhits – mostly DDoS attacks – originating on Russian servers. Details about who is responsible for the attacks, which disable various Estonian government websites and substantially disrupt commerce for several hours, remain murky, but the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi eventually claims responsibility, though it denies having carried out direct orders from the Russian government. Whether state-sponsored or an especially virulent example of nationalist hacktivism, the cyber assault against Estonia amounts to one of the largest DDoS attacks in history.

January 2008

Anonymous releases a YouTube video announcing Project Chanology, a deliberate campaign to destroy the Church of Scientology due to its “campaigns of misinformation” and “suppression of dissent.” “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” the group declares in an ominous, automated voice. Less than a month later, Anons hold their first physical protest (also against Scientology) simultaneously at various places around the world, with many demonstrators wearing the signature Guy Fawkes masks that will become symbols of the movement.

November 2010

Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali blocks access to WikiLeaked US State Department cables noting massive corruption in his government. In response, Anonymous hackers launch “#OpTunisia,” attacking Tunisian government websites and at one point bringing down the Tunisian stock exchange. As protests rage across the region in the following months, the group launches a series of “Freedom Ops” to assist pro-democracy activists – Anonymous’ biggest foray yet into world politics.

December 2010

Anonymous launches Operation Avenge Assange after MasterCard and Visa block payments to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. Anons knock out the websites of the credit card giants and briefly slow web traffic to PayPal using an application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon, which directs massive amounts of traffic to specified websites.

December 2011

AntiSec, an offshoot of Anonymous that takes particular issue with the cyber security industry, hacks the Texas-based private intelligence company Stratfor, knocking its website offline and lifting 200GB of data, mostly emails, which it hands over to WikiLeaks. It is the largest public “d0xing” – the posting of private information online – attack that Anonymous has carried out to date.

January 2012

A group of pro-Palestinian hacktivists calling themselves “Nightmare” knocks out the websites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al airlines. In an online post taking credit for the attacks, the group says it is joining Saudi hacker 0xOmar, who previously released tens of thousands of Israelis’ credit card numbers on the internet, in a “movement” of “Islamic hackers against Israel.” The next day, Israeli hackers going by the name IDF-Team retaliate by knocking the Saudi Stock Exchange and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange offline.

February 14, 2012

On the first anniversary of Bahraini armed forces’ violent dispersal of rallies in the capital, Manama, during the Arab uprisings, Anons carry out a series of hacks against the Bahraini government and its backers, notably the Pennsylvania-based tear gas manufacturer Combined Systems. The kingdom is eventually moved, in February 2013, to ban the import of Guy Fawkes masks to its still-roiling territory.

February 29, 2012

Interpol arrests 25 suspected Anonymous hackers from around the world following an FBI sting operation that flipped an Anonymous ringleader, Hector Monsegur, known online as “Sabu.” The information he provides leads to a wave of hacktivist arrests – for taking part in everything from the Stratfor hack to illegal eavesdropping on an FBI conference call – dealing Anonymous a major blow.

March 2012

Frustrated with the way WikiLeaks handled the Stratfor data dump – it was an unqualified media flop – Anonymous launches its own WikiLeaks clone: Par:Anoia (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency). The website relies on purloined “submissions” provided by the Anonymous community and publishes everything from hacked emails from the Syrian Foreign Ministry to New York City Police Department video footage of the 2011 eviction of Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park.

April 2012

Anonymous turns its guns on China, knocking out several corporate and local government websites and tagging them with the message: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”

October 2012

WikiLeaks puts millions of its documents behind a paywall, prompting a vicious rebuke from the freedom-obsessed web underground. The main Anonymous Twitter account tweets @wikileaks: “die in a fire.” The Anonymous-WikiLeaks breakup is complete.

January 2013

Computer whiz kid and internet activist Aaron Swartz hangs himself in his New York City apartment after federal prosecutors indict him for hacking into JSTOR’s digital library, presumably to free millions of academic articles from behind its paywall. His death in many ways symbolises the battered state of the hacktivist movement and the futility of its utopian vision – after all, Swartz stole mostly obscure journal articles – but hardly sounds its death knell. Within weeks of Swartz’s death, sympathetic Anons hack into the website of the government agency responsible for the sentencing policies of federal courts, at one point turning its home page into a version of the computer game Asteroids.

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A brief history of computer chess

jointhec — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:40:04 +0000

Since the 18th century, people have been fascinated by the idea of machines that could play chess against humans. With the advent of the digital electronic computer in the mid-20th century, that dream finally became feasible. What followed was six decades of intense development in the field of computer chess, from research projects to commercial products. Over that period, computers grew from playing only a limited subset of chess to beating the World Chess Champion in a six-game match. Today, a worldwide computer network (the Internet) facilitates play between humans all over the world.

Clearly, computer chess has come a long way. Let’s take a compressed look at some key moments in its evolution over the years.

Article source: http://www.techhive.com/article/2036854/a-brief-history-of-computer-chess.html

Computer History Up For Auction – I Programmer

jointhec — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:20:44 +0000

An online action to be held later this month has a veritable treasure trove of computing history. The 20th century is well represented with an Apple 1, an Apple Lisa, an Altair, and more, but for me the star item is a 17th century Pascaline.

German auction house Breker accepts online realtime bids for its auctions and set a record price for an Apple 1 in November last year when an anonymous Internet bidder paid $640,000 (over 490,000 Euros) for a fully working model. Now the same auctioneers have another Apple 1, this one with a motherboard bearing the signature of Steve Wozniak, “Woz”.

The example to be auctioned on May 25 has been identified by Mike Willegal who runs The Apple 1 Registry as the one that he lists as #37 on account of a signed letter from Steve Jobs to Fred Hatfield offering to exchange the unit for an Apple II for a a payment of $400. The letter is part of the lot that is now up for sale with an estimate of 200-300,000 Euros and a reserve of 90,000. It is is working condition as shown in the video prepared by Auction Team Breker of Lot 14:

Lot 15 in the same sale is an Apple Lisa-1, dating from 1983, and claimed by Breker to be “highly sought and as rare as an Apple1“, explaining:

Very few survived as the Lisa 1 diskette drives (aka TWIGGY driver” were unreliable an Apple offered a free upgrade to a Lisa 2.

The model being auctioned, with an estimate fo 15-30,000 Euros, has an Apple Lisa Owners guide, Lisa-1 mouse, external hard drive and some Twiggy diskettes with the a copy of the LOS 1.0 operating system, as shown in the video:

For Apple afficianados there”s also the chance to bid for both an Apple II (Lot 17) and an Apple III (Lot 18), which is described as Apple’s “first significant failure” partly because the design of the case took priority over its technical features. The notes conclude:

Despite, or perhaps because of its original drawbacks, the Apple III is now considered a rare and interesting machine in the development of the firm’s range.

The sale also offers a MITS Altair 8800 with an original CPU board and 16 KB of memory estimated to fetch 400-6,500 Euros. Dating from 1974 the Altair was the first PC, Personal Computer, predating the Apple 1 by about two years.

The next year saw the introduction of a clone of the Altair 8080 – the IMSAI 8080 – which according to Breker, which has one in the sale with an Estimate of 2,500-5,000 Euros was an imitation that was even more successful than the original.

A slightly earlier milestone in computer history is also included in this sale. The SCELBI-8H Mini-Computer was built in 1973 around the first Intel 8-bit microprocessor. the 8008, the so-called CPU on-a-chip. According to Breker, around 200 units were produced, of which only three are estimated to have survived. The one available has an estimate of 15-20,000 Euros.

Going back another couple of years, the sale includes a Busicom 141-PF, the first electronic calculator based on the Intel 4004. As only minimal quantities quantities were produced and few remain, Breker’s estimate in 8-12,000 Euros.

For those interested in early calculating machines, the sale also two arithmometers. The first of these is a model from circa 1900 produced by the Swedish firm. W. Odhner. Despite being described as a “Rare Russian spokewheel model” its estimate is only 200-300 Euors.

The other a “rare English brass stepped-drum model
with interesting patent dating from 1909. Listed as the Laytons Improved Arithmometer and dated 1910, its estimate is 3-4,000 Euros.

Those with deeper pockets can bid for the item listed as:

A true milestone in ‘Computer History’!

with an estimate of 80-150,000 Euros and a reserve of 60 Euros. It is an extremely rare Pascaline, which was designed by Blaise Pascal as the first numerical wheel-calculator to have the ability to carry over.

According to Breker only 20 machines were ever built, of which just nine are known today and all (apart from this one are in national museums. For my money, although this may not be sold for as high a price as the Apple 1, it is the star of the line up.

Article source: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/5833-computer-history-up-for-auction.html

History Lesson: Capcom

jointhec — Sat, 04 May 2013 22:34:46 +0000

Born a tiny mewling arcade cabinet manufacturer in 1979, Japan Capsule Computers wasn’t to become the Capcom we know and love until the arrival of Kenzo Tsujimoto (he of Irem fame) in 1983.

It’s a well known fact that he merged together the Cap and Com of its old name to form Capcom. Less known is the offshoot of the titular remnants, Suleputer (not a joke) – the official home of Capcom merchandising.

Capcom became proud parents to its first game Vulgus – a vertical scrolling space shooter – in 1984, and shouted it from the rooftops. Well, rather it shouted it out fourteen years later from beat ‘em up Marvel vs Capcom, when it gave Captain Commando the very odd win quote: “Capcom’s first game was Vulgus, made in 1984!” Thanks for that, Cap’n!

Incidentally, Captain Commando used to be Capcom’s mascot until Mega Man’s huge success usurped him. In his appearance in Marvel vs Capcom he was known for shouting “Capcom!” at random points in battle. A real (Cap)company man, then.

Vulgus also introduced the Capcom motif of the Yashichi, a health power-up that was to raise its ugly health-replenishing mug in more than thirty (unrelated) further games. It’s a small red circle with a pinwheel-esque white cross emblazoned upon it; tracking it down is the gaming equivalent of counting Eddie Stobart lorries. Not that we know anything about that, of course.

This motif is the perfect symbol for Capcom’s signature trait – its inability to let go. Its franchises seemingly stretch out for eternity – as over 20 Resident Evil games, 20 main Street Fighter games and over 100 Mega Man titles prove, though the latter has taken a backseat of late – and the characters resurface time and time again. Just look at the Resident Evil, Final Fight, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Mega Man and Strider mishmash of a roster that forms the ragtag Capcom half of Marvel vs Capcom.

For the millions they made between them, both Street Fighter and Mega Man teetered on the edge of non-existence to begin with. Yoshiki Okamoto, creator of Street Fighter in 1987 (a franchise that now has more than 30 million sales under its karate belt), only ended up at Capcom after he was booted out of Konami HQ for developing shooters Gyruss and Time Pilot. But they were great games, weren’t they? Of course they were. But they weren’t the driving games that Konami tasked Okamoto with making. Whoops.

The rather loopy Okamoto – known for jotting down cruel caricatures of people on the business cards they give him so that he won’t forget them – later went on to head up Flagship, an independent studio funded by Capcom, Nintendo and Sega that generated scenarios for other games, such as Onimusha. Flagship also developed the excellent GBC Zelda Oracles pairing and GBA’s Minish Cap, though it was sadly closed down in 2007.

A fellow Street Fighter alumni takes responsibility for Mega Man, or Rockman as he’s known back home (he was almost named Rainbowman, due to the seven powers players collected through the game). Keiji Inafune, an illustrator on Street Fighter, took inspiration from rock/paper/scissors and applied it to the end-of-level Robot Masters – each could be easily defeated by only one of the others’ weapons.

Rockman’s instantly recognisable image was a bit of a design fluke, however. The NES only had a palette of 56 colours to display, the majority of which sported a blue-tint. Thus, the blue suited Rockman was born.

Remember that 100+ figure from above? It almost started and ended here. The original Rockman didn’t sell nearly as well as Capcom had hoped, prompting it to pull support and set Inafune the task of designing Professional Baseball Murder Mystery instead. As you’ll no doubt notice, there aren’t 100 Professional Baseball Murder Mystery games, so you can guess what happened next.

Inafune agreed to the barmy ‘death in the diamond’ notion on the grounds that he could ‘fix’ Rockman. And fix it he did. It’s a just a shame that while Resident Evil, Street Fighter and the like continue to get love from Capcom, the blue bomber seems to be strangely neglected these days.

Article source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/404501/features/history-lesson-capcom/

Living History: Computing Pioneer Harry Huskey Is Honored at 97

jointhec — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:08:47 +0000

Michael B. Johnson

Computer History Museum President John Hollar presents Harry Huskey with the Mountain View, Califorinia museum’s Fellow Award on April 27, 2013

On Saturday evening, I was a very happy attendee of the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Awards, an inspiring annual event which celebrates the contributions of individuals whose work has changed the course of computing history. Three people were honored this year: Ed Catmull, Harry Huskey and Bob Taylor.

Ed Catmull, as I knew, started out as a computer graphics scientist, became one of the founders of Pixar and is now the president of both that extraordinary company and Walt Disney Feature Animation. I was also well aware that Bob Taylor headed up the research efforts at ARPA and Xerox PARC which produced the Internet, the modern graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer and other utterly essential technologies.

But Harry Huskey? I’d never heard of the man. Turns out that he did an awful lot — and, having been born in 1916, he did much of it in the very early days of the computing industry, even before the word “computer” came into use.

Computer History Museum

Harry Huskey with SWAC in the 1950s

During World War II, Huskey worked on ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. He also collaborated with Alan Turing (1914-1952), still perhaps the most influential computer scientist of all time. In the 1950s, he designed a machine called SWAC which was the fastest computer in the world for a while and the Bendix G15, which was, in a sense, the first personal computer. (It was the first one designed to be operated by one individual.) Then he spent more than 30 years teaching; numerous important computer scientists were among his students.

Oh, and in 1950, Huskey was a guest on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life radio quiz. (A losing one — during the Computer History Museum ceremony, he gave a gracious speech in which he joked that he still didn’t know the answer to the question which he and his game-playing partner, a junk dealer, fumbled in the category “Adjacent States.”)

63 years later, Groucho’s dismantling of the very idea of an “electronic brain” is still entertaining. Press the play button below, and you can hear for yourself.

Groucho being Groucho, he didn’t take computers very seriously. But he did describe Huskey’s efforts as “worthwhile work which will make life easier and better for all of us.” Boy, was he right — and it was great to see a ballroom full of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest honor that work last week with a standing ovation.

Article source: http://techland.time.com/2013/04/30/living-history-computing-pioneer-harry-huskey-is-honored-at-97/

Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years: Book review

jointhec — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:46:06 +0000

Cambridge Computing, the book

The University of Cambridge’s Computer Lab has celebrated its first 75 years with, among other things, a readable coffee-table book by Professor Haroon Ahmed. Although packed with historical information, it’s more of a souvenir than an academic work, and the numerous photographs will certainly remind the thousands of staff and former students of the Lab’s contribution to computing’s rapid progress from EDSAC’s valves and mercury delay lines to the diminutive Raspberry Pi.

The book is not too constrained by the Computer Lab’s actual existence. It starts with two of Cambridge’s greatest pioneers, Charles Babbage and Alan Turing, who are both seminal figures in computing. After this pre-history, it takes the 75 years in the title from the founding of the Mathematical Laboratory. Its two staff members helped university researchers tackle numerical problems using mechanical calculators and differential analysers.

The Mathematical Laboratory’s greatest era began when Sir Maurice Wilkes returned from war service in 1945. He visited the USA to attend lectures on building digital computers, learned about ENIAC and EDVAC, and decided that Cambridge would build its own digital computer. The result, EDSAC, was the first programmable computer in general service, and several EDSAC users won Nobel prizes. It also led to the world’s first business computer, LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). This was built for the tea-shop company, though Leo Computers sold systems commercially.

It wasn’t until 1970 that the university set up a separate organisation to provide computing services, but by that time, the Mathematical Laboratory was no longer developing its own machines, such as EDSAC, EDSAC 2 and Titan. The university could buy them from IBM and similar suppliers. Of course, this didn’t stop the lab from building useful and interesting research machines like CAP, the “Capabilities computer” used by Bjarne Stroustrup, of C++ fame.

More recently, the Computer Lab was transformed by Wilkes’s right-hand man and successor, the late Sir Roger Needham. He supported a deal under which Microsoft contributed to the construction of today’s purpose-built lab in the William Gates building, named after the Microsoft co-founder’s father. More controversially, Needham also set up Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

A spread from the book shows EDSAC, the old Mathematical Laboratory’s green door, and (right) Sir Maurice Wilkes visiting the new building shown on the book’s cover

The university’s computer activities stimulated the development of a “Silicon Fen”, and the book includes brief sketches of a few Cambridge-based technology companies that have some connection with the lab. This includes Acorn and its ARM spin-off, Sophos, RealVNC, Jagex (online games), blinkx, and Raspberry Pi. However, there doesn’t appear to be any mention of the multi-award-winning software pioneer and entrepreneur Mike Lynch OBE, who did both his degrees at Cambridge and became a fellow of Christ’s College. This is odd because Lynch gave a talk during last week’s 75th anniversary celebrations.

Lynch built Cambridge’s second most successful technology company, and is much more closely associated with the university than the most successful, which is ARM. Of course, Lynch sold his company — Autonomy — to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion, which has resulted in some negative publicity, but he hasn’t ceased to exist.

But the main problem with the book is that it’s a bit of a patchwork. There isn’t even a timeline to give readers not already familiar with Cambridge’s history something to hang on to. Dip into it at random and you’ll quickly find something entertaining to read, but I found that trying to use it for reference could be somewhat frustrating.

The publisher, TMI, has produced similar glossy tomes about Exeter College: The First 700 Years, The London Oratory School (150 years), UCLA (100 years), Charterhouse, Grosvenor House, Cowdray Park Polo Club and many more. Pre-order a book and you get your name listed in the back, as a Subscriber, and several hundred people are listed in Cambridge Computing. It’s not what Cambridge University Press would do, perhaps, but it seems to work.

Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years

by Haroon Ahmed

TMI

176 pages

ISBN: 9781906507831

£40 plus PP

Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/cambridge-computing-the-first-75-years-book-review-7000014708/

Disruptions: Brain Computer Interfaces Inch Closer to Mainstream

jointhec — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:21:59 +0000

Muse Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with computers, iPads and smartphones.

Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.

But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In the next couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Further into the future, our robot assistant will appear by our side with a glass of fresh lemonade simply because it knows we’re thirsty.

Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.

The technology, often called brain computer interfaces, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.

Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen.

Emotive A brain computer interface, developed by Emotive.

NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight brain movements and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets — all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling — like happy, or excited — rather than searching by keywords. Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with an app that “exercises the brain” by forcing people to concentrate on aspects of a screen, almost like taking your mind to the gym.

Car manufacturers are exploring technologies packed into the back of the seat that detect when people fall asleep while driving and rattle the steering wheel to awaken them.

But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. “The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,” said John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.” In other words, to gain access to the brain, for now you still need a chip in your head.

Last year, a project called BrainGate pioneered by Dr. Donoghue, enabled two people with full paralysis to use a robotic arm with a computer responding to their brain activity. One woman, who had not used her arms in 15 years, could grasp a bottle of coffee, serve herself a drink and then return the bottle to a table. All done by imagining the robotic arm’s movements.

But that chip inside the head could soon vanish as scientists say we are poised to gain a much greater understanding of the brain, and, in turn, technologies that empower brain computer interfaces. An initiative by the Obama administration this year called the Brain Activity Map project, a decade-long research project, aims to build a comprehensive map of the brain.

Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, is working on the project and although she said it would take a decade to completely map the brain, companies would be able to build new kinds of brain computer interface products within two years.

“The Brain Activity Map will give hardware companies a lot of new tools that will change how we use smartphones and tablets,” Dr. Chun said. “It will revolutionize everything from robotic implants and neural prosthetics, to remote controls, which could be history in the foreseeable future when you can change your television channel by thinking about it.”

There are some fears to be addressed. On the Muse Web site, an F.A.Q. is devoted to convincing customers that the device cannot siphon thoughts from people’s minds.

These brain-reading technologies have been the stuff of science fiction for decades.

In the 1982 movie “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot on a mission to the Soviet Union to steal a prototype fighter jet that can be controlled by a brain neurolink. But Mr. Eastwood has to think in Russian for the plane to work, and he almost dies when he cannot get the missiles to fire during a dogfight. (Don’t worry, he survives.)

Although we won’t be flying planes with our minds anytime soon, surfing the Web on our smartphones might be closer.

Dr. Donoghue of Brown said one of the current techniques used to read people’s brains is called P300, in which a computer can determine which letter of the alphabet someone is thinking about based on the area of the brain that is activated when she sees a screen full of letters. But even when advances in brain-reading technologies speed up, there will be new challenges, as scientists will have to determine if the person wants to search the Web for something in particular, or if he is just thinking about a random topic.

“Just because I’m thinking about a steak medium-rare at a restaurant doesn’t mean I actually want that for dinner,” Dr. Donoghue said. “Just like Google glasses, which will have to know if you’re blinking because there is something in your eye or if you actually want to take a picture,” brain computer interfaces will need to know if you’re just thinking about that steak or really want to order it.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/disruptions-no-words-no-gestures-just-your-brain-as-a-control-pad/