35th Anniversary of the Intel 4004

The Intel 4004, introduced in November 1971, was the world's first microprogrammable computer on a chip, or microprocessor. Intended for use in a Busicom calculator, there is little doubt that the 4 bit, 2300 transistor chip launched a electronics revolution, as it was this chip and its immediate successors (including the Intel 8008) that powered the microcomputer explosion which began in the 1970s. In honor of the 35th anniversary of its release, Tim McNerney has created "a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004". It will be on display at the Intel Museum, but the his story explaining the recreation can be found at http://www.4004.com.

The Canadian connection to this story is that during the design phase, the engineers responsible for the 4004 contemplated a simpler chip known as the 4005. As Stan Mazor, one of the inventors, recalls in an interview:

And when we were working on the 4004, Ted and I thought it was a little too aggressive and we weren't sure it could be done, so we started with another chip called the 4005 and it was a joint project with MIL, which was an affiliate of Intel in Canada. And so we defined the architecture to be much, much simpler than the 4004 and the idea was the Canadian company MIL would actually design the chip and we'd provide the memories.

According to Mazor, MIL never completed the 4005, but a sample of the chip recently turned up in the York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) collection. This poses a bit of a mystery that curators at YUCoM are working to unravel. Stay tuned!

Upcoming conferences

In an effort to clear out conference announcements relevant to The Push Button Brain, I'm going to consolidate a number of them into one post. Some may or may not be immediately relevant to Canadian historians of technology and science, but should be interesting nonetheless. In no particular order:

• This is short notice, but why not head for Scientific research in World War II, 25-26 January 2007 in Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. This two-day conference will seek to explore how scientists managed to cope with the particular circumstances created by the war. We invite historians working on World War II, science, and scientific instruments to give their views and to elaborate on the theme. The deadline for papers has passed, but nonetheless it should be interesting. UPDATE (November 29): The preliminary program is now online.



• ICOTECH 2007 Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007. Deadline for proposals is 15 January 2007. Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice is the symposium’s general theme. While open to all proposals dealing with the history of technology, the program committee suggests the following subthemes for the consideration of session organizers and contributors:
  
  • Consequences of design, purposeful and accidental
  • National styles in design and technology: myth or fact?
  • Embodying design in products
  • Social and/or cultural values in the design of products, machines andsystems
  • Designers: craftsmen, engineers, artists, or something else?
  • Fe/male designs: sex and gender in design
  • Tweaking technology and products: users as designers
  • Imaginary designs: unrealized, utopian and immaterial constructions
  • Design history in the context of the history of technology
  • Designing consumption from commodities to malls
  • Reshaping spaces: landscapes, cityscapes and technoscapes
  • The fashioned body: technologies of food, clothing and medicine
  • Building technoscience: design in the laboratory
  
  See the full Call for Abstracts for more information.



• The BSHS will be holding its 2007 conference at the University of Manchester, UK, Thursday 28 June - Sunday 1 July 2007. Papers are invited in all areas of the history of science, technology and medicine. Proposals for themed panels are particularly encouraged. See the call for papers for additional details. I do know there is interest in a session devoted to the history of computing, which would be rather appropriate given that the UK's National Archive for the History of Computing is as part of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Manchester.
  

Canadian computing pioneer interviewed

At the Canadian IT Manger, a 28 minute interview with Professor Emeritus Calvin "Kelly" Gotlieb was posted today. Gotlieb has been involved with modern computing at the University of Toronto since 1948, when he was hired to help build an electromechanical relay computer for the new Computation Centre. While that project fell through within a few months, he had already begun to supervise both a mathematical team of human computers in the Centre and an engineering group determined to build the first electronic computer in Canada. For the rest of his storied career he has continued to lead Canadians in the application of digital computers, all of which is discussed in the interview, available as an mp3. Link

Paper beats Rock, Paper also beats Computer

Statistics Canada released a study recently entitled Our lifes in digital times, with one standout result:

The arrival of the personal computer gave much talk to the "paperless office". However, between 1983 and 2003, consumption of paper for printing and writing alone more than doubled... Similarly, volumes of postal mail have been rising, although the composition of mail has changed, and couriers and local messengers are proliferating. This is the case even as Internet usage and e-mail are high in Canada. Link

That we are no closer to the paperless office today is no surprise. Thomas Landauer and other computer critics warned us about this in the 1990s, and I recently spent time flipping through magazine advertisements from the mid 1980s which rated a personal computer's storage capacity in terms of typewritten pages, a delicious irony to say the least.

The Man who Saved Geometry

On November 4, CBC's Quirks & Quarks radio program interviewed Siobhan Roberts, the author of a new book about Donald Coxeter, The King of Infinite Space. Coxeter was a math professor at the University of Toronto for more the sixty years, until his death in 2003. His most astounding accomplishment was to revitalize the study of geometry in the 20th century, after it was discarded by mathematicians in the 19th century in favor of algebra. His work influenced scientists, engineers, and artists, including M.C. Escher. Best of all, you can download an mp3 of the interview (or an ogg file, if that has meaning for you) from Quirks & Quarks, or subscribe to the podcast. There is also links to the publisher page for the new book, and an earlier Quirks profile of Coxeter after his death.