CSTHA call for papers

A call for papers has gone out for the XVth CSTHA conference, to be held in Toronto, October 11-14, 2007. It is to be co-hosted by the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. CSTHA is one of my favorite societies. It is a very big tent organization without a great deal of pretension.

In addition to the normal subject matter of the history of science, technology, and medicine in Canada, the program committee is interested in papers "relating to the scientific and technological aspects of Canadian environmental history."

The deadline for proposals is 6 May 2007. Get cracking!

(The) Internet on CBC

This YouTube clip of a CBC report (circa early 1990s?) is certainly part of history (Flash required). As introduced by Peter Mansbridge, "There is a revolution taking place in rec rooms, offices, and classrooms around the world." Bill Cameron proceeds to explain the computer network "Internet", in a time before YouTube, before the dot-com collapse, before the web even caught hold. He explore chat rooms, emoticons, and written computer communication across cultures and continents.



For the first half of the report Mansbridge and Cameron call it simply "Internet" without the definite article, and the overall effect is humorous to our 21st century ears (to be fair, Cameron does include "the" towards the end). It is a charming little piece, especially in the awe shown for what would soon be everyday technology.

History, the sheldoncomics.com way

While not about Canadian technology per se, the famous Antikythera Mechanism was highlighted yesterday in a Sheldon comic. It can't be very often that the famous and mysterious Greek computing device shows up in the funny pages, so it deserves to be highlighted. If only history were as simple as the punchline suggests...

And I did attend a recent talk about the Antikythera computer not that long ago here in Toronto, so there is a slim Canadian connection.

Blueberries and Blackberries. A Pie? No, it's the British Association for Canadian Studies!

The British Association for Canadian Studies will be holding its 32nd annual conference at the University of Durham, 11-13 April 2007. Entitled: "From Blueberries to BlackBerries: Traditions and Technologies in Canada", according to the call for papers I just read, the deadline for proposals was 1 December 2006, which has already flown past. In any case, readers of this blog who find themselves in the UK next spring have something from home to look forward to.

SHOT and 4S

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary at the next annual meeting in Washington, D.C., October 17-21, 2007. The theme of the conference (and the following year's) is "Looking Back, Looking Forward":

To that end, the Program Committee seeks papers or sessions for the 2007 meeting that concern the History of Technology as it has been practiced in the past, and for the 2008 meeting as it may or ought to be practiced in the future.

See the call for papers (pdf). The deadline for proposals in March 16, 2007.

The week before SHOT meets, 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) will be holding its annual conference in Montreal, October 11-13. The theme is "Ways of Knowing":

By this we mean several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither nice nor neutral. So we are interested in processes of valuation (from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic.

Details are on the 4S website. The deadline for proposals in February 1, 2007.

Computing for the masses not the classes

While it is too late to attend World of Commodore 2006 (Dec 1-3), maybe it is not too early to start planning for next year. The WOC is hosted each year by the Toronto Pet User's Group, the oldest computer user group in Canada. TPUG was founded in 1979 and is still going, though membership has declined from a peak exceeding 20,000 in the early 1980s.

For those still in the dark, Commodore was a personal microcomputer manufacturer in the 1970s and 1980s responsible for the highly successful Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, and Amiga computers. Thanks to colour graphics and more memory than any other computer in the same price range, Commodore shipped over 20 million C64s after it was introduced in 1982, making it perhaps the most popular computer of all time. For a history of Commodore longer than two sentences, try http://www.commodore.ca, but a recent book on the subject should be enlightening. On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall promises to explore how a company founded to repair typewriters in Toronto in the 1950s rose so quickly to the top of microcomputing in the early 1980s only to fall even more dramatically a few years later. I have yet to read his book, but it's on my Christmas list.

Jim Butterfield, one of TPUG's founders and a phenomenal advocate of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s, gave a nice historical talk on early microcomputing in Canada at the York University Computer Museum a few years ago. YUCoM has a substantial collection of Commodore computers, including a VIC-20 that was manufactured in Canada, and several SuperPETs, produced in collaboration with the University of Waterloo.