Notes From the Editor

More virtual events. This past summer I attended two conferences which switched from in-person meetings to virtual via the Internet because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was impressed with how well they worked—missing informal communication but generally improved presentations and better attendance.

One conference was Vintage Computer Festival West (described above by Dean Notarnicola) on August 1, and I attended from my recliner chair in the living room of my home. You can watch it yourself at youtube.com/watch?v=7YoolSAHR5w&t=397s (skip the first 9.5 min). Watching the August 1 event, a notable member of the computing history world can be “sighted”—Len Shustek founder and now chairman emeritus of the Computer History Museum presenting his work on magnetic tape recovery, starting one hour and ten minutes into the video at the above URL.

A week earlier than VCF West was the TeX Users Group annual conference (August 24–26, tug.org/tug2020/). This was not primarily a computing history conference, but it showed some ways any conference may go in the future; please read my conference report at tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb128walden-tug20.pdf. Amelia Hugill-Fontanel’s presentation on the evolution of font specimen books is but one example from the conference of how much better presentations can be if videotaped in advance: youtube.com/watch?v=7Cm2AcQiUuk

Less formal than a conference, the “thirty veterans” reuniting on January 19, 2020, in Harry Lewis’s article on the creation of Harvard’s computer science department (harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born),¹ met via Zoom.

With all the virtual meetings going on these days, it is interesting to take a look at one of the earliest demonstrations of Internet-based virtual meetings, a video provided to the Computer History Museum by Danny Cohen and posted else-where by Steve Casner: youtube.com/watch?v=MGat1jRQ_SM; a brief history by Robert Gray about those early developments is at researchgate.net/publication/3321615_The_1974_origins_of_VoIP

HOPL IV. In the prior issue of this department, we mentioned that HOPL IV conference (hopl4.sigplan.org) had been cancelled but the papers for the conference were published in ACM SIGPLAN (dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2020/4/HOPL). The HOPL IV conference has now been rescheduled for June 20–22, 2021, virtual and co-located with ACM Programming Language and Implementation conference. Also published by conference co-chairs Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel is a discussion and reflection on the conference: blog.sigplan.org/2020/06/25/hopl-not-an-ordinary-conference. This report describes the conference participant invitation process as well as unusually thorough paper reviewing and author shepherding methods; they are worth reading—at hopl4.sigplan.org/getImage/orig/HOPLReviewing.pdf and hopl4.sigplan.org/getImage/orig/HOPLShepherding.pdf; also interesting, if somewhat overlapping, is dl.acm.org/action/showBmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F3406494; if only all conferences and journal papers could be as thoroughly reviewed and so much developmental help given.

PROFESSOR V. RAJARAMAN. Readers of this journal may have read Prof. Rajaraman’s “History of Computing in India: 1955–2010” in this journal in 2015.² Recently, we received a note from Prof. Rajaraman stating that he has published a book entitled Groundbreaking Inventions in Information and Communications Technology, which is available for about $5US.³ This book seems aimed at a popular audience as is a series of shorts articles he is writing for issues of the Computer Society of India Communications which he calls “Titbit from the History of Computing.” Number 13 in the series in the August 2020 issue is on “CTSS—The first time-sharing operating system.” At present, the CSIC issues are publicly available at csi-india.org/csic.

Prof. Rajaraman is himself an important personage in the history of computing in India, both for his own research and for helping to expand digital computing in the country (writing text books, starting academic program in computer science, serving on government and industry panels, and consulting to industry). In 2012, Prof. Rajaraman noted that his Principles of Computer Programming, originally published in 1969, was in...