Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

First conference

July 27, 2001

Sandy Brown's introduction

SANDY BROWN: Just to introduce myself, I am Alexander Brown, but I go by the name of Sandy. I'm a graduate student here at MIT. David is my advisor. My interests are very much in the history of computing, and I  buy into David's idea about trying to write histories of computing that are about engineering, and about manufacturing rather than the histories of mathematics.

So as you can see, a central part of this project is this World Wide Web section; getting information onto the Web, using the Web as a tool.

What I thought I would do is very, very briefly run you through our Web site to show you what we've done already, and where we want to go.

There are really two sections to the Web site. One is a repository section; we're starting to scan documents that people have given us, the ones that we've found from our own reference. This is important, because a lot of these materials are buried in either the MIT archives, or NASA archives and so forth. So one of the parts of the project we've funded, brought forward, is just simply making some of this material available, again, so other people in the historical community, or as David has mentioned, in the general public, can get access to these.

One of the things that I've been surprised about since I've been involved in this project is the sheer interest from people who are just out there, who want us to know about this information, and are volunteering to give us documents; who are suggesting that we might want to go look at documents.

I was away for a couple of weeks, and when I came back a few days ago, David had forwarded me on an e-mail from a guy who is actually rebuilding one of these machines from, it would seem from scratch; absolutely from scratch. He's got design documents, and he's sort of telling us that he wants to physically manufacture the thing and then reprogram it. This is the kind of interest that's out there, so it's an interesting topic.

We have got a documents section which we are ordering. And obviously, if you guys have any material, or you can suggest things that we might want to put up there, we are very willing to take this kind of information. So just to give you a quick idea of what we've got. We've got a variety of images.

DAVID MINDELL: Trying to leverage off the NASA, what NASA has already posted, as much as we can.

SANDY BROWN: We are willing to take links as well. So if you know of material that's out there on the Web already that you think might be appropriate to link to this, please send them on to us, and these original scanned documents as well.

We are also trying to couple biographies of key people who were involved. I'm sure you'll recognize some of the names. This section is under process at the moment. I want to get this finished by the end of the summer; so again, information that you might have people who you think we might need to include in this, or just sort of interesting biographical information you might have. I am more than willing to listen to any stories that anybody has. There is no actual information off these links yet, which is the project that I want to get finished by the end of the summer.

We're also trying to put together timelines. One of the things that we would like to do, at some point, is to try to make this timeline to accessible to everybody who is part of the group, which will of course include you folks. So that if you want to start putting in events, or dates, or links of your own that you think are key moments, this is part of our sort of collaborative effort; is that as people read the site, they can start to insert information or pieces or so forth that they think are important.

JOE GAVIN: There are a lot of other key items and timelines before and around what you have here.

SANDY BROWN: Yes.

JOE GAVIN: I know at one point the NRC study, we dug into this in some depth. And there are some pretty interesting things, like how the Air Force tried to beat NASA out of the ... (inaudible) and so forth.

DAVID MINDELL: The timeline that we have there is very crude and very much first order; just to kind of get something up there. Part of the point is that anyone who logs on in the participant's room can then contribute exactly these kinds of things. And each of them can have a document associated with it, and then it can also generate a discussion. People say "No, that's not an important moment at all, and this is why" and it can spin out its own discussion.

So we're very much hoping to flesh this out in much greater detail. And you can see they are also sub-categorized by, I think we've designed it into four: design, manufacturing, context, human machine interface -- just so you can search on a different timeline.

SANDY BROWN: We might end up having something other than a linear time line; we'll end up with something looking a little bit more like a network than a timeline. But again, this is the sort of thing we can work out as we go along, as we get more deeply into this. Associated with each entry on the timeline is a little electronic forum. As David said, this is one of the types of sort of mechanisms we have for on-line discussions; and again, we can kind of look at how this is going to work.

In this kind of section, we can have discussion, or links to documents can be posted, images; that kind of thing.

And we have a variety of other bits and pieces. The people, the academics were involved with this, and a variety of sort of introductory essays. This was the second part of the section, the sort of interpretation side of this that we are putting together slowly as we learn more about the project. This is another one of the things that we -- Where your contribution will be invaluable.

We're really hoping that as a result of some of the discussions that ensue today and the rest of the meetings, we start to have a little more material to start to flesh out the larger story. 
A lot of the documentation we have gives us the technical side of this. What we don't have, at this point, are some of the larger sort of social and professional contexts in which these things were happening.

So this is the basis of the Web site. One other sort of personal plea is if any of you folks have any images that you think would be -- Photos or anything on those lines, we're just a little bit short on visual content, and it would be great if people are just taking personal photos or anything like that, that you wouldn't mind us scanning and putting on the Web. I would greatly appreciate that. It would make the Web site that much more visually attractive.

DAVID MINDELL: Another one of the goals, we should say, is that the Web site is going to become an archival repository. So one of the big issues for historians, that is actually true for a lot of scholars on the Web, is how do you site something on the World Wide Web? Because you site a link, and often you can get real scholarly, scientific material on the Web, but you're not sure it's going to be there a year from now. You can't really site it if people then can't reliably go back for it.

So the Dibner Institute, which is right down the street has, among other things, about half of Newton's papers. And they have a permanent, perpetually endowed archival facility where they store documents at historical, scientific and technical information, as long as humankind can guarantee such thing will go forward.

And the Web sites are all intended to be that way. So there is a permanent address. All of this stuff will be stored in a stable, fully citeable format, and kept up for the long duration. This is one of the things that the project is intended to at least experience with, and hopefully settle on, is what are the proper procedures for doing that, and how do you make addresses on the Web that are going to stay there for good and this kind of thing. So anything you do give us, we don't need to keep the paper documents, for one thing. You can have those back. But the digital form of it, we are making arrangements to keep it around forever.

SANDY BROWN: As David has mentioned, and I won't say much more about this, one of the key aspects we want to develop here is this collaborative aspect; that this is your story as much as it is ours, or much more than it is ours, I should say. So one of the things that we really want to do over the next, I guess year, or couple of years, is to organize another series of meetings and discussions like we're doing today -- although much less talking from us, and much more letting you guys tell your stories.

The other part of the project that David has alluded to is that Sloan and Dibner are very interested in finding out can we do this almost exclusively on-line? Now, I guess we're fortunate in the sense that our participants are people who are computer savvy, almost by definition. So we are interested to see can we take this discussion that we're doing today, and move it on-line?

We hope that the systems that are being set up and people are experimenting with at the moment are going to do this. But again, if you guys have any suggestions or any ideas for doing this, we'd greatly appreciate that.

Slava Gerovitch's introduction

site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown