Think piece datamation, annals, slashdot, and tomorrow's history

issue reminded me of the close relationship this journal had with Datamation. At least that was true in the early years of Annals, back when mainframes and minicomputers ruled the industry and when IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) were on everyone's radar screens. Datamation occasionally covered history; I recall a very good article by W. David Gardner on the Atanasoff affair and a selection from Nancy Stern's dissertation on Eckert and Mauchly. But that was not why most Annals readers read it so faithfully. As Weiss said, " Its chief virtue was its unique ability to track trends and product innovations. " That made it complementary to the history chronicled in Annals. It gave its readers a sense, however imperfect, of what tomorrow's history might be written about. Under Robert Forest's direction, Datamation achieved a balance of factual reporting, gossip, humor, and seriousness that Weiss said " distinguished it from all other computer publications, past and present. " It is no criticism of that journal, or to magazine publishing in general, to say that neither Datamation nor any other print publications play such a role any longer. 1 But for those of us whose primary interest is the history of computing, the need remains for a venue that tracks the computer field and indicates where it might be headed. Does such an equivalent venue exist? Covering tomorrow's history All of us know, vaguely, that tomorrow's history of computing will have to find its place in the nexus of the Internet and in the common access to the Internet through the Web. Scholars of Internet history might argue that what they study is not so much about computing as it is about communications, the history of which places Samuel F.B. Morse on its pedestals, not Babbage or Eckert and Mauchly. 2 Others argue that cyber-space is only incidentally about technology and that the best way to understand it is through literary and cultural criticism, examining for example, texts by the science fiction writers William Gibson and Philip Dick, or the recent films of Steven Spielberg. The daily press is concerned more with legal issues than with technology— note the constant headlines over the Microsoft antitrust trial or the arguments over digital rights management of music and entertainment products. For them, the people making history are not engineers or programmers but legal scholars, law firms, and …