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This paper explores the history of, and addresses certain perceived procedural misunderstandings in, Hush-A-Phone v. United States (D.C. Cir. 1956) and its progeny In re Carterfone (F.C.C. 1968) to illuminate what the Hush-A-Phone Corporation actually did in its dispute with AT&T prior to the breakup of AT&T's century-long telephone monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, many software developers and enthusiasts reacted to software's unclear status within the U.S. copyright law by pursuing technical, rather than legislative fixes. This paper applies forensic methods to recover records of conflict between commercial software developers and the enthusiasts who sought to "crack" commercial programs' copy protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of papers presented to the Association for Computing Machinery Conference at Rutgers University on March 28-29, 1950, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 'Maddida'--General Theory,' by Floyd G. Steele; 'Maddida--Design Features,' by Donald E. Eckdahl.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century American governments—local, state, and national—profoundly shaped diffusion of novel mathematical instruments. The federal government ran an office that judged what inventions were patentable and a legal system for those who defended or challenged patent rights. Governments at all levels employed inventors. Sometimes new laws required extensive calculations promoting invention and sale of computing instruments. Governments were customers for mathematical instruments ranging from teaching apparatus to adding and calculating machines to harmonic analyzers to tabulating machines. They not only bought goods, but set standards for what they would purchase. Government buyers also offered testimonials to businesses. From the 1890s, ant.itrust legislation led to some federal government oversight of corporations. Historians usually rely on documents to tell this story. This paper begins from objects—a few known only from patent descriptions, but most surviving in museum collections. This perspective complements rich existing accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the cultural climate faced by women in the American computer industry from the 1960s to the early 1980s, a period in which the percentage of the industry workforce that was female almost tripled. Drawing on a comprehensive study of articles and advertisements in the trade journal Datamation, sources from IBM, Control Data, and the Burroughs Corporation, and the records of the user group SHARE, Inc, the study argues that the cultural climate of the industry shifted radically in the early 1970s, from hostility in the 1960s to a more open one in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1970, Dennis J. Frailey generated his doctoral dissertation using a text processor on a computer, successfully producing plain-paper output that was accepted by Purdue University's dissertation office. This was before the days of word processors or widespread availability of plain-paper printers and the process involved several steps that may be of historical interest. This may also bring nostalgic memories to others who struggled as he did in those days prior to the advent of desktop publishing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article highlights the events at the Computer History Museum of Mountain View, California, for the winter quarter of 2008. Finding aids for the papers of authors including Harwood Kolsky, Gene Amdahl, and Edmund Berkeley were added to the Online Archive of California by the Museum. Also, the SAP collection was rescued from destruction by the Museum staff, and were catalogued and placed at the new offsite storage facility in Milpitas, California. An obituary for Donald Lee Stevens was also presented.

Details on convention held on June 13-15, 1997 at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia to survey the different aspects of computers' history. Description about the series of invited papers from historians on computer history; Highlights of the conference.

Randy H. Katz, David Patterson, and Garth Gibson first defined the acronym RAID, or redundant arrays of inexpensive disks, in a 1987 paper. The RAID idea was that it was feasible to achieve significantly higher levels of storage reliability from possibly very large numbers of lower-cost and lower-reliability smaller disk drives, which were then emerging for personal computers. Today, the National Academy includes RAID among the technologies created by federally funded research in universities that have led to multibillion dollar industries, and software implemented RAID is a standard component of modern operating systems. Here, Katz chronicles his experiences and contributions to RAID's early development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]