News

October 2026: Closing out my 2026 conference season was the SHOT annual meeting held virtually in October. Joining with Andra Sonia Petrutiu, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, we organized a session titled Supercomputers and the History of Technology comprised of seven presentations. My talk was titled When multitasking became social and what did supercomputers have to do with it? where I suggest that the ability of computer systems from the 1960s and early 1970s to support the concurrent execution of multiple jobs, programs, and tasks by one or more central processing units played a pivotal role in propelling this technical word into greater and wider use.

September 2026: I enjoyed a summer of travel in Europe ranging from waterfalls in Iceland to hanging out with Albert Einstein in Switzerland.

As if twenty counties over 105 days wasn’t enough, I also folded in two conferences along the way. The large HSS/ESHS conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July was well attended with nearly 2000 registered participants. This gathering gave me the chance to hear an abundance of talks and panels along with reconnecting with former grad school classmates and other academic colleagues. The SIC (Scientific Instrument Commission) conference in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in September was a smaller event in a great location on Lake Neuchâtel where the Alps were visible in the distance. Here I gave a talk titled The center is where you make it: The spectroscopic research of Japanese Physicist Hori Takeo where I explored four episodes of precision spectroscopy research by Japanese physicist Hori Takeo (1899-1994).

August 2026: My short piece titled Richardson’s “GPUs,” circa 1922 appeared in the August 2026 ACM SIGHPC Connect e-newsletter. It contrasts the human computers outlined in Lewis F. Richardson’s 1922 book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process with today’s silicon GPUs. I first explain how Richardson’s offered a “two-fold solution [that] comprised a novel computational architecture combined with the required calculations being done by thousands of human computers,” or Richardson’s GPUs as called them. I then explored the specifics of “what began as a CPU-bound challenge for Richardson” turning into an I/O-bound problem for today’s HPC.

May 2026: Back home from a 16-day Grand Canyon rafting trip arranged with the OARS rowing company. Plenty of big (and small) rapids, fun day hikes, and yummy food, it was a fabulous adventure with the serenity of the Grand Canyon towering overhead every day. The long history of the canyon and the numerous geological layers on view made this journey a delight for a historian of science as well as a welcomed break from the turmoils of the outside world (which were there waiting for us when we exited the river at Pearce Ferry).

February 2026: Since moving to Reno, Nevada, in 2023, I have made it a point to get to know the surrounding area and especially to stop and take time to check out places along the roads I have driven in the past. For example, on a recent trip from Southern California back to Reno I paused at two roadside attractions of minor yet fun note: Cabazon Dinosaur theme park just off I-10 east of Riverside, California, and the Giant Rock in the California Mojave Desert. Not much in the way of history of science to be found at these two locations, but worth the time and gas to investigate something you don’t see every day.

December 2025: I closed out this year with a pair of conferences. After a two-year hiatus, I returned to the annual Supercomputer Conference held in St. Louis in mid-November for six days of workshops, lectures, and, of course, time on the massive exhibit floor. The workshops on HPC education were of particular interest to me because I feel education is the most workable avenue for introducing any aspect of history (and ethics) into HPC. Overall, SC25 let me reconnect with SIGHPC colleagues and chat with some of the other 16,500+ attendees. Especially gratifying was meeting some of this year’s graduate student volunteers at the conference, an energetic and talented group of scholars who always find it interesting to learn that I too was a volunteer seven years ago at SC18 when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Of course, I came home with at least a half dozen free t-shirts to augment my Nevada summer wardrobe options.

In December I drove to Vancouver, BC, to attend the Joint PIMS-ICMS Big Data Before Data Science Conference held on the University of British Columbia campus. I enjoyed listening to the 20 speakers on the history of the idea of data and forms of data and came away with many notes that will help me continue exploring the history of computing and supercomputers. The best part of this trip to the Pacific Northwest was the return leg where I was able to spend time visiting with two Oxford classmates from 1997-98 who I hadn’t seen in over 25 years.

September 2025: My participation with the 27th International Congress of History of Science and Technology in Dunedin, New Zealand, wrapped up in early July on a satisfying note. There were over 900 registered attendees (with about 400 in-person) who enjoyed a week of plenary lectures and paper presentations set in classrooms across the University of Otago campus. I had contact with many of these attendees given my work on the local organizing committee in putting together the final schedule; it had been an all-consuming task for over a year, and it was pleasing to see it all come together when the Congress opened.

After the Congress, I turned my attention to exploring New Zealand for the rest of July followed by four weeks of travel in Australia. It was my first visit to both countries, so there were plenty of places to see, hikes to take, adventures to try, museums to enjoy, etc. Let me highlight just one activity from these travels: bungy jumping from the Kawarau Bridge near Queenstown, NZ.

June 2025: A new short historical column appeared in the June 2025 SIGHPC Connect newsletter. It is titled High-Performance Tabulating in the Late 19th Century – please take a look!

April 2025: Back in the 1970s when I was a systems programmer in the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Computer Center, system performance was a regular part of my job in wanting to improve the throughput of our overloaded IBM 360 batch and DEC PDP-11 timesharing systems. Doing something that decreased batch card deck job turnaround times and terminal response times for interactive users made using campus computers a more enjoyable/less painful experience for students and supported the university in its larger educational mission.

I think back on these days from time to time and, thanks to the Internet Archive, I found a copy of my very first talk and subsequent paper published in the Fall 1979 conference proceedings of DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users Society) meeting held in San Diego, California. This paper talked about using the MINITAB statistical analysis program to analyze system stats from a PDP-11 RSTS/E timesharing system to obtain descriptive graphs and regression analysis diagrams. Paired with the suggestions offered in my paper, this information not only provided guidance on what system configurations changes to try, either hardware or software adjustments, it went on to advise acquiring new data to see if those changes made any actual improvement.

It was a heady time for someone in the early phase of a career in computers and looking back a long way from where I stand now having recently completed a PhD in the humanities. No doubt my writing could have been better, a challenge that remains true even today, but the paper gives me a good sense of where I started and how far I have come since that conference 46 years ago.

November 2024: I very much enjoyed going to Ottawa, Canada, in September to attend the annual Scientific Instrument Symposium held at the Ingenium, or Canada’s Science and Technology Museum. I say this because it was back in 1996 that I first got my feet wet in the history of science by attending this same conference in the same city – what a difference 28 years has made in my having become somewhat acquainted with this field of study. Besides giving a talk titled “Exploring the Impact of Weight Scales Used to Appraise Children’s Health in Early Twentieth-Century America,” I had the pleasure of seeing many old colleagues and friends, including some who were also in attendance back in 1996.

January 2024: The new year finds me mostly settled in my new home in Reno, NV, where most of my moving boxes have been unpacked and their contents put away. Looking ahead to next year, I’ve been asked to help with the 2025 International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST) in Dunedin, New Zealand. So plenty to look forward to, stayed tuned for more details.

December 2023: The journal American Catholic Studies published my article, Cattell’s Catholics: Who were these American Men (and Woman) of Science?, in their Winter 2023 issue (link to the article here).

November 2023: As one of the over 14,000 attendees at the SC23 Supercomputer Conference in Denver, I played a unique role as a historian by helping to prepare the 35th Anniversary exhibit area, particularly three display cases with a trio of historical artifacts connected with supercomputing in the past where I wrote the accompanying text and arranged the objects and labels for display.

October 2023: My member-contributed editorial, Computer Benchmarks: 50 Years Ago and Now, appeared in the October 2023 issue of CONNECT, the ACM SIGHPC newsletter (just in time for the SC23 conference in Denver).

September/October 2023: I returned to Japan for the first time in 18 years where I enjoyed two weeks travelling from Tsukuba to Tokyo to Ishinomaki for a mix of research and pleasure activities. Highlights included going to KEK in Tsukuba and taking a tour of their high-energy physics systems in addition to spending time in their archives, looking at the Nagaoka Hantaro materials in the National Science Museum archives in Tsukuba, reuniting with my 2005 NSF Summer in Japan host Prof. Okamoto Takuji at the University of Tokyo, meeting with other friends and colleagues, checking out the cats at Tashirojima (or ‘Cat Island’) off the coast from Ishinomaki, and ending with my attending the Artefacts XXVIII conference hosted by the National Science Museum in Tokyo. It was great to be back and I hope to return soon with the help of a JSPS postdoc fellowship.

August 2023: I wish to acknowledge the recent passing of Ronald L. Numbers who was my dissertation advisor from start to finish. His patient guidance, terrific insights, forceful editorial feedback, and honest comments made it all possible for me to reach the end of that long project. It is hard to believe that a year ago he walked with me across the June 2022 UW commencement stage. I express my sincere condolences to his family on their loss. On September 2, I attended a memorial service for Ron held at the Loma Linda University Church (video here).

June 2023: I enjoyed giving my talk titled Work So Difficult that It Could Give the Computer a Headache at the 15th Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop at Notre Dame University this past June.

Coming up next will be my assisting at the SC23 Supercomputer Conference in November in Denver, Colorado, as I have become a member of the SC23 35th Anniversary committee.

May 2023: My member-contributed editorial, Processing & Production of Scientific Data: An historical marriage, now in a permanent divorce?, appeared in the May 2023 issue of CONNECT, the ACM SIGHPC newsletter.

I am revising a chapter from my 2022 dissertation for publication in American Catholic Studies to appear sometime next year. Titled Cattell’s Catholics: Who were these American Men (and Woman) of Science?, I probe the 1910 second edition of J. McKeen Cattell’s American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory with the aim of identifying individuals who, through their institutional affiliation, education, and other details, could be classified as likely being Catholic to gauge the gauge American Catholic higher education’s range and effectiveness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Otherwise, I continue to weave a balance between my interests in history of science and supercomputing. In January my review of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies appeared in H-Net Reviews in Humanities & Social Sciences. About the same time the December 2022 issue of CONNECT, the digital newsletter of the Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGHPC), came out with my short column that offered a historical contrast between a 1922 hand-cranked calculator and the modern EXAFLOP supercomputer Frontier located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Future plans include attending the upcoming Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop to be held 21-25 June 2023 at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

More news: In November I enjoyed attending a pair of conferences that allowed me to catch up with colleagues, former classmates, and friends in the history of science and supercomputing fields. Closest to home was the annual History of Science Society meeting in Chicago where I volunteered to chair the session titled “Physics in Perspective.” The other gathering was the annual supercomputer conference SC22 held in Dallas where my badge indicating my position as a ‘historian / independent scholar’ generated no few questions.

Update: On June 17, 2022, I deposited my dissertation to complete my Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin. It is done! Celebrations included the formal UW commencement ceremony and a smaller department hooding ceremony, both shared with family and friends.

It is early 2022 and the end of my long graduate student career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is near as I will be defending my dissertation on The Place of Science in Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Higher Education later this spring. Much remains to be done, but soon I will be giving my committee a full draft for their consideration. With thanks for their help, I list their names below:

• Susan M. Lederer, Professor and Chair, Medical History and Bioethics (Advisor)
• John Rudolph, Professor, Curriculum and Instruction
• Adam R. Nelson, Professor, Educational Policy Studies and History
• William Reese, Professor, Educational Policy Studies and History
• Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine

Watch this spot for more details as I work my way toward walking across the commencement stage on May 13th (a Friday the 13th, so appropriate) at the UW Kohl Center.

Virtual talks remain the order of the day given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In March, I gave an online talk titled “Teaching Astronomy and Nineteenth-century American Catholic Higher Education” to members of the Madison Astronomical Society. The following month I presented a dissertation-related paper titled “Cattell’s Catholics: Who were these American Men (and Women) of Science?” given virtually at the 2021 Midwest Junto.

Also, in the Spring I was finally able to travel and utilize my 2020 Summer Award for Off-Campus Upper Division and Graduate Students travel grant from the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University for dissertation-related research. My proposal to explore “Early Science Education at St. Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City, 1875–1900,” developed from seeing intriguing pre-1900 details about this school for young girls in newspaper articles that mentioned astronomy, physics, physiology, and other sciences. I enjoyed two days working the in Special Collections at BYU along with time in the Archives of the Catholic Church in Utah in downtown Salt Lake City where I found good material to help me decenter Protestantism in this one instance by looking at St. Mary’s to provide an example for my dissertation of Catholic higher education in an alternative religious context.

I presented an online talk at the Science History Institute conference on Pedagogy, Popularization, and the Public Understanding of Science. Titled “Such an important and widespread influence on our society today”: Teaching Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1960s which explored how this now familiar field came to be taught in the new departments of computer science that first appeared in the United States during the early 1960s.

I went to Denver in November for the 31st annual Supercomputer Conference in support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison booth on the main exhibition floor. Nearly 14,000 people attended this event, including many UW alums whose work involved high performance and throughput computing. Having prior experience in this field along with my historian sensibilities helped me to prepare various documents for display at the booth related to past UW activities in this highly technical realm.

In September I gave my department’s first History of Science Colloquium talk for the fall semester. Here I expanded on my summer HSS talk with the new title “Practicing what they Preach: The Bachelor of Science degree in Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Higher Education.”

Summer found me in The Netherlands for a pair of geographically and chronologically adjacent conferences. The first event, the 28th International Conference on the History of Cartography, took place in Amsterdam where I enjoyed the numerous good talks, fun evening social events, and assisting at the History of Cartography Project display table. The next gathering was the annual History of Science Society conference held in Utrecht where I helped to organize a session on science education along with presenting a dissertation-related talk titled “The B.S. Degree: A New Objective in Nineteenth-Century American Catholic Higher Education.”

The 14th Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop held at Notre Dame University in June gave me a chance to present a dissertation-related poster titled “James Curley, S.J., a Jesuit ‘comet’ in Nineteenth-Century American Astronomy.” For someone who enjoys science, technology, religion, Japan, astronomy, and all things in between, these many gatherings were useful and informative.

I was in Washington, D.C., in April for a one-day conference titled Religion and Innovation held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Two months later I returned to D.C. to attend the 24th “Science in Japan” Forum organized by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (or JSPS) on the theme of “New Eyes on the Universe,” a one-day event featuring two sessions about multi-messenger astronomy: gravity waves and cosmic rays.

In November I worked as a Graduate Student Research Assistant on the 30th Anniversary Committee in support of the annual Supercomputer Conference held in Dallas, Texas. As the Artifact Display Lead, I installed historical materials in multiple display cases to help mark the conference’s 30th Anniversary in an area open to the 13,000 people attending the event. Besides working in the display area with various historical items (including a Cray-1 supercomputer) and collecting remembrances, I had the chance to renew acquaintances with colleagues from the 1980s when I worked on a Cray X/MP-48 system (SN 209) at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Yippie-ki-yo-ki-yay!

In October I presented a ‘flash talk’ titled “What Hath God Taught – Teaching Telegraphy at Notre Dame in the 1870s” at the SHOT conference held in St. Louis, Missouri. I also took in the 10th Annual SIGCIS gathering titled Stored in Memory held on the last day of the conference.

January started off with a happy bang related to my work as the Illustrations Editor for the History of Cartography Project when the 950+ map images destined for Volume 4, Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the next volume in the History of Cartography series due to appear in 2019, went off to our publisher the University of Chicago Press.

In November I travelled to Toronto for the annual History of Science Society conference where I chaired a session on Science Education in the United States.

My book chapter “To Any Degree”: Jesuit Medical Schools in Nineteenth-Century America came out in August in Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014, volume 11 in the Jesuit Studies series from Brill edited by Kyle B. Roberts and Stephen R. Schloesser, S.J., about the history of the restored Jesuits in America.

In July I enjoyed my first visit to Brazil at the 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I served as the secretary to the conference program chair along with giving a talk to the Scientific Instrument Commission group titled The ‘personal’ equations of American astronomer Joel Stebbins. While in Brazil, I also participated in the 27th International Conference on the History of Cartography held in Belo Horizonte.

I attended the SIGCIS-organized conference Command Lines: Software, Power, and Performance in March at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.