Projects and Activities of the IPSJ Computer History Committee - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 50

Projects and Activities of the IPSJ Computer History
Committee
Eiiti Wada
IIJ Innovation Institute,
Jinbocho Mitsui Bldg., 1-105, Kanda, Jinbo-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
[e-mail]
Abstract. IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan), which was launched
in 1960, formed the Computer History Committee in 1970 in order to record the
early history of Japanese computers. The Committee has continued its activities,
publishing history related topics, maintaining the Virtual Computer Museum
web pages, editing articles about old computers and technologies, etc. Recently,
it started another mission, searching and nominating the Information Processing
Technology Heritages. The present paper surveys the Committee's long time loci
in a concise way.
Keywords: early computers in Japan, Virtual Computer Museum web page,
oral history, Information Processing Technology Heritage.
1 Introduction
“An early computer was very much a thing”, scribed Professor Maurice Wilkes of
Cambridge University at the beginning of his topic [1]. Yes indeed! In fact, computers
have been very much things until recently when people began carrying personal com-
puters with no idea about the inside of their machines.
Early computers were real excitement for researchers, developers, even for users
employing computers for their number crunching. In those good old days, the com-
puters were physically very imposing. The arrays of vacuum tubes were registers
directly in the engineers' sight. Mystically twinkling patterns on the cathode ray tubes
incarnated the program loops. Irregular sounds of relay contacts helped locate pro-
gram bugs. Architecture models of computers were implemented in exactly the same
form. These are now merely folklore.
In order for young students to share the excitement of this dawn of computers, a
number of activities are conducted on a worldwide scale. Here in Japan, Professor
Ryota Suekane (1925-1987) started the Computer History Committee in IPSJ (Infor-
mation Processing Society of Japan) in 1970 aiming to collect records of the devel-
opment activities of early Japanese computers. The Committee stopped work once
this original goal was fulfilled. Years later, Professor Shigeru Takahashi (1921-2005)
reconvened the Computer History Committee, with the primary goal to edit “ The
History of Japanese Computers ,” which was published in 1985.