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Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration
... Such routines were written by the programming teams working inside computer using companies. In the early days of computing, it was common for system or utility programs of this kind to be shared freely, most notably through the SHARE user group established for users of large IBM computers [1]. During the ...
... Such routines were written by the programming teams working inside computer-using companies. In the early days of computing it was common for system or utility programs of this kind to be shared freely (Akera, 2001). These techniques were very useful with tape storage . ...
The data base concept derives from early military on-line systems, and was not originally associated with the specific technologies of modern data base management systems. While the idea of an integrated data base, or "bucket of facts," spread into corporate data processing and management circles during the early 1960s, it was seldom realized in practice. File-processing packages were among the very first distributed as supported products, but only in the late 19 60s were they first called "data base management systems," in large part through the actions of the Data Base Task Group of the Committee on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL). As the DBMS concept spread, the data base itself was effectively redefined as the informational content of a packaged DBMS. Throughout the process, managerial descriptions of the data base as a flexible and integrated repository for all corporate data stood in sharp contrast with the useful but limited nature of actual systems.1
... Sociological research on prosocial behavior in the offline world has focused on more highly organized social contexts, such as the self-help group and the volunteer organization (e.g. Akera, 2001; Knoke, 1981; Popielarz & McPherson, 1995; Wilson, 2000 for a review). See Table 6 ...
Volunteers and charitable organizations contribute significantly to community welfare through their prosocial behavior: that is, discretionary behavior such as assisting, comforting, sharing, and cooperating intended to help worthy beneficiaries. This essay focuses on prosocial behavior on the Internet. It describes how offline charitable organizations are using the Net to become more efficient and effective. It also considers entirely new models of Net-based volunteer behavior directed at creating socially beneficial information goods and services. After exploring the scope and diversity of online prosocial behavior, the essay focuses on ways to encourage this kind of behavior through appropriate task and social structures, motivational signals, and trust indicators. It concludes by asking how local offline communities ultimately could be diminished or strengthened as prosocial behavior increases online.
How can historians tell stories about software without focusing solely on the code itself?
The article discusses how historians can tell stories about software without focusing solely on the code itself. Software is the soul. The essence of code is its immateriality. An invisible spark of life, it controls the operation of the machine and can transmigrate from one host to another. It is bound not by the laws of this world but by those of another. The distinction between hardware and software partitions the careers, journals, conferences, interest groups, and businesses of computing into separate camps. In recent years it has also shaped the work of historians of computing, as software history has become an increasingly popular area of research. Technologies such as FPGAs, virtual machines, APIs, and microcoded instruction sets complicate the simple picture of programs directly manipulating hardware. Second, the recent Turing Centenary indicates that the founding insight of theoretical computer science is that hardware and software are, from the viewpoint of computability, almost entirely interchangeable.
In 1995 AOL announced that it would be converting its pricing plan from an hourly rate that ranged from 6 an hour to a flat monthly rate of $15.95. The increase in member subscription was expected to be significant, and a wave of concern swept through the large remote-staff volunteer population, whose duties included monitoring electronic bulletin boards, hosting chat-rooms, enforcing the Terms of Service agreement (TOS), guiding AOL users through the online community, and even creating content using the AOL's own program, RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Manager), the text scripting language and the publishing tool that allows remote staffers to update and change content on AOL. Chief among remote-staff volunteer's concerns was the initiative to convert many of the volunteer accounts from overhead accounts, which had access to tools and privileges that made remote-staff volunteers' duties on par with in-house employees, to unbilled or discounted accounts. In a meeting meant to address the emerging concerns of remote-staff volunteers held over electronic chat, Bob Marean, a representative for AOL, confronted over 450 remote-staff volunteers.
Generalized report generation and file maintenance programs were widely used in the 1950s, standardized by the Share user group with 9PAC and Surge. By the 1960s the first recognizable DBMS systems, such IMS and IDS, had evolved to address the challenges of disk drives and MIS projects. Finally, in the late 1960s Codasyl's Data Base Task Group formulated the DBMS concept itself.
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