Historia De La Informática

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction: History
of Informatics
Laszlo Boszormenyi
¨¨
University Klagenfurt
The 2007 Methodic and Didactic Challenges of the History of
Informatics (MEDICHI) workshop, at Austria’s Klagenfurt University,
focused on methodic and didactic questions of the history of
computing. This issue presents highlights from that workshop.
As the yearswent by, I became convinced that
the influence of automatic computers in their
capacity of tools would only be a ripple on the
surface of our society, compared with the deep
influence they were bound to have on our
culture in their capacity of intellectual challenge to Mankind that was totally without
precedent.

—Dijkstra, personal notes, 1975
This special issue of the Annals gives aselection
of the best papers presented at the MEDICHI
(Methodic and Didactic Challenges of the
History of Informatics) 2007 workshop, held
in Klagenfurt, Austria. The focus of the
workshop centered on the issues of the
methodology and didactics of the history of
informatics. The workshop was organized by
the Austrian Society for the History of Informatics (OEGIG), the Austrian ComputerSociety (OCG), and Klagenfurt University.
The keynote papers of Michael S. Mahoney,
Niklaus Wirth, and Joseph Weizenbaum are
featured here with slight modifications. The
selected full papers of Roland Mittermeir,
Horst Oberquelle and Oskar Beckmann, and
Peter Antonitsch et al. have been considerably
modified and extended. The sidebar, ‘‘In
Memory of Joseph Weizenbaum,’’ pays tribute
to thiscomputing pioneer, who died in March
and will be greatly missed.

Why ‘history of informatics’?
The history of informatics (of computer
science) is a thriving subject, yet is barely
credited as an academic discipline. The existing body of historical literature, although
small, includes some brilliant contributions,
especially biographical and technological
chronicles, as well as someexcellent anecdotal
treatments. Nevertheless, the methods and
didactical approaches for examining the history of informatics are poorly developed; the

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IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

number of conferences and journals dealing
with these issues is few, as is the number of
young scientists conducting scientific research
on the history of informatics. This is not
because thesetopics are uninteresting or
irrelevant; rather, the conditions for methodically well-founded research—acceptance as
true science—are lacking. The motivation of
this special issue is to contribute toward
making the ‘‘history of informatics’’ an accepted science and a valued component of
informatics education and research.

Methodic issues
The history of informatics has both internal
andexternal questions. An internal question
can be answered by looking only at informatics itself; the external (or interface) questions
relate to the interaction between informatics
and the rest of the world (for example, other
sciences). The external questions are obviously
more general, and more interesting for the
layperson, but cannot be answered without a
thorough investigation of internalquestions.
The most relevant external questions might be
these:

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Where do the ideals of computing science
come from?
How does the development of computing
science influence our ideals?

In some cases we are more interested in the
first question; in others, in the second. For
example, it is interesting to ask: which external
inspirations played a role in the emergence of
softwareengineering? The influence of the
latter on the rest of the world might be less
interesting, at least from a theoretical point of
view. On the other hand, in the case of digital
media, the really thrilling question is related to

Published by the IEEE Computer Society

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2008 IEEE

In Memory of Joseph Weizenbaum
The most active, important, and involved...