Communications of the ACM

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we’ll publish selected posts or excerpts.

century BC) was digital. The abacus is regarded as the oldest digital calculating aid. The Romans also used digital bead frames. Similar devices are offered today at flea markets. Digital calculating machines appeared in the 17th century ( inventions by Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz). In 1614, the Scotsman John Napier invented digital Napier rods, used for multiplication and division. Since the middle of the 19th century, mechanical calculating machines have been mass-produced in France (Thomas Arithmometer, patent 1820). Charles Babbage’s (unfinished) analytical engine (1834) and a similar machine of the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo (1920) were also digital, as were the widely used punch card machines (Herman Hollerith, 1890).

Digitalization is therefore nothing
new. The first mathematical instrument
was not an analog but a digital device,
the abacus. Significant phases of digi-
tization began in the 1940s and 1950s
with the advent of relay and vacuum tube
computers. The shift from mechanics
to electronics, which began mainly in
the 1970s, replaced analog slide rules
and digital mechanical calculators with
digital electronic computers. For many
years, analog and digital electronic com-
puters competed against each other.

In my opinion, the humanities are neither analog nor digital. They increasingly using digital resources. It would be better to speak of computer-aided or computer-assisted humanities. The pre-digital era must have been before the Greek abacus.

Robin K. Hill
Tech User
Responsibility
https://cacm.acm.
org/blogs/blog-
cacm/231489-tech-
user-responsibility/fulltext
September 30, 2018

Some years of experience with faculty assistance has led me to speculate that the well-known frustrations of IT user support hide even deeper problems. Many of us with such experience know the chronic difficulty suffered by both client and consultant in the support scenario. Each day promises, and delivers, repeated problems, trivial issues, and deep misunderstandings attendant on the use of applications and devices. Users ask the same questions, individually and severally, over and over, requesting help when what they really want is someone who will do it for them. In my own experience providing technical support to faculty and also to members of a volunteer civic organization, I

Herbert Bruderer
There Are
No Digital Humanities
https://cacm.acm.
org/blogs/blog-
cacm/232969-there-
are-no-digital-humanities/fulltext
November 26, 2018

Digitization and the digital revolution are quite confusing. Probably most people believe digital is something new. Many think the opposite of digital is analog or mechanical. However, the forerunners of electronic or digital journals and books are printed works. I would not call them analog. Historians sometimes speak of a pre-digital era. Even museum experts are surprised when historical mechanical calculating machines are described as digital. For them, digital and electronic are synonymous. A new field of the humanities is named digital humanities.

However, the equation digital = new, analog = old does not work. Digital is not an achievement of the 21st century. Even the antique Salamis counting board (4th