Murray_Turoff_Pioneer

Murray Turoff

Biography
 * Murray Turoff: Father of Computer Conferencing** by Ramesh Subramanian

Web page

Article Murray says this "article is probably the most important first thing i ever did. It was the very first collaborative system on a computer (asynchronous operation) and you may recognize some of the participants in the discussion like Herb Grosch and others in computing. I have to note this group we are on is still using a message list rather than a collaborative system." (Personal email to Liza Loop on 17 Nov. 2016)
 * Delphi Conferencing: Computer-Based Conferencing with Anonymity**


 * Comment from Murray about his early experience:**

I got my PhD in physics in 1965 but I was fortunate in that during my last two years of my bachelors I spent summers in a naval lab that had a vacuum tube Burrows computer that filled a gym and you could walk though the middle of it. I than got an IBM fellowship from my graduate physics department in Massachusetts where I was told to go to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and learn how to program on their "large" IBM machine so I could do any programming for any of the physics professors that needed it. One thing that was definitely exciting about that was a lot of computer people came from many different fields and it was highly interdisciplinary around 1960 through about the early 1970's. But it was the mathematicians and the management scientists that were taking over the field with some engineers. There was very little social science presence and that is a long story. The social scientists did not come back ‘till Ben Shniederman's book (software psychology) [was published] in 1981 and after they also got into using personal computers.

The big problem with the attitude of computer scientists was that they [thought they] could replace people with programs and every problem had a logical solution. Experience did not count in making decisions and that upper management could run their company from their office. This was the standard MIT evening program for managers in the late sixties.

While finishing my phd in the last three years I was a part time systems engineer in the Boston branch office of IBM advising. This leads to many interesting stories in those early dates. The IBMer was some sort of priest with a new truth or religion!! I was almost fired by showing in one company that the problem was due to a lack of human communication between different units of the company instead of designing a massive linear program for them to implement. We are dealing with the history of computer science we should take up the many problems and mistakes that were also made in its history. Abby Mowshowitz wrote some good stuff on what could go wrong or right in those early days.

Personal email to Liza Loop (17 Nov. 2016)