Laxman+Kumar

Laxman Kumar

Intern
My name is Laxman and I am a new member of the team behind the HCLE wiki. My main interest in joining the growing team is to expand my current knowledge of the history of computing, on one hand, and on the other to augment my current skill set with experience in web design. I have been studying History at San Jose State and my primary interest is history and specifically the history of California. I feel California is on the forefront of many national trends as well as on the forefront of historical trends. A good deal of that has to do with the personal computer industry which really has as its epicenter the place I currently call home, the South Bay, or Silicon Valley. My site is a little sparse now but I will be growing it and adding to it as I go along.

Communications
Dear Liza,

How is everything, good I hope. I will email you the availability for coming in to the office. I will also get in touch with Stan and continue working on CSS as well as some research finally.

Laxman Kumar Reply from Liza Loop 2014-08-27

Hi Laxman, I see from you volunteer hours sheet that you are studying CSS. Glad you're getting started.

I need to go to the office/storage in Milpitas within a week or two to make sure the earthquake didn't knock over any of our poorly piled boxes. Would you like to join me and see what our collection looks like? If so, please email or call me so we can arrange a time convenient for both of us.

I asked Stan, from our database team, to contact you about working with him. Please post a few notes about whatever you guys work out and let me know. I think you'll find it more motivating to be part of a team. You can always contact me if you feel like it.

We have another historian volunteer - Svetlana. She'll be working on comparing our metadata to standards used by other museums and archives. Her son, Andrey, will also be on the database team.

Also, you might find it interesting to join in on the HCLE 10 am Monday morning meetings Tom and I hold. We post an agenda on Google drive to keep us somewhat organized. If there's something you'd like to discuss, let one of us know and we'll add it at the beginning of the meeting. That way you can get action on your item and don't have to sit through all the boring details unless you want to.

I'll send you a "heads-up" email pointing to this post. Please get in touch.

Reply from Liza Loop 2014-07-31 This is great Laxman. Let's start with one history project and see how it goes. How do you like the working title: "The Industry-Education Connection: How Computer Companies Viewed the Education Market in the 1960s and 1970s."

I suggested IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard in my earlier message because these companies were established before the personal computer came on the scene and sold minis and mainframes to schools and colleges. As the personal computer industry grew they changed their strategies and rode the wave expecting education to be a significant market which, ironically, didn't pan out. I think we should add Digital Equipment Corporation to the mix. Our archive has lots of source material from these companies that needs to be scanned and cataloged so it can be used in your exhibit.

Your list included Apple, Adobe, Oracle, Cisco. I suggest Apple should be a separate project because it was so influential and Woz had education in mind when he build the Apple. Adobe, Oracle and Cisco are important in the computer industry but my impression is that they were less focused on learning and education and more on general business. Of course, your research may show my impression to be wrong. At any rate, IBM, Intel, HP and DEC will keep you busy for a while and we can add the others if you find relevant material. It may be a week or two before I can get down to Milpitas to meet you in our physical archive but you can start doing web research right away. Do some general searches on the first four target companies to see what comes up. I know HP had a whole education division based on their 2000 and 3000 timesharing minicomputers. IBM had a policy of giving both hardware and software to colleges because they knew that graduates who went into the computer industry would buy equipment they had been trained on. IBM also supported the development of educational software for elementary and secondary schools. I believe on of the key players was a guy named Donald Parker. Intel offered microcomputer kits to highschool and college students at little or no costs. They may have had other educational initiatives that I don't know about. DEC published a huge amount of educational software that was developed with NSF funding. Look up Lud Braun, Project Solo and the Huntington II simulations. It will take some digging but I know a lot of this material is already available on the web. Once we find resources on the web we will need to put them in our catalog. The catalog data entry system isn't ready just yet so we may have to enter the information directly into MySQL using the PhPMyAdmin program provided by our web hosting company. For the moment you can keep track of what you find on a spread sheet. Read our wiki page on relational structure to see what information you need to capture. Let's talk about how to proceed before you try to go too far. We'll get to scanning and cataloging some of the material in the archive when we have a chance to get together face to face.

A good way to learn HTML is to practice editing existing code. Wikis insert lots of junk HTML tags into their page source and I would love to have these useless tags removed. Have you looked at the "wiki text editor" for this page?Click on edit (after you have logged on) and then on the down arrow to the right of the 'save' button. That will let you switch from 'wysiwyg' editor to html. Why not try cleaning up this page. You could also see if you can create a CSS for all our volunteer pages, starting with this one. You will quickly know more than I do so you'll need to recruit someone else to help you when you get stuck.

I've suggested many hours of work so please put your work log/spread sheet at the bottom of this page as soon as possible. You can use Delia's Page as an example. Let's talk on the phone or online soon. Thank you, Liza

Reply from Laxman 2014-07-31

Dear Liza, Sorry for the delay. I have looked over the site and want to be part of the project topic you mentioned on my wiki intern page. This project pertains to how major Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Adobe, Oracle, Cisco, or you name it, influenced, contributed to, or affected in some way, education during the decades HCLE is focusing on. I also would like to be attached to the Art and Art History exhibit working project. I want to contribute to these topics by scanning and archiving documents and artifacts into the database and also by doing research. I would also like to write on these topics if needed. As of now I have not made any edits to HCLE's wiki page. I would also like to be assigned any clerical or editing tasks as part of my involvement but if this is in other hands then that's fine. I am in the process of learning HTML and CSS so if there are any tasks involving those for developing the virtual museum I could be of some assistance. Primarily I want to contribute content to the site though.

Regards,  <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; display: block; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Laxman Kumar

Note from Liza Loop 2014-07-24 Welcome Laxman! I hope you'll have a good time learning and contributing. Getting your personal page started is the first milestone. Congratulations. Check out Delia Caban's page to see how she kept track of her volunteer hours and the projects she worked on. You can put your hours chart at the bottom of this page.

Please send me an email when you have updated this page with some ideas for projects you would like to take on. It might be fun to research how some of the major Silicon Valley computer companies (e.g. IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard) were involved in education during our focus decades ('60s, '70s, '80s). This would include both how they interacted with schools and colleges and how they expected both their employees and customers to learn about their products. The outcome of this research would be an online exhibit about each company. If this idea appeals to you let's talk further about it. There may be some other topics you like better -- that's fine with me.

Whatever topic you choose, your duties will include gathering relevant images and documents and entering them into our database/catalog. I'll teach you how to use the database after we've outlined your project. Cheers, Liza

Tasks/Assignments

 * 1) Learn to make wikispaces templates
 * 2) Learn more about CSS for wikis
 * 3) Make working page
 * 4) Search for information about HP's education division on web. Put finding on working page
 * 5) Learn about anchors for links in wiki and implement them.
 * 6) Create table of contents on personal page.

Volunteer Hours