Special Issue 5/1/02 Volume 11 No. 1 In Memory of Michael Hauben: Discoverer of Netizens [6] In Memoriam a Netizen Michael Hauben by Dr. A. R. Herman* Once upon a time I had been searching on the web for documents about the life and work of the famous mathematician (maybe he is better known as the co-inventor of the computer language BASIC and of DTSS), of the late Professor John G. Kemeny. One of the robots sent me to Michael Hauben and so it began .... I became acquainted with the family Hauben. By the web I could read the early, digital version of the book "Netizens", written by Michael and Ronda Hauben. The time went on and I met personally Ronda and Jay Hauben in Budapest, Hungary. It was a pleasure to me. I received a significant gift - the hardbound edition of "Netizens" (IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1997). I read it over thoroughly because from one side it is well written (readable) and from the other it is a fascinating account of the past, present and the future of the Internet, including a chronicle and impact of the Usenet, moreover about the life and usage of the "net". As an engineer, who worked that time in a library I was interested to know more about the Internet. Nathan and Ida Reingold, wrote in their book Science in America, A Documentary History, 1900 - 1939 (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago - London, 1981) that: A traditional way of regarding science and its history is to envisage a core consisting of concepts, data, and techniques, an account of which constitutes the history of science. Human beings and their institutions are outside the core; if they are sometimes included within the definition of ‘core', the tendency is to define them in terms of importance to the content of science. In fact, to this day both the ideology of science and some histories have a tendency, explicitly or implicitly, to identify the scientist and the scientific organization with the body of knowledge. Ohm becomes Ohm's Law; Darwin is natural selection; the early Royal Society is Newtonian science. The core exists independently of humans; humans exist for the core. Michael and Ronda Hauben wrote their book successfully in the best tradition of science history and at the same time they made it clear that the development of the network from the beginning was the result of the scientific work of flesh and blood, i.e. real people. The title of their book used the new word, new term, the "netizen", i.e. citizen of the net, which was coined by Michael. His word became very popular in a short time, and if you search the web for it, you will have hundreds of URL addresses to see, among them Estonian or Japanese addresses. (There is a Japanese translation of this book initiating a social approach to this new phenomenon.) There are various opinions about the beginning of the net. I use a citation from Michael and Ronda's book: J. C. R. Licklider was one of these early network pioneers. His vision of an Intergalactic Computer Network helped to inspire these developments. The book stays somehow mainly on ARPANET and the Usenet. I think that ARPANET and the so called poor man's ARPANET were of course very early phases of the "Internet revolution", but I think that at MIT and Dartmouth the first time-sharing systems were the beginning, not to mention the work of Baran at Rand corporation. Scientists and researchers and users who were free of market forces have developed the current global computer network. There is a long list of names of people who contributed to establishing this net, who may be named netizens. Michael Hauben was the author of this new word, and with his works, among others his main work, the book "Netizens", made a significant contribution to the exploring of the technical and social roots and aspects of the Internet. He deserves the right to be one of the netizens and be on the short list. One of the first thinkers about the role of this network in the world was Michael Hauben. His early passing away made a big gap mainly for the community of netizens (not only for his parents) and this gap will be very difficult to fill. There were theoretical speculations proceeding the work on Netizens. Some ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher, published nearly half a century ago in "The Vision of the Past" (Harper & Row, New York, 1966) were about the "noosphere", i.e. the man made sphere on the globe. The Hungarian biologist, Vilmos Csányi published his synthesizing work, "Evolution Systems and Society: A General Theory of Life, Mind, and Culture" (General Evolution Research Group, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1989), which concludes with the autogenesis of a global system based on new technology. Michael had the knowledge and foundation to make the next step, to join these speculations with the birth and development of the Internet. This work may be continued partially by Ronda and Jay Hauben, but I think the method used nine years ago by Michael, i.e. lean upon the netizens community, will help them to work on this topic and search for possible coworker(s). * * * "Habent sua fata libelli" (the books have their own fate) the original Latin expression meant (for me) how the work can live through centuries and find its reader, but in this case it has other meaning. The book was read over by me and left at the distant left corner on my writing table. I thought that it may be and will be a good beginning for a new period of my life. (I prepared myself for the period of my retirement.) That time I was working at the OMIKK. It is an abbreviation from the Hungarian name of the National Technical Information Centre and Library in Budapest. This library was serving the whole Hungarian community, people and organizations, including small and medium sized enterprises, both as a special and as public library in the fields of science, technology and economy. OMIKK was one of the biggest Hungarian libraries, with a holding of one million and a half library units (books, serials and other documents), and traditionally it was in the forefront of progress. OMIKK was the first public - and for a long time the only -- organization not only in Hungary, but in the whole so called Eastern Block, or on the east side of the Iron Curtain which had subscriptions to the western science and technology databases twenty years ago. We had the biggest collection of CD-ROM databases (more than one hundred) and the most subscriptions to electronic journals in Hungary (more than six thousand). One element of the library crisis in the whole world is that in the best cases, budgets are flat while there is the more or less exponentially growing number of publications, the inflation in prices making an ever growing tension. So we had a money shortage for acquisition. At the same time it was clear to me, that Michael and Ronda Hauben's book "Netizens", although it will be a very useful book for our readers, we will not buy it. I had an exemplar dedicated personally to me. I was afraid that not any other Hungarian library will have this book. I decided one year ago, grudgingly, to give it to the library. So it was that this groundbreaking book became part of the OMIKK's holding. OMIKK was a state owned public budget organization, founded more than a hundred years ago, in 1883. But then the Secretary of State for Education decided to put an end of this success story. Against the will of many thousands of our users, he made an end of it. With the date June 30, 2001, the holdings of the previous OMIKK were transferred to Budapest Technical University. "Habent sua fata libelli", so it is the fate of the copy of Michael and Ronda Hauben's book "Netizens", dedicated personally to me, in the last two years. Budapest, 25th November, 2001. --------- * Sadly, Dr. Akos Herman died on February 28, 2002. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 11 No 1, May 1, 2002. The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------