2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics

The 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics (CHE2004) was the fifth in a series of conferences sponsored by the IEEE History Committee and the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University.  The profound role electronics have had in shaping the modern world, from the invention of the Fleming diode to the present, makes this an important topic of historical study.

This workshop was held at the historic Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom.  This was an ideal site for such a meeting with conference facilities in the Victorian mansion and historical exhibits there and elsewhere in the park-like grounds.  It was also an appropriate site, as it was here during World War II that the transition from electromechanical to electronic computing was made in the effort to decrypt intercepted messages.  This is an IEEE Milestone, the citation states:

On this site during the 1939-45 World War, 12,000 men and women broke the German Lorenz and Enigma ciphers, as well as Japanese and Italian codes and ciphers. They used innovative mathematical analysis and were assisted by two computing machines developed here by teams led by Alan Turing: the electro-mechanical Bombe developed with Gordon Welchman, and the electronic Colossus designed by Tommy Flowers. These achievements greatly shortened the war, thereby saving countless lives.

Approximately one hundred people attended the conference. These engineers, historians, and museum curators came from some twenty countries on five continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America). More than fifty papers were presented in nineteen sessions over the three days of the conference. In addition, there was a panel discussion on the history of computer business, and there were historical tours of the Bletchley Park grounds and collections. The computer pioneer Sir Maurice Wilkes opened the conference with an overview of the beginnings of electronics. This conference again featured a worldwide Student History Paper Contest. A grant from the IEEE Foundation made it possible to provide travel funds for winners of the contest to participate in the conference. The conference concluded with an awards luncheon, honoring these student winners, where Bernard Finn of the Smithsonian Institution gave a talk on the artifacts of electronics history.  The IEEE History Center would like to thank the IEEE Foundation and the EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) for their support of the conference.

Other events were held by the Institution of Electrical Engineers and University College London to commemorate the Centenary of the Fleming Diode.