Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

  

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one of the original members of the Impressionists, was known for his lifelike paintings done in the out-of-doors, en plein aire. He employed the multicolor brush strokes to create lively and colorful scenes while rejecting black along with the rest of the impressionists. In later life, he turned away from the impressionists and once again used black as a counterpoint to the array of color. In all this, his paintings reflected exquisite renditions of the light of the out-of-doors. His work should be required viewing by all photographers.  GLB

    

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be the indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth, which sweeps you along in his passion.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.”
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  

Note:
The quotes included in this posting were taken from the public quotation site, ThinkExist.com, which does not indicate that they are covered by any special copyright restrictions. Likewise, the images included in this posting were obtained under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from the Wikipedia.com web site which did not state any restrictions on their use. This blog makes every attempt to comply with the legal rights of copyright holders.

This posting is intended for the educational use of photographers and photography students and complies with the “educational fair use” provisions of copyright law. For readers who might wish to reuse some of these images should check out their compliance with copyright limitations that might apply to that use.

GLB

  

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau".

Youth

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.

The Theater Box, 1874
by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Courtauld Institute Galleries,
London

During the Paris Commune in 1871, while he painted on the banks of the Seine River, some members of a commune group thought he was a spy, and were about to throw him into the river when a commune leader, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.

In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Coeur and his family ended, and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association, but a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.

Maturity

Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.

The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876,
oil on canvas,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris

In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, then to Madrid, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that he traveled to Italy to see Titian’s masterpieces in Florence and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On January 15, 1882 Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner’s portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria after contracting pneumonia, which would cause permanent damage to his respiratory system.

In 1883, he spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin’s, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape which includes beaches, cliffs, bays, forests, and mountains. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.

Conditions were ripe for the birth of a new pictorial language, and Impressionism, bursting upon the scene, attracted notoriety with the first Impressionist exposition of 1874, held independently of the official Salon. It took 10 years for the movement to acquire its definitive form, its independent vision, and its unique perceptiveness. But one can point to 1874 as the year of departure for the movement that subsequently spawned modern art.

Renoir’s work is a perfect illustration of this new approach in thought and technique. By using small, multicoloured strokes, he evoked the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman’s skin in the outdoors. Renoir and his companions stubbornly strove to produce light-suffused paintings from which black was excluded, but their pursuits led to many disappointments: their paintings, so divergent from traditional formulas, were frequently rejected by the juries of the Salon and were extremely difficult to sell. Despite the continuing criticism, some of the Impressionists were making themselves known, as much among art critics as among the lay public. Renoir, because of his fascination with the human figure, was distinctive among the others, who were more interested in landscape. Thus, he obtained several orders for portraits and was introduced, thanks to the publisher Georges Charpentier, to upper-middle-class society, from whom he obtained commissions for portraits, most notably of women and children.
— Bio (see reference below)

While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed as a model Suzanne Valadon, who posed for him (The Bathers, 1885–87; Dance at Bougival, 1883) and many of his fellow painters while studying their techniques; eventually she became one of the leading painters of the day.

Girls at the Piano, 1892,
by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

In 1887, a year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen’s associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.

In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist’s friends, had already served as a model for Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881), and with whom he already had a child, Pierre, in 1885. After his marriage Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline’s cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.

Later years

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers, but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand. The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.

In 1881 and 1882 Renoir made several trips to Algeria, Italy, and Provence, and these eventually had a considerable effect on his art and on his life. He became convinced that the systematic use of the Impressionistic technique was no longer sufficient for him and that small brushstrokes of contrasting colours placed side by side did not allow him to convey the satiny effects of the skin. He also discovered that black did not deserve the opprobrium given to it by his comrades and that, in certain cases, it had a striking effect and gave a great intensity to the other colours. During his journey to Italy, he discovered Raphael and the hallmarks of classicism: the beauty of drawing, the purity of a clear line to define a form, and the expressive force of smooth painting when used to enhance the suppleness and modeling of a body. At this same time, he happened to read Il libro dell’arte (1437; A Treatise on Painting) by Cennino Cennini, which reinforced his new ideas. All of these revelations were so powerful and unexpected that they provoked a crisis, and he was tempted to break with Impressionism, which he had already begun to doubt. He felt that until now he had been mistaken in pursuing the ephemeral in art.
— Bio (see reference below)

During this period he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works with his limited joint mobility.

In spite of his misfortune, Renoir’s paintings during this period still embodied a cheerful attitude toward life. His themes became more personal and intimate, focusing on portraits of his wife, his children, and Gabrielle, his maid, who often also posed for his nude paintings. His still lifes were composed of flowers and fruits from his own garden, and the landscapes were those that surrounded him. The nudes, especially, reflect the serenity that he found in his work. Examples of this period include The Artist’s Family (1896) and Sleeping Bather (1897). He attempted to embody his admiration for the female form in sculpture, with the assistance of young Richard Guino. Since Renoir was no longer able to do sculpture himself, Guino became, about 1913, the skillful instrument who willingly followed his directions. He yielded before the personality of Renoir and succeeded so well that the works have all the qualities of Renoir’s style.
— Bio (see reference below)

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, on December 3.

Artworks

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
(Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Renoir’s paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.

His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas’ sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher.

A fine example of Renoir’s early work, and evidence of the influence of Courbet’s realism, is Diana, 1867. Ostensibly a mythological subject, the painting is a naturalistic studio work, the figure carefully observed, solidly modeled, and superimposed upon a contrived landscape. If the work is still a ‘student’ piece, already Renoir’s heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, then the artist’s mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings.

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them, an effect today known as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).

One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir’s 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived.

On the Terrace, 1881,
oil on canvas,
Art Institute of Chicago

The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid 1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884–87. It was a trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures.

After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1918–19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir’s late, abundantly fleshed nudes.

A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir’s style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Posthumous Prints

In 1919, Ambroise Vollard, a renowned art dealer, published a book on the life and work of Renoir, La Vie et Oeuvre de Pierre Auguste Renoir, in an edition of 1000 copies. In 1986, Vollard’s heirs started reprinting the copper plates, generally etchings with hand applied watercolor. These prints are signed by Renoir in the plate and are embossed “Vollard” in the lower margin. They are unnumbered, undated and not signed in pencil.

     

References

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Pierre-Auguste Renoir… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoir

Web Sites and Blogs:

Bio: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography…
http://www.biography.com/articles/Pierre-Auguste-Renoir-9455662

Think Exist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir…
http://thinkexist.com/quotes/pierre-auguste_renoir/

by Gerald Boerner

  

We continue our series on the IBM PC developmental history. Today, we look at the computer series that IBM developed to try to win back the market from the PC Compatibles: the IBM Personal System/2. These machines had the capacity to have set a new standard in the PC marketplace, but fell short due to several factors.

Among these factors were the use of a proprietary bus architecture (the Microchannel Architecture), the use of the Intel 80286 process instead of the Intel 80386 (due, allegedly to the large supply on hand), and the development by Microsoft of a new operating system (OS/2). These developments had potential, but the motivation behind them, to secure a “protected” share of the marketplace, was flawed. In addition, IBM feared Microsoft’s development of Windows 3.0 as a competitor to OS/2. All these factors led to an end to  IBM as a major player in the PC hardware marketplace!

This is the third installment in a multipart series.  GLB

    

“You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.”
— Roy Romer

“The next thing is: we can make IBM even better. We brought IBM back but we’re gunning for leadership.”
— Louis Gerstner

“IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film.”
— Douglas Trumbull

“The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.”
— Donald Knuth

“There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens.”
— Douglas Trumbull

“We can learn from IBM’s successful history that you don’t have to have the best product to become number one. You don’t even have to have a good product.”
— Adam Osborne

“You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.”
— Kevin Rollins

“We think the managed security services opportunity is enormous and so we have been an active participant and probably the largest firm in this space outside of an IBM or EDS, which does large outsourcing contracts.”
— John W. Thompson

  

Wizards of the Internet: IBM Personal System/2

The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM’s third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture. Although IBM’s considerable market presence ensured the PS/2 would sell in relatively large numbers, the PS/2 architecture ultimately failed in its bid to return control of the PC market to IBM. Due to the higher costs of the closed architecture, customers preferred competing PCs that extended the existing PC architecture instead of abandoning it for something new. However, many of the PS/2′s innovations, such as the 16550 UART, 1440 KB 3.5-inch floppy disk format, 72-pin SIMMs, the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and the VGA video standard, went on to become standards in the broader PC market.

The OS/2 operating system was announced at the same time as the PS/2 line and was intended to be the primary operating system for models with Intel 286 or later processors. However, at the time of the first shipments, only PC-DOS was available, with OS/2 1.0 (text-mode only) available several months later. IBM also released AIX PS/2, a Unix-like operating system for PS/2 models with Intel 386 or later processors. Windows was another option for PS/2.

IBM’s PS/2 was designed to remain software compatible with their PC/AT/XT line of computers upon which the booming PC clone market was built, but the hardware was quite different. PS/2 had two BIOSes — one was named ABIOS (Advanced BIOS) which provided a new protected mode interface and was used by OS/2; the other was named CBIOS (Compatible BIOS) which was included in order for the PS/2 to be software compatible with the PC/AT/XT.

PS/2 Technologies

Micro Channel Architecture

The IBM Personal System/2 line introduced the Micro Channel Architecture (MCA for short), which was technically superior to the ISA bus and allowed for higher speed communications within the system. The MCA bus featured many advances that would not be seen in other interface standards until several years later. Transfer speeds were on par with the much later introduced PCI bus standard. MCA allowed one-to-one, card to card, and multi-card to processor simultaneous transaction management which is a feature of the PCI-X bus format. Busmastering capability, bus arbitration, and true plug-and-play BIOS management of hardware were all benefits of the MCA bus. Despite all of these technical advantages, the Micro Channel Architecture never gained wide acceptance outside of the PS/2 line due to IBM’s anti-clone practices and incompatibilities with ISA. IBM offered to sell a Micro Channel license to anyone who could afford the royalty, but they not only required a royalty for every MCA-compatible machine sold, but also a payment for every IBM-compatible machine the particular maker had ever made in the past.

Keyboard/mouse interface

The PS/2 connection ports (later colored purple for keyboard and
green for mouse —PC 97), are still used in many new computers
today, but are gradually being replaced by USB connectors.

PS/2 systems introduced a new specification for the keyboard and mouse interfaces, which are still in use today and are thus called "PS/2" interfaces. The PS/2 keyboard interface was electronically identical to the long-established AT interface, but the cable connector was changed from the 5-pin DIN connector to the smaller 6-pin mini-DIN interface. The same connector and a similar synchronous serial interface was used for the PS/2 mouse port. Additionally, the PS/2 introduced a new software data area known as the Extended BIOS Data Area (EBDA). Its primary use was to add a new buffer area for the dedicated mouse port. This also required making a change to the "traditional" BIOS Data Area (BDA) which was then required to point to the base address of the EBDA.

Graphics

MCA IBM XGA-2 Graphics Card

Most of the initial range of PS/2 models were equipped with a new frame buffer known as the Video Graphics Array, or VGA for short. This effectively replaced the previous EGA standard. VGA increased graphics memory to 256 KB and provided for resolutions of 640×480 with 16 colors, and 320×200 with 256 colors. VGA also provided a palette of 262,144 colors (as opposed to the EGA palette of 64 colors). The IBM 8514 and later XGA computer display standards were also introduced on the PS/2 line. Although the design of these adapters did not become an industry standard as VGA did, their 1024×768 pixel resolution was subsequently widely adopted as a standard by other manufacturers, and "XGA" became a synonym for this screen resolution. The PS/2 Model 25 and Model 30, however, did not include VGA. On these budget models, IBM opted to use MCGA, which was a stepping stone between CGA and VGA, but unfortunately lacked EGA compatibility.

VGA Video Connector

All of the new PS/2 graphics systems (whether MCGA, VGA, 8514, or later XGA) used a 15-pin mini-D connector for video out. This used analog RGB signals, rather than fixed sixteen or sixty-four color lines as on previous CGA and EGA monitors, allowing arbitrary increases in the color depth (or levels of grey) compared to its predecessors. It also allowed for analog grayscale displays to be connected; unlike earlier systems (like MDA and Hercules) this was transparent to software, allowing all programs supporting the new standards to run unmodified whichever type of display was attached. These greyscale displays were relatively inexpensive during the first few years the PS/2 was available, and very commonly purchased with lower-end models. The VGA connector became a near universal standard for connecting monitors and projectors over the course of the early 1990s, replacing a variety of earlier connectors on non-PC hardware. Recently other standards (primarily DVI and HDMI for digital flat panel displays) have become common as well, but none have yet become as common as the VGA connector.

External storage

Although 3.5" floppy disks were becoming common in the industry by 1987, the PS/2s were the first IBM models to use them as standard, relegating the 5.25" format to an expensive, optional external accessory drive. While the disk format itself was standard, IBM chose to use a non-standard form for the disk drives, resulting in very high repair costs as a standard drive could not be retrofitted to a PS/2. The IBM part was functionally identical to a standard 3.5" floppy drive, but about five times more expensive. In the initial line-up, IBM used 720 KB Double Density (DD) capacity drives on the 8086-based models and 1.44 megabytes High Density (HD) on the 80286-based and higher models. By the end of the PS/2 line they had moved to a somewhat standardized capacity of 2.88 MB. The PS/2 floppy drives were famous for not having a capacity detector. 1.44 MB floppies had a hole so that drives could identify them from 720 KB floppies, preventing users from formatting the smaller capacity disks to the higher capacity (doing so would work, but with a higher tendency of data loss). Clone manufacturers implemented the hole detection, but IBM did not. As a result of this a 720 KB floppy could be formatted to 1.44 MB in a PS/2, but the resulting floppy would only be readable by a PS/2 machine.

Memory

The PS/2 introduced the 72-pin RAM SIMM, which became the de facto standard for RAM modules by the mid-90s in mid-late 486 and early Pentium desktop systems. SIMMs were 32 or 36 bits wide, and replaced the old 30-pin (8/9-bit) SIPP standard, which was much less convenient as SIPPs had to be used four at a time to match the bus width of a system with a 32-bit bus. 72-pin SIMMs were also capable of larger maximum capacities.

Models

At launch, the PS/2 family comprised the Model 30, 50, 60 and 80; the Model 25 was launched a few months later.

IBM Personal System/2 Model 25

The PS/2 Models 25 and 30 (IBM 8525 and 8530 respectively) were ISA-based (in other words, essentially IBM PC-like systems in a different form factor) systems, originally only available with Intel 8086 CPUs. These machines also differed from other PS/2 models in having 720k floppy disk drives, an ST506-compatible hard drive controller and MCGA graphics. The hard drives were available as an optional part; however, many of these entry-level machines were sold without hard drives due to the high cost.

The Model 25 featured an integrated monochrome or color monitor to compete with the Apple Macintosh as an integrated system for educational environments. An external "paper white" monochrome screen was also available as a cost-saving model instead of the standard VGA display; this was often paired with the Model 30.

The externally very similar
Models 60 and 80 next to
each other

Later ISA PS/2 models comprised the Model 30-286 (a Model 30 with an Intel 286 CPU), Model 35 (IBM 8535) and Model 40 (IBM 8540) with Intel 386SX or IBM 386SLC processors.

The higher-numbered models were equipped with the MicroChannel bus and mostly ESDI or SCSI hard drives (models 60-041 and 80-041 being MFM based). PS/2 Models 50 (IBM 8550) and 60 (IBM 8560) used the Intel 286 processor, the PS/2 Models 70 (IBM 8570) and 80 used the 386DX, while the medium-performance PS/2 Model 55SX (IBM 8555-081) used the 16/32-bit 386SX processor. Later Model 70 and 80 variants (B-xx) also used 25 MHz Intel 486 processors, in a complex called the Power Platform.

IBM Model 70 (case open
over case closed)

The PS/2 Models 90 (IBM 8590/9590) and 95 (IBM 8595/9595/9595A) used Processor Complex daughterboards holding the CPU, memory controller, MicroChannel bus interface, and other system components. The available Processor Complex options ranged from the 20 MHz Intel 486 to the 90 MHz Pentium and were fully interchangeable. The IBM PC Server 500, which has a motherboard identical to the 9595A, also uses Processor Complexes.

Other later MicroChannel PS/2 models included the Model 65SX with a 16 MHz 386SX; various Model 53 (IBM 9553), 56 (IBM 8556) and 57 (IBM 8557) variants with 386SX, 386SLC or 486SLC2 processors; the Models 76 and 77 (IBM 9576/9577) with 486SX or 486DX2 processors respectively; and the 486-based Model 85 (IBM 9585).

The IBM PS/2E (IBM 9533) was the first Energy Star compliant personal computer. It had a 50 MHz IBM 486SLC processor, an ISA bus, four PC card slots, and an IDE hard drive interface. The environmentally-friendly PC borrowed many components from the ThinkPad line and was composed of recycled plastics, designed to be easily recycled at the end of its life, and used very little power.

IBM also produced several portable and laptop PS/2s, including the Model L40 (ISA-bus 386SX), N51 (386SX/SLC), P70 (386DX) and P75 (486DX2).

The IBM PS/2 Server 195 and 295 (IBM 8600) were 486-based dual-bus MCA network servers supporting asymmetric multiprocessing, designed by Parallan Computer Inc.

The IBM PC Server 720 (IBM 8642) was the largest MCA-based server made by IBM, although it was not, strictly speaking, a PS/2 model. It could be fitted with up to six Intel Pentium processors interconnected by the Corollary C-bus and up to eighteen SCSI hard disks. This model was equipped with seven combination MCA/PCI slots.

Marketing

The PS/2′s controversial hardware design was tied to a marketing strategy that was similarly unsuccessful. During the 1980s, IBM’s advertising of the original PC and its other product lines had frequently used the likeness of Charlie Chaplin.

For the PS/2, however, IBM augmented this character with a notorious jingle that seemed more suitable for a low-end consumer product than a business-class computing platform:

“How ya’ gonna’ do it?
PS/2 It!
It’s as easy as I.B.M.”

“How ya’ gonna’ do it?
PS/2 It!
The solution is I.B.M.”

Another campaign featured the actors from the television show M*A*S*H playing updated versions of their characters from the series.

The profound lack of success of these advertising campaigns led, in part, to IBM’s termination of its relationships with its global advertising agencies; these accounts were reported by Wired Magazine (Issue 3.08, August 1995) to have been worth over $500 million a year, and the largest such account review in the history of business.

Overall, the PS/2 line was largely unsuccessful with the consumer market, even though the PC based Models 30 and 25 were an attempt to address it. With what was widely seen as a technically competent but cynical attempt to gain undisputed control of the market, IBM unleashed an industry and consumer backlash. The firm suffered massive financial losses for the remainder of the decade, forfeited its previously unquestioned position as the industry leader, and eventually lost its status as the largest single manufacturer of personal computers (ironically, only after it decided to deemphasize Microchannel), first to Compaq and then to Dell. Still, the platform experienced success in the business sector where the reliability, ease of maintenance and strong support from IBM offset the rather daunting cost of the machines. Also many people still lived with the motto "Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM." The model 55SX and later 56SX were the leading sellers for almost their entire lifetimes. Many models of PS/2 systems saw a production life span that took them well into the late 1990s.

Operating System: OS/2

OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM’s "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. OS/2 is no longer marketed by IBM, and IBM standard support for OS/2 was discontinued on 31 December 2006. Currently, Serenity Systems sells OS/2 under the brand name eComStation.

OS/2 was intended as a protected mode successor of PC-DOS. Notably, basic system calls were modeled after MS-DOS calls; their names even started with "Dos" and it was possible to create "Family Mode" applications: text mode applications that could work on both systems. Because of this heritage, OS/2 shares similarities with Unix, Xenix, and Windows in many ways.

Enthusiastic beginnings

The development of OS/2 began when IBM and Microsoft signed the Joint Development Agreement in August 1985. It was code-named "CP/DOS" and it took two years for the first product to be delivered.

OS/2 1.0 was announced in April 1987 and released in December as a textmode-only OS. However, it featured a rich API for controlling the video display (VIO) and handling keyboard and mouse events so that programmers writing for protected-mode no longer had to call the BIOS or access hardware directly. In addition, development tools included a subset of the video and keyboard APIs as linkable libraries so that family mode programs were able to run under MS-DOS. A task-switcher named Program Selector was available through the Ctrl-Esc hotkey combination, allowing the user to select among multitasked text-mode sessions (or screen groups; each could run multiple programs).

Communications and database-oriented extensions were delivered in 1988, as part of OS/2 1.0 Extended Edition: SNA, X.25/APPC/LU 6.2, LAN Manager, Query Manager, SQL.

The promised GUI, Presentation Manager, was introduced with OS/2 1.1 in October, 1988. It had an almost identical user interface to Windows 2.1.

The Extended Edition of 1.1, sold only through IBM sales channels, introduced distributed database support to IBM database systems and SNA communications support to IBM mainframe networks.

Version 1.2 introduced Installable Filesystems and notably the HPFS filesystem. HPFS provided a number of improvements over the older FAT filesystem, including long filenames and a form of alternate data streams called Extended Attributes. In addition, extended attributes were also added to the FAT filesystem.

The Extended Edition of 1.2 introduced TCP/IP and Ethernet support.

OS/2 and Windows-related books of the late 1980s acknowledged the existence of both systems and promoted OS/2 as the system for the future.

Breakup

The collaboration between IBM and Microsoft unraveled in 1990, between the releases of Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.3. Initially, at least publicly, Microsoft continued to insist the future belonged to OS/2. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft even took to calling OS/2 "Windows Plus". However, during this time, Windows 3.0 became a tremendous success, selling millions of copies in its first year.^[10] Much of its success was because Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers. OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware. Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware.

The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from cooperating on OS/2 with IBM to building a franchise based on Windows. Several technical and practical reasons contributed to this breakup:

• Differences in culture and vision: Microsoft favored the open hardware system approach that contributed to its success on the PC; IBM sought to use OS/2 to drive sales of its own hardware, including systems that could not support the features Microsoft wanted. Microsoft programmers also became frustrated with IBM’s bureaucracy and its use of lines of code to measure programmer productivity. IBM developers complained about the terseness and lack of comments in Microsoft’s code, while Microsoft developers complained that IBM’s code was bloated.

• Differences in API: OS/2 was announced when Windows 2.0 was near completion, and the Windows API already defined. However, IBM requested that this API be significantly changed for OS/2. Therefore, issues surrounding application compatibility appeared immediately. OS/2 designers hoped for source code conversion tools, allowing complete migration of Windows application source code to OS/2 at some point. However, OS/2 1.x did not gain enough momentum to allow vendors to avoid developing for both OS/2 and Windows in parallel. IBM’s involvement was much more successful in redefining Windows’ visual appearance after the 1.0 release, giving it what is today perceived as the "Windows 3.0 look".

• OS/2 1.x targeted the 80286 processor: IBM insisted on supporting the Intel 80286 processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, due to commitments made to customers who had purchased many 80286-based PS/2′s because of IBM’s promises surrounding OS/2. Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the Intel 80386′s much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and virtual 8086 mode features. This was especially painful in providing support for DOS applications. While, in 1988, Windows/386 2.1 could run several cooperatively multitasked DOS applications, including expanded memory (EMS) emulation, OS/2 1.3, released in 1991, was still limited to one 640KB "DOS box".

Given these issues, Microsoft started to work in parallel on a version of Windows which was more future-oriented and more portable. The hiring of Dave Cutler, former VMS architect, in 1988 created an immediate competition with the OS/2 team, as Cutler did not think much of the OS/2 technology and wanted to build on his work at Digital rather than creating a "DOS plus". His "NT OS/2," was a completely new architecture.

     

References:

Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: ARPANet… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPAnet

Wikipedia: The Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet

Wikipedia: IBM Personal System/2…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2

Wikipedia: Microsoft’s Operating System/2…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Web Sites and Blogs:

Brainy Quote: IBM Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/ibm.html

by Gerald Boerner

  

Only occasionally has a book had a significant impact on history. Examples we can think of include the Bible, The Prince, Common Sense, Profiles of Courage and many others. Today we consider another one of these high-impact books is considered: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This book directly attacked the institution of slavery in the United States. In fact, this impact was probably a major force behind the Civil War and the ending of Slavery. Join us for this examination of this critical issue in our nations history.  GLB

    

“A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.”
— Rita Mae Brown

“All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.”
— Alexander Herzen

“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
— Noah Webster

“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Among the expected glories of the Constitution, next to the abolition of Slavery was that of Rum.”
— George Clymer

“As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.”
— Julian Bond

“Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood… there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!”
— Padraic Pearse

“But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
— Josiah Stamp

Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Book that Ended Slavery

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States, so much in the latter case that the novel intensified the sectional conflict leading to the American Civil War.

Stowe, a Connecticut-born preacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, focused the novel on the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters—both fellow slaves and slave owners—revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States alone. The book’s impact was so great that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln is often quoted as having declared, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

The book, and even more the plays it inspired, also helped create a number of stereotypes about black people, many of which endure to this day. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned “mammy”; the “pickaninny” stereotype of black children; and the Uncle Tom, or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom’s Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a “vital antislavery tool.”

References for the Novel

An engraving of Harriet Beecher Stowe
from 1872, based on an oil painting by
Alonzo Chappel.

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, wrote the novel as a response to the 1850 passage of the second Fugitive Slave Act (which punished those who aided runaway slaves and diminished the rights of fugitives as well as freed Blacks). Much of the book was composed in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, taught at his alma mater Bowdoin College.

Stowe was partly inspired to create Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the autobiography of Josiah Henson, a black man who lived and worked on a 3,700 acre (15 km²) tobacco plantation in North Bethesda, Maryland owned by Isaac Riley. Henson escaped slavery in 1830 by fleeing to the Province of Upper Canada (now Ontario), where he helped other fugitive slaves arrive and become self-sufficient, and where he wrote his memoirs. Stowe eventually acknowledged that Henson’s writings inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Stowe’s work became a best-seller, Henson republished his memoirs as The Memoirs of Uncle Tom, and traveled extensively in the United States and Europe. Stowe’s novel lent its name to Henson’s home—Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site, near Dresden, Ontario—which since the 1940s has been a museum. The actual cabin Henson lived in while he was a slave, still exists in Montgomery County, Maryland.

American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a volume co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters, is also a source of some of the novel’s content. Stowe also said she based the novel on a number of interviews with escaped slaves during the time when Stowe was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. In Cincinnati the Underground Railroad had local abolitionist sympathizers and was active in efforts to help runaway slaves on their escape route from the South.

Stowe mentioned a number of the inspirations and sources for her novel in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). This non-fiction book was intended to verify Stowe’s claims about slavery. However, later research indicated that Stowe did not actually read many of the book’s cited works until after the publication of her novel.

Publication

Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in National Era, an abolitionist periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851 issue. Because of the story’s popularity, the publisher John Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. While Stowe questioned if anyone would read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in book form, she eventually consented to the request.

Fullpage illustration by Hammatt
Billing for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The
engraving shows Eliza telling Uncle
Tom that she has been sold and is
running away to save her child.

Convinced the book would be popular, Jewett made the unusual decision (for that time) to have six fullpage illustrations by Hammatt Billings engraved for the first printing. Published in book form on March 20, 1852, the novel soon sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed (including a deluxe edition in 1853, featuring 117 illustrations by Billings).

In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold. The book was translated into all major languages, and eventually became the second best-selling book after the Bible. A number of the early editions carried an introduction by Rev James Sherman, a Congregational minister in London noted for his abolitionist views.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold equally well in Britain, with the first London edition appearing in May 1852 and selling 200,000 copies. In a few years over 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in Britain, although most of these were pirated copies (a similar situation occurred in the United States).

Major Themes

“The fugitives are safe in a free land.”
Illustration by Hammatt Billings for
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, First Edition.
The image shows George Harris,
Eliza, Harry, and Mrs. Smyth after
they escape to freedom.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery. While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity, she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery. Stowe pushed home her theme of the immorality of slavery on almost every page of the novel, sometimes even changing the story’s voice so she could give a “homily” on the destructive nature of slavery (such as when a white woman on the steamboat carrying Tom further south states, “The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections—the separating of families, for example.”). One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery was how this “peculiar institution” forcibly separated families from each other.

Because Stowe saw motherhood as the “ethical and structural model for all of American life,” and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women. Through characters like Eliza, who escapes from slavery to save her young son (and eventually reunites her entire family), or Little Eva, who is seen as the “ideal Christian”, Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe’s female characters are often domestic clichés instead of realistic women, Stowe’s novel “reaffirmed the importance of women’s influence” and helped pave the way for the women’s rights movement in the following decades.

Stowe’s puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel’s final, over-arching theme, which is the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how she feels Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery. This theme is most evident when Tom urges St. Clare to “look away to Jesus” after the death of St. Clare’s beloved daughter Eva. After Tom dies, George Shelby eulogizes Tom by saying, “What a thing it is to be a Christian.” Because Christian themes play such a large role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and because of Stowe’s frequent use of direct authorial interjections on religion and faith—the novel often takes the “form of a sermon.”

Style

Eliza crossing the icy river,
in an 1881 theater poster

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is written in the sentimental and melodramatic style common to 19th century sentimental novels and domestic fiction (also called women’s fiction). These genres were the most popular novels of Stowe’s time and tended to feature female main characters and a writing style which evoked a reader’s sympathy and emotion. Even though Stowe’s novel differs from other sentimental novels by focusing on a large theme like slavery and by having a man as the main character, she still set out to elicit certain strong feelings from her readers (such as making them cry at the death of Little Eva). The power in this type of writing can be seen in the reaction of contemporary readers. Georgiana May, a friend of Stowe’s, wrote a letter to the author stating that “I was up last night long after one o’clock, reading and finishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child.” Another reader is described as obsessing on the book at all hours and having considered renaming her daughter Eva. Evidently the death of Little Eva affected a lot of people at that time, because in 1852 alone 300 baby girls in Boston were given that name.

Despite this positive reaction from readers, for decades literary critics dismissed the style found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other sentimental novels because these books were written by women and so prominently featured “women’s sloppy emotions.” One literary critic said that had the novel not been about slavery, “it would be just another sentimental novel,” while another described the book as “primarily a derivative piece of hack work.” In The Literary History of the United States, George F. Whicher called Uncle Tom’s Cabin “Sunday-school fiction”, full of “broadly conceived melodrama, humor, and pathos.”

However, in 1985 Jane Tompkins changed this view of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with her book In Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. Tompkins praised the style so many other critics had dismissed, writing that sentimental novels showed how women’s emotions had the power to change the world for the better. She also said that the popular domestic novels of the 19th century, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were remarkable for their “intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness”; and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers a “critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville.”

Reactions to the novel

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has exerted an influence equaled by few other novels in history. Upon publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin ignited a firestorm of protest from defenders of slavery (who created a number of books in response to the novel) while the book elicited praise from abolitionists. As a best-seller, the novel heavily influenced later protest literature.

Creation and Popularization of Stereotypes

Illustration of Sam from the 1888
“New Edition” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The character of Sam helped create
the stereotype of the lazy,
carefree “happy darky.”

In recent decades, scholars and readers have criticized the book for what are seen as condescending racist descriptions of the book’s black characters, especially with regard to the characters’ appearances, speech, and behavior, as well as the passive nature of Uncle Tom in accepting his fate. The novel’s creation and use of common stereotypes about African Americans^[9] is important because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century. As a result, the book (along with images illustrating the book and associated stage productions) had a major role in permanently ingraining these stereotypes into the American psyche.

Among the stereotypes of blacks in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are:

• The “happy darky” (in the lazy, carefree character of Sam);
• The light-skinned tragic mulatto as a sex object (in the characters of Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline);
• The affectionate, dark-skinned female mammy (through several characters, including Mammy, a cook at the St. Clare plantation).
• The Pickaninny stereotype of black children (in the character of Topsy);
• The Uncle Tom, or African American who is too eager to please white people (in the character of Uncle Tom). Stowe intended Tom to be a “noble hero.” The stereotype of him as a “subservient fool who bows down to the white man” evidently resulted from staged “Tom Shows,” over which Stowe had no control.

In the last few decades these negative associations have to a large degree overshadowed the historical impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “vital antislavery tool.” The beginning of this change in the novel’s perception had its roots in an essay by James Baldwin titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In the essay, Baldwin called Uncle Tom’s Cabin a “very bad novel” which was also racially obtuse and aesthetically crude.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Power and Black Arts Movements attacked the novel, saying that the character of Uncle Tom engaged in “race betrayal,” saying that Tom made slaves out to be worse than slave owners. Criticisms of the other stereotypes in the book also increased during this time.

In recent years, however, scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have begun to reexamine Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stating that the book is a “central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations.”

Other Events on this Day

• In 1831…
  Edward Smith steals $245,000 from the City Bank in downtown New York, the first recorded bank robbery in American history.
• In 1916…
  The first U.S. air combat mission begins as the First Aeor Squadron takes off from Columbus, New Mexico, in the expedition to catch Pancho Villa.
• In 1952…
  The one millionth Jeep, originally produced as a “general purpose” vehicle for the U.S. Army, is manufactured.
• In 1979…
  The U.S. House begins televising its day-to-day business on C-SPAN.
• In 2003…
  An American-led coalition launches a war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, with air strikes on Baghdad.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Wikipedia: Uncle Tom’s Cabin… 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin

Brainy Quote: Slavery Quotes…
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/slavery.html