Today in 1909, Edmund C. Berkeley was born.
In an obituary in the July-September 1988 issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Eric A. Weiss described Berkeley as
The founder and lifelong editor/publisher of Computers and People, the oldest computing periodical still in existence… Berkeley was part of Howard H. Aiken’s Harvard Mark II team; was the founder and first member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); wrote the first book to popularize computers, Giant Brains or Machines that Think [1949]; and devoted his life to the mental improvement of his readers, the prevention of nuclear war, and the saving of the world.
Thomas Haigh in “Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950–1968”:
The issues addressed by information theory were fundamental to the design of computers that could store data and move it between different internal components for processing. This relation between computer and information was the organizing theme of Edmund Berkley’s seminal 1949 book, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think—the first to introduce electronic computers and their potential use in business to a general audience. Berkley, a former insurance executive, gave early expression to the idea of information as a ubiquitous presence in the natural and social worlds. He made the computer less threatening by presenting it as the latest and most powerful in a series of pieces of “physical equipment for handling information” that included everything from nerve cells to writing to human gestures.
Computers and Automation was the original title of Berkely’s magazine. The cover of the January 1963 issue featured a computer-generated image by Efraim Arazi which Berkeley called "computer art," coining and adding a new term to the expanding vocabulary of our digital lives.
Berkely gave the image the title “a portrait by a computer as a young artist” and told his readers:
The brush is an electron beam; the canvas, an oscilloscope; the painter, an electronic computer. The result: an intriguing form of "electronic surrealism"… The work was created by [Efraim] Arazi, a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working under Associate Professor Robert O. Preusser… Mr. Arazi says that the next step in his work to make the computer a skilled companion in artistic creation is to free the computer from the limitations of two dimensions and of monochrome.
Efraim Arazi went on to participate in the development of the television camera that transmitted images in real-time from Apollo 11 and, in 1967, to found Scitex, the first successful Israeli tech startup, developing hardware and software for the graphics design, printing, and publishing industries.
James Vincent in The Verge:
This piece of "electronic surrealism," as the editors described it, wasn't just a departure from the magazine's traditional covers (smartly dressed engineers grinning over desk-sized computer banks), it was also one of the earliest documented examples of computer art ever, and the editors were so taken with it, that in February of the same year, they introduced an annual competition. It was "the first of its kind," writes art historian Grant D. Taylor in his book When the Machine Made Art, and the journal had a "crucial role in connecting the growing number of interested technologists and artists."
Announcing the change (on January 1, 1974) of title from Computers and Automation to Computers and People, Berkeley explained its mission in the November 1973 issue:
Computers and Automation, established 1951 and therefore the oldest magazine in the field of computers and data processing, believes that the profession of information engineer includes not only competence in handling information using computers and other means, but also a broad responsibility, in a professional and engineering sense, for:
--The reliability and social significance of pertinent input data;
--The social value and truth of the output results.
In the same way, a bridge engineer takes a professional responsibility for the reliability and significance of the data he uses, and the safety and efficiency of the bridge he builds, for human beings to risk their lives on. Accordingly, Computers and Automation publishes from time to time articles and other information related to socially useful input and output of data systems in a broad sense. To this end we seek to publish what is unsettling, disturbing, critical---but productive of thought and an improved and safer "house" for all humanity, an earth in which our children and later generations may have a future, instead of facing extinction. The professional information engineer needs to relate his engineering to the most important and most serious problems in the world today: war, nuclear weapons, pollution, the population explosion, and many more.
In the same IEEE Annals issue with the Berkeley obituary, Eric Weiss published another one, for Neil D. Macdonald, a
lifelong literary collaborator, close associate, and alter ego of the late Edmund C. Berkeley, died 7 March 1988 at the same instant that Ed did. Macdonald, although known to many through his writings and editing, was personally known to almost no one…
Not until Berkeley’s death, when I asked his colleague for obituary material, did I discover that Neil D. Macdonald was an alias Ed used to avoid the appearance that he produced his magazine almost single-handedly. In many ways this trick was characteristic of Ed. It was a gentle, sly, and entertaining joke that harmed no one.