I'm going through old DH conference abstracts, and I love the William Gibson-esque details that go into some descriptions. From 1989:

"The UWJ Project is currently being developed on Macintosh computers, with a minimum memory of 2 MB RAM and a 20 MB hard disk drive."

(This was a 1989 paper by Hiroshi Nara at Pitt. cc @adlangmead @zazie243 @adal_raja)

Oh here's another fun one from the 1989 DH conference:
"Metaphorical Understanding in Reader-Text Interaction: A Connectionist (Neural Network) Model" by Christian Koch of Oberlin's CS department.

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha
@achdotorg-sponsored 1989 session:
"Computing in the Humanities: Is it a Discipline?" -B. Buchwald
"The following questions will be addressed: 1. What is a discipline? 2. How does computing in the humanities figure as a discipline?"
(it goes up to 4)

1989:
"The Word Processor as a Tool for Comparative Analysis of Multiple Literary Translations" -W.E. Bartscht

Word processors, what a concept!

The cycles of DH (and its other names) are fascinating. The 1989 ACH/ALLC conference in Toronto had keynotes from Japan, the US, Germany, Canada, France, the UK, Norway, China, and Italy.

I haven't crunched the numbers yet, but the '89 conference appears to be more international and multilingual than many later conferences that intentionally positioned themselves as such.

1987 ACH / ICCH conference's highlight:
"Harnessing the CD-ROM = 'Laser Disk' for humanistic scholarship" by Robert Kraft.

(btw Kraft's CD-ROM presentation was only part of Helen Agüera's larger @NEHgov panel on CD-ROM Technology. cc @NEH_ODH)

Now I'm in the 1985 "DH" conference at BYU. First favorite: "A Portable Full-Text Retrieval System."

"10 million characters of storage easily holds the text of a novel and the necessary index files. At less than $6500, this system is within the reach of many literary users."

Going back in time one conference paper at a time, the fall and rise of trends becomes exceedingly clear. HyperCard, you were so full of promise.

It's amazing how much pedagogy was really at the heart of the community that eventually formed the digital humanities, and (based on my analyses for the last several years) just seems to have slowly lost respect from peer reviewers and thus traction from the conference program.

1989 seems to be the earliest year that I've seen a decent amount of people I still spend time with at DH conferences; before that, mostly legends (Zampolli, Raben, Hockey, Harris, Busa, etc.) and faceless names.

Also before '89, the institution and country categories in the database that I'm entering these paper records into start losing meaning. I don't have the U.S.S.R. in my country database. As we get earlier, more and more scholars are unaffiliated or coming from industry (IBM/etc).

Picture this: It's 1985, and the University of Guelph has just released its latest cutting edge file management research tool: the OMNICHRONICON.

It's incredibly difficult to use, the author grants, but the results are more than worth it.

OMNICHRONICON

@antimony27 Know any more about this? From an English professor there named C. Stuart Hunter.