After his term as IFIP President [1965 - 1968] Prof. Speiser left the information processing field and IFIP had not heard of him for many years. We are grateful to Ambros for agreeing to take part in the project and we are very happy he is back with us. The interview focuses on his Presidential term and some of his recent activities.
Delivery Co.: During your tenure as IFIP President what, in your opinion, were the most significant IFIP developments and activities?
Ambros Speiser: Looking back at my Presidency, important events were the increase in membership (Chile, Hungary and Yugoslavia were admitted). During my term as Secretary-Treasurer, and, accordingly, prior to my assuming Presidency, an important step was a change in the management structure: Previously the federation was governed by a "Council", which was an assembly of all delegates. As the number of participating countries and, accordingly, of the Council members increased, it became necessary to create the "General Assembly", consisting of all delegates and meeting once a year, and the "Council", a smaller group including the officers and a selection of delegates, meeting twice yearly. In 1966 the Secretariat and treasury became more professional. Previously, I had done this work in my office as Director of the IBM Research Laboratory Zurich, together with my secretary. As the workload increased, it was decided to move the Secretariat and Treasury to the British Computer Society in London. After the 1968 Congress in Edinburgh these operations were transferred to Geneva.
Among the many events there are a few episodes that come to mind – not very important, to be sure, but still worth being remembered. One was the preparation of the Council meeting in Tbilisi (Tiflis) in the Soviet Union in spring 1968. At the previous meeting in Mexico City, the Soviet representative, Anatol Dorodnicyn, had invited the Council to meet in the Soviet Union. Everyone agreed. I asked whether a visitor’s visa for all the delegates would be provided, the answer was, yes. "Really for everyone, without exception?" Yes, of course. Two weeks before the meeting, the event occurred that I had feared: Dov Chevion called me from Israel, saying that his application for a visa had been rejected. So I took the telephone and I called Dorodnicyn in Moscow. I reminded him that he had promised visa for all members without exception, and I told him in no unclear terms that I would cancel the entire meeting if Chevion would not have his visa in time. I told him that I had asked my secretary to prepare telegrams for each one of the members, calling the meeting off, and that these telegrams would be sent out within a week. In the last moment Chevion called me, saying he had received word that he should travel to the Soviet Embassy in Vienna where his visa would be ready. Finally, after waiting in Vienna for a full day, he was allowed to travel, and the meeting could take place. Later I learned that Dorodnicyn in his fight with the Soviet bureaucracy was almost driven mad before he finally was successful.
Another event worth remembering was our visit to the IBM Research Laboratory at La Gaude, France. We had scheduled a General Assembly meeting in Nice, France, in 1965, and IBM had invited us to take half a day off for a visit to their Research Laboratory in nearby La Gaude. Upon my question whether all participating members would be welcome the answer was, of course, yes. So when we arrived with our bus we were cordially greeted and asked into the lobby. There we were politely told that the representative of the Soviet Union could not participate in the tour, he would have to stay in the lobby. My answer was straightforward: In that case nobody will participate. I said that I had instructed the bus driver to wait and that, we were ready to go back to Nice and visit a museum. Understandably this caused utmost embarrassment with our hosts. Finally, after about a half an hour of waiting – during which time, as I learned later, there were frantic telephones calls going back and forth between Nice and IBM Headquarters in Paris – we were told that everyone, including Dorodnicyn, would be welcome. I could ask the bus driver to leave, and there followed a most interesting visit.
Political undertones became visible also on another level. At the time of my Presidency, Germany was represented by Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Rechenanlagen (DARA) which insisted that it represented West Germany as well as East Germany. Accordingly, on the meeting table the delegate’s seat was marked "Germany". Then suddenly at one meeting an overzealous secretary had prepared a sign that read "Federal Republic of Germany". Fortunately I discovered the mistake before the delegates arrived, and the sign could be replaced in time. Otherwise this would have been taken as an indication that, by reserving the seat for the Federal Republic of Germany, we were prepared to allow another seat for the German Democratic Republic. But the fiction of a unified Germany could not be maintained much longer. In 1968 the West German representation went to "Gesellschaft fur Informatik", and a separate representation for east Germany had to be admitted.
Delivery Co: Please share with us a few words about your professional occupation, personal projects and hobbies after you left IFIP.
Ambros Speiser: I am one of the few IFIP Presidents (perhaps the only one?) who left the Information Processing field after his IFIP term. In 1966, I decided to make a complete change in my life and to accept the position of Director of Corporate Research of Brown Boveri, a large international corporation based in Switzerland, active mainly in the electric power field. Accordingly, steam turbines and electric generators, rather than computers, became the objects of my daily work. The two years of IFIP Presidency, while an employee of Brown Boveri, did present some problems. While my company was generous in allowing me time (and also travel expenses) for my IFIP work, in my contacts with colleagues and with top management I met little interest in IFIP. Certainly, the company is not to be blamed as priorities were simply different. Of course I found new and interesting challenges, not only in my main job, but also in national science policy and in professional societies, culminating in my Presidency of the Swiss National Academy of Engineering from 1987 to 1993. My hobbies to-day are articles in professional journals and in the daily press, as well as books on scientific subjects for lay readers, and I am giving talks (among other subjects on the history of computers), now of course with the help of my laptop computer and a beamer. My family with ten grandchildren is happy to find that their grandfather now has more time for them.