[SIGCIS-Members] References on computer hobbyists, user periodicals etc.

[Meyer, Peter - BLS]

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Theodore Lekkas
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 10:17 AM
To: members at sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] References on computer hobbyists,user
periodicals etc.

Hello,
I am looking for references on the history of computer hobbyists, home
computer user groups, home computer publications.
Any suggestions from the members of the list would be most welcomed.

Theodore Lekkas
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Athens
Greece



It's a great subject!  I will be interested to learn from your work.

I studied the Homebrew Computer Club in the Menlo Park / Palo Alto, CA
area and interviewed a couple of people who attended early meetings in
1975.  I attended myself once in the 1980s.  Meant to write more in
detail about it but haven't gotten back to that.  Here are some sources.

* Evan Koblentz of this list pointed me to this collection of scanned
newsletters from the Homebrew club:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/index.html
* I found Steven Levy's _Hackers_ and Freiberger and Swaine's
_Fire_in_the_Valley_ to be useful on this topic.  I believe Steve
Wozniak's recent book was also helpful.
* At the 2008 SHOT, Elizabeth Petrick of UCSD gave a presentation about
the Homebrew Club.

I wrote a couple of economics papers about the processes of
technological innovation that can occur in these clubs, using Homebrew
as an example, and how that behavior is parallel to other cases, notably
to open-source software.  They're comparative, not primary-sourced
histories.  

* This one is called "Episodes of collective invention":
http://www.bls.gov/osmr/pdf/ec030050.pdf and compares the underlying
behavior to other cases descriptively.
* This one called "Network of Tinkerers" is a micro-economic model that
gives an underlying structure for the innovative behavior that these
clubs can generate:  http://www.bls.gov/osmr/abstract/ec/ec070120.htm
(it's not a history, but provides an precise counterargument to anyone
who says that sharing innovations in a hobbyist/experimental/scientific
context is unimportant or irrational behavior.)

This is a rich topic, about which much more is to be discovered.  Such
comparisons can help us understand certain attributes of societies and
organizations that enable them to generate useful technological
innovation.

-- 
Peter B. Meyer       Research economist      202-691-5678
Office of Productivity and Technology, U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics