-----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Theodore Lekkas Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 10:17 AM To: members@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