Dear All, I've been thinking about these kinds of histories, quarrels, and computer historiographies in recent months, esp. in the light of the "debate" around Shiva Ayyadurai and the invention of email. I'm interested in these histories, claims, and claimants for the origins and development of info technologies. They are stimulating and telling ("symptomatic" one might say) for the reason that "computer historiography" is not to my mind an impartial, neutral recounting of a series of rote facts, but rather itself a vibrant actor within the history of computational innovation. The Shiva case shows this pretty well, because the "historiography" is in some way coextensive with individuals staking claims that shape their ability to act in the field in the present (i.e. Shiva has patents, a start-up company, etc, so I think his belated discovery of his "invention" speaks to his present-day ambitions; his enlisting of The Smithsonian etc. to back up his claims is an fascinating case of an actor-network theoretical aligning of interests in action). Same goes for the Isaacson books, because they also involve efforts to ally, interest, and orient readers around certain conceptions of where and how invention happens. These frames and theories of innovation converge with other agendas (figuring out how private markets shaped the PC revolution; granting women greater representation in computational histories; writing a history of computing focused on its ability to stimulate our passions rather than just crunch numbers). These kinds of frames and agendas relate specifically to the struggles surrounding innovation and education in the present; that they should bear on popular histories shouldn't be so surprising, nor that they would come to bear upon how the Smithsonian or TIME magazine decides to acknowledge innovation. As for the kinds of cases surrounding the "ENIAC girls" invoked in a previous mail: Even despite the condescending instances of tokenism invoked by Tom, I think that when push comes to shove, actually distinguishing the "real" or "authentic" innovation from the cultural hype proves tricky (this isn't meant as a counter-argument--Tom's commented on these same problems elsewhere). As works by Ensmenger and Jen Light and others note, the distinctions between invention and innovation, hardware and software, engineers and mere programmers, scientific and technical labor, etc, themselves rest upon a set of (often naive and shortsighted) cultural assumptions over what's the "real" work of computing. Ensmenger in particular shows that these cultural assumptions have profound consequences at the very heart of technological development: There's a decent argument that early computer scientists entirely dismissed programming as a kind of subaltern variety of labor, contributing both to the wartime assignment of this work to women, and the industry-crippling software crisis that followed. This makes the attempt to sift though debating historical causes and factors enmeshed, from the outset, in debates over cultural theory, gender, notions of material history and cultural labor, and so on (Schaffer makes a similar point in Babbage's Intelligence). The attempt to identify a baseline for the "real history" of a technology and its development never "escapes" cultural agendas, for example, re-examining the under-representation of women in computing, which can be credibly cited as a determining factor in the technological (mis-)development in the field. So as I see it, the work of historiography is really about these ongoing battles and quarrels in our midst, each of which deploys alternate values and horizons for making sense of informatics--a process that necessarily will continue to evolve and unsettle, without much resolution, so long as our field remains vibrant and relevant. Isaacson is an actor in this field, much as we are, even as von Neumann was, even if there are (as Tom correctly urges us to recognize) different roles of vastly different import. Moreover, I think readers approach histories like Isaacson's with the ability to recognize that the claims are sort of puffed up. For example, I don't think many readers of Standage's history of the telegraph take as literally true his claim that it was "the Victorian internet" nor his other book's claims that the 17th c. Chess-Playing Turk gave rise to IBM computing machines. Readers turn to these accounts for fun, diverting accounts that mix trivia, drama, and fragments of technical knowledge, as well as orientation in the varied kinds of forces that play out in the history of a technology. These histories, in turn, were often convened in response to a given topical event (anniversary, marketing event, product launch, someone's death). Readers recognize that, too. I wrote about this awhile back in the IEEE Annals, in an article titled "The Historiographic Conception of Information," a kind of reflection on the status of historiography within computing. As I put it there, in discussing popular accounts of Claude Shannon on the occasion of his death, I wrote: /‘Computer history’’ does not appear before the public as a...natural and unmediated accounting of clearcut facts. Instead, a historically specific organization//of experts, research, resources, and interpretive frames emerges in response to present and presumably historical events. This is not the meddling intervention of outside interests and biases upon the neutral labor of historiography; rather, these are the basic conditions for writing computer history. These conditions’ appearance prompts questions about how a retiring mathematician [Claude Shannon], skeptical about his personal acclaim, emerged as a recognizable and heroic subject of popular interest./ I guess I'm not above taking some delight in our field's status as a kind of joyful cultural science whose interest and relevance is deeply tied up with its ability to bisect pop culture, current events, and institutional struggles. And if our field attracts shallow excitement and fantastic tale telling, I'm not above welcoming this, our imaginative fecundity, however suspect its offspring may seem. Best, Bernard On 10/5/14 9:47 PM, Chuck House wrote:
personal opinion, based on the Steve Jobs book and my interview with Isaacson after his talk at the Computer History Museum, this will be a relatively shallow treatment by a gifted captivating writer
On Oct 5, 2014, at 1:28 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org <mailto:thaigh@computer.org>> wrote:
Hello everyone, I haven't read Isaacson's book yet, but have been looking at some reviews with interest. It sounds from the review that Andy links to that the book gets better as it goes on. On the historical part, Wisnioski notes in his polite and generally favorable review that "Isaacson diligently attends to this syllabus, but it curbs his trademark enthusiasm, and many of his anecdotes are well-worn." What I've seen in other places makes me question the diligence of Isaacson's attention in the earlier chapters, like that of Jane Smiley in her attempt at a popular history of early computing a few years ago. According to a profile in the New York Times the book starts and ends with Ada Lovelace. Isaacson credits her to the extent of observing thathttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/fashion/the-innovators-by-walter-isaacson-... “Ada Lovelace defined the digital age,”Mr. Isaacson said in one of several recent interviews about the book…. “If it wasn’t for Ada Lovelace, there’s a chance that none of this would even exist,” Mr. Isaacson added as he waved his hand in the air, gesturing as if to encompass all of Silicon Valley and the techies sitting around us. Given that Babbage’s project was itself apparently unknown to computer pioneers of the 1940s such as Aiken, Eckert, Atanasoff and Mauchly at the time they conceptualized and designed their machines this claim seems to me quite impossible to justify, however profound Lovelace’s contribution to that project was. He also has a chapter on the “Women of ENIAC.” That has been put up as an text and audiobook extract as a teaser prior to the launch of the book.http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ This chapter captures a broader trend in ENIAC’s changing role in collective memory: for about fifteen years now it has been remembered primarily as a machine programmed by women. Even within the scholarly literature our discussion of the place of the initial cohort of six operators has sometimes mischaracterized the work they were hired to do and exaggerated their contributions to the development of thinking about what ENIAC could be used to do and how it might be configured to accomplish those tasks. That’s something I’ve become aware of in returning to primary sources for my forthcoming book/ENIAC in Action/with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope. Janet started this thread with mention of some NPR interviews, and coverage in her recent book/Recoding Gender/makes a definite contribution towards clarifying these issues. In contrast, drawing almost entirely on oral histories and memoir, Isaacson is for the most part just summarizing the consensus when he implies that Jean Jennings and her colleagues made fundamental innovations by, for example, realizing that the master programmer could be used to do the exact task it was designed and built to perform: looping nested subroutines. It seems that the book is held together with a Gladwellian argument about the collective and incremental nature of innovation, which is certainly preferable to the lone genius view of history. However the ending of the ENIAC extract makes me question how tightly though through this argument is: he asserts that “all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women”. That’s either a very radical STS argument that a computer is only created in use, or a sign that he did not spend much time thinking about what creating a computer involves. Now of course Lovelace, the “Women of ENIAC,” Hopper, and a few others are of interest to a lot of people because of their instrumental value as the source of parables useful in the rebranding of computing as a field created in large part by women. That’s a worthy goal, and there are no wrong reasons to be interested in history. Isaacson’s book will sell maybe 1,000 times more than anything that any of us are ever likely to write. However it would be nice if there was a way to achieve this without pretending that a causal chain makes Ada Lovelace essential to the “birth of the digital age” or Jennings and her colleagues essential to the creation of ENIAC. Is there a necessary tradeoff between historical accuracy and inspirational value, as with the story about young George Washington and the cherry tree? I hope not. Best wishes,
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed frommembers@sigcis.org <mailto:members@sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are athttp://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/and you can change your subscription options athttp://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members
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-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com