Fwd: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems'
Hello, For those of you that are not on the H-SCI-MED-TECH mailing list and have not seen this announcement, it might have interest Best Julie ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Nathan Ensmenger, H-SCI-MED-TECH <smtedit@mail.h-net.msu.edu> Date: 2010/5/11 Subject: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems' To: H-SCI-MED-TECH@h-net.msu.edu Lars Heide. Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880--1945. Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 369 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-9143-4. Reviewed by Larry Frohmann (State University of New York at Stony Brook) Published on H-German (May, 2010) Commissioned by Benita Blessing The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems From their first major use in tabulating the 1890 United States
census to the breakthrough of digital computers and magnetic storage in the 1970s, punched cards were the dominant technology for processing the vast amounts of information needed by large, complex enterprises and the modern social state. As Lars Heide makes clear in _Punched-Card Systems_, without this information-processing capability, the modern world would have looked quite different, and certainly less modern. Heide's prodigiously researched book provides a comparative study of the development of punched-card technology and its application in the United States, England, France, and Germany from the 1880s to the end of World War II. His point of departure is a dissatisfaction or discomfort with works in the sociology of technology that focus primarily on the social impact of technology, while treating its development as an external factor. Instead, Heide's aim here is to develop an excentric or peripheral account that will explain the trajectory of technological development--i.e., the decision to pursue or neglect a technically feasible path of innovation--not in terms of a company's ability to develop and market a given technology, but rather as an attempt to meet the demands of its real or imagined users and uses. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach, Heide follows the development of punched-card technology through four successive moments of provisional path stability, or technological "closure," relating to its use for, first, the compilation of counting-based census statistics; second, the processing of general statistics, third, bookkeeping; and fourth, the operation of large population registries. The bulk of the book documents in great detail the wide variety of user-related factors that shaped the development of these applications in different national contexts. Such factors included: the obstacles presented by prior commitment to an alternate path of technological development; conditions of access to patented technologies; the intrinsic complexity of punched-card technologies, the ability to accumulate relevant expertise, the ability to leverage knowledge in related manufacturing fields, and associated difficulties in manufacture and operational reliability; the degree to which the acceptance of one technology was dependent on the development of ancillary technologies (such as the ability to print the results of calculations or to store and operate with intermediate sums); success in exploiting prime mover advantages (or the failure to do so); the ability to raise sufficient operating capital and effectively manage it; the development of business or social processes of such scale and complexity that they could no longer be adequately controlled through the use of manual methods of data management; the willingness of potential public- and private-sector users to invest in new data-processing technologies that could only be profitably employed on a continuous basis; and the adoption of punched-card technology by a user influential enough to serve as a model for other potential users. Although these factors may cumulatively shed a great deal of light on the theoretical question that Heide set for himself, it is less clear that potential readers will share this particular set of concerns. Ultimately, Heide's decision to bracket the question of how this new technology affected the organization and strategic functioning of firms and states or the meaning of the information explosion that appears in the book's title will limit the appeal of the book. The one point where Heide looks beyond the dynamics of technological change is his discussion in the final chapter of the use of punched cards to maintain large population registries. These registries enhanced the ability of nation-states to locate and control their individual inhabitants. In this vein, card systems changed over time in relation to different organizations' technological needs, resulting in systems that were significantly different and more powerful than the original system. Examples of institutions that developed more sophisticated punched-card technology include the U.S. Social Security system, the French national population and military mobilization registry, and the belated efforts of the Nazis to develop an automated registry of the entire population that would help identify and exclude unwelcome members of society. The one point where Heide looks beyond the dynamics of technological change is his discussion of the use of punched cards to maintain large population registries that enhanced the ability of nation-states to locate and control their individual inhabitants. Technologically, the card systems developed for the American Social Security system, the French national population and military mobilization registry, and the belated efforts of the Nazis to develop an automated registry to facilitate the mobilization of the population and the identification and exclusion of community aliens all required new punched-card technologies that were different and more powerful than those developed for existing bookkeeping systems. In the long-simmering debate over the role of census data, population registries, the _Volks_- and _Judenkarteien_, and punched-card systems in the perpetration of the Holocaust, Heide stakes out a rather moderate position. He argues, echoing claims made by others, that the information contained in the nationwide network of locally maintained manual population registries set up on the basis of the 1938 _Reichsmeldeordnung_ was, in conjunction with other information available to the police and security agencies, more than adequate to seek out Jews for deportation. This ability becomes all the more important since it was possible even in the absence of an automated national registry whose development was, in any case, blocked by the resistance of the Gauleiter and other officials to the further centralization of power in the hands of Albert Speer. The book ultimately remains a narrowly focused study in the sociology of technology. It does not address either the question of how this new technology affected the organization and strategic functioning of firms and states. Nor does Heide discuss the meaning of the information explosion that appears in the book's title. Without asking Heide to have written a different book that would add to the substantial literature that does address these topics, there is no way to dismiss the problem that Heide's decision to ignore these issues will limit the appeal of the book for many audiences. Citation: Larry Frohmann. Review of Heide, Lars, _Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880--1945_. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2010. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30100 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Julie Katrine Hugsted phone: DK: (+ 45) 51 92 02 83
Hello, Julie's contribution reminds me that Isis has just recently published my review of Fred Turners book. This is the text I sent (the original was a bit longer) but I thought I should wait for it to be published before sharing it with the list. While I'm here: the guy who reviewed Lars Heide's book seemed rather grumpy! Or rather he didn't have any interest in the use and development of punched card technology except in as much as it might have had a major social impact. So let me add that it is well worth reading and is by far the broadest and deepest account so far published of the evolution of punched card machine applications over a range of countries and industries. In exploring the shaping of technology by users it is an excellent complement to JoAnne Yates' work on punched card use in the insurance industry. If you come across other reviews of interest to readers on the list please feel free to link or forward to our list. Tom Review of From Counterculture to Cyberculture Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee Preprint text -- Published version March 2010 in Isis. Turners book is one of the best every written on the history of information technology. It centers on the unlikely career of Stewart Brand, who happily for this purpose personifies the Bay Areas paradoxical success as Americas central hub for counter-cultural politics, new age fads, and high technology entrepreneurship. Having arrived to study biology at Stanford University Brand soon immersed himself in the emerging countercultural scene. He took acid, hung out with the Merry Pranksters, and organized the multimedia Trips Festivals. In 1968 he started a business to serve the areas burgeoning population of rural communes. It published the Whole Earth Catalog, which Turner calls a smorgasbord of books, mechanical devices, and outdoor recreational gear showcasing items from birch cribs to electronic calculators. Its title reflected Brands 1966 campaign to have NASA release a picture of the Earth from space, something he presciently believed would act as a powerful symbol of the worlds fragility and interdependence. The catalogs eccentric scope and deliberate juxtapositions made it a powerful exemplar of the holistic mindset it promoted. Brands slogans of access to tools and whole systems promised to supply individuals and local communities with the technologies (literal and intellectual) needed to defend themselves against the deadening conformity of government and big business. Journalistic accounts of the origins of personal computing, most recently John Markoffs disjointed What the Doormouse Said, have celebrated connections between computer enthusiasts and the counterculture without really getting to grips with their substance or asking what the counterculture actually was. Turner argues powerfully for the need to separate the political activism of the New Left from the libertarian lifestyle tinkering of what he calls the New Communalists. More provocatively he suggests that the devotion of Brand and his followers to cybernetics, systems thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ad-hoc non-hierarchical forms of organization did not, as they believed, set them aside from the military-industrial-academic complex of the Cold War. Instead, drawing primarily on characterizations of the MIT Radiation Lab made by Peter Galison and David Mindell, he insists that these values united the counter culture with the elites of the Cold War research world. This argument implies that the books title might more accurately be reversed to read From Cyberculture to Counterculture. The Whole Earth Catalog ceased publication in 1972, though Brand mined similar territory with successor publications such as CoEvolution Quarterly into the 1980s. As the commune movement fizzled Brand developed a growing interest in computer technology. A failed publication of the 1980s, The Whole Earth Software Catalog, merged his countercultural networks with the world of personal computer enthusiasts. This produced the WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link), an extremely influential online conferencing system marked by its sense of community and wide-ranging discussions of politics, culture, and technology. It was the WELL that inspired Howard Rheingold to devise the concept of virtual community. Brands cohort spearheaded what Turner calls a reversal of the political valance of computers from remote, impersonal things used by agents of government and big business to intimate devices able to knit communities together and unleash personal potential. Brands personal networks extended ever further into the worlds of business and computing research. He formed an alliance with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MITs influential Media Lab. Brands popular book Inventing the Future celebrated the labs potential to reconnect individuals and rebuilt communities via computer systems. Brand founded another business, the Global Business Network, to bring executives to a series of seminars and retreats. In 1990 Brand helped charter the Electronic Frontier Foundation to keep cyberspace free of government regulation. Many of Brands associates became investors in, editors of, or contributors to Wired magazine. It was both a mascot and an early driver of the high-tech bubble of the 1990s. Embracing networks and computer technologies as both personally empowering and socially transformative, Wired promoted Brands friends (dubbed the digerati) as visionaries and advanced a libertarian political agenda. Like Brand, Wired claimed descent from the counterculture of the 1960s while supporting Newt Gingrich whose idiosyncratic blueprint for a Republican revolution mixed social conservatism with a rhetoric of decentralization, entrepreneurship, and technological transformation. Turner writes clearly and concisely, organizing his sprawling story into a well crafted narrative around the twists and turns of Brands career. He nimbly summarizes the many relevant contexts and secondary literatures needed to address topics from the New Left to cybernetics to the founding of Wired magazine. He uses archival sources and access to the participants, including Brands personal diaries, to offer a seemingly authoritative telling of these stories. Some of these incidents are already familiar from journalistic accounts. Others are less well known. I was particularly interested in the explanation of exactly how cyberspace moved from its origins in the 1980s as a science fiction phrase to describe a deeply immersive virtual world to its vogue in the 1990s to describe text-based computer communication. The books primary value comes from integrating all these episodes into a single story. This exposes the surprising consistence of Brands philosophy and method of operation. For example, Turner discovers commonalities between the organization of the Whole Earth Catalog and the later WELL network. The Whole Earth Catalog, cast here as an information technology, included heated discussion from readers and projected itself as the focal point of an intellectually diverse community. Brand retained his quasi-mystical faith in utopian transformation and the power of technologies and ideas to empower individuals. He worked by making himself the focal point of a broad network, using the rhetoric of systems theory as what Turner, following Galison, calls a contact language for symbolic trading between disparate intellectual communities. We also see parallels between Brands own career and the vision he espoused of a world of skilled free agents growing rich through networks and the exchange of information. Turner resists the urge to editorialize but is unafraid to subject Brand to historical scrutiny, finding historical voices to note that his networks and communities were made up almost exclusively of young white men and that his ostensibly apolitical stance ignored the realities of social class. However it remains unclear whether Turner believes that the language of systems and cybernetics Brand and his counterparts appropriated represented a substantive transfer of concepts and methods from the Cold War elite or just a fashionable vocabulary on which to draw. This book makes an important contribution to historicizing the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s and demonstrating to historians the centrality of insights from the history of science and technology in studying the cultural history of these turbulent decades. From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of julie hugsted Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 8:06 AM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems' Hello, For those of you that are not on the H-SCI-MED-TECH mailing list and have not seen this announcement, it might have interest Best Julie
Tom's excellent review of Fred Turner's book reminds me that I promised to report back to this list on development of my History of Computers and the Internet syllabus. It's available at http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/379syll.pdf, or on the SIGCIS web page. In addition to numerous articles, I used four books: Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer (general history of computers) Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (history of the software industry) Abbate, Inventing the Internet Of these, I think I will remove the Campbell-Kelly book — it's a bit too business-history oriented for undergrads (sorry Martin!) I agree entirely with Tom's assessment of Turner's book as among the best in the field. While I wouldn't use it in place of a general-history book like Computer, it does work well as a supplement, and it gave me a chance to lecture on American culture decade by decade. Today's undergrad students really don't know much about the pre-Internet era, or even about events before around 2000, so unless they're history majors it's important to throw in some context. My wish list for future textbook-y work in this field - we really need.... - a new general history (or a new edition of Computer) that puts more emphasis on the European and Japanese stories - a book on the history of computer games that blends serious (i.e. non-lionizing) business history with the cultural side of gaming, including serious review of the psychology of gaming (including impacts on behavior). The ideal book would also cover the military-gaming links in detail. - a history of software structured not around the development of software firms, but around the development of software functionality and the impacts of software on business and society. Such a thing might need to be web-based, with emulators, etc. - a real history of the web These items all call for teams rather than individuals to write them. - Paul On May 12, 2010, at 3:53 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:
Hello,
Julie's contribution reminds me that Isis has just recently published my review of Fred Turner’s book. This is the text I sent (the original was a bit longer) but I thought I should wait for it to be published before sharing it with the list.
While I'm here: the guy who reviewed Lars Heide's book seemed rather grumpy! Or rather he didn't have any interest in the use and development of punched card technology except in as much as it might have had a major social impact. So let me add that it is well worth reading and is by far the broadest and deepest account so far published of the evolution of punched card machine applications over a range of countries and industries. In exploring the shaping of technology by users it is an excellent complement to JoAnne Yates' work on punched card use in the insurance industry.
If you come across other reviews of interest to readers on the list please feel free to link or forward to our list.
Tom
Review of From Counterculture to Cyberculture Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee Preprint text -- Published version March 2010 in Isis.
Turner’s book is one of the best every written on the history of information technology. It centers on the unlikely career of Stewart Brand, who happily for this purpose personifies the Bay Area’s paradoxical success as America’s central hub for counter-cultural politics, new age fads, and high technology entrepreneurship. Having arrived to study biology at Stanford University Brand soon immersed himself in the emerging countercultural scene. He took acid, hung out with the Merry Pranksters, and organized the multimedia Trips Festivals. In 1968 he started a business to serve the area’s burgeoning population of rural communes. It published the Whole Earth Catalog, which Turner calls a “smorgasbord of books, mechanical devices, and outdoor recreational gear” showcasing items from birch cribs to electronic calculators. Its title reflected Brand’s 1966 campaign to have NASA release a picture of the Earth from space, something he presciently believed would act as a powerful symbol of the world’s fragility and interdependence. The catalog’s eccentric scope and deliberate juxtapositions made it a powerful exemplar of the holistic mindset it promoted. Brand’s slogans of “access to tools” and “whole systems” promised to supply individuals and local communities with the technologies (literal and intellectual) needed to defend themselves against the deadening conformity of government and big business.
Journalistic accounts of the origins of personal computing, most recently John Markoff’s disjointed What the Doormouse Said, have celebrated connections between computer enthusiasts and the counterculture without really getting to grips with their substance or asking what the counterculture actually was. Turner argues powerfully for the need to separate the political activism of the New Left from the libertarian lifestyle tinkering of what he calls the New Communalists. More provocatively he suggests that the devotion of Brand and his followers to cybernetics, systems thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ad-hoc non-hierarchical forms of organization did not, as they believed, set them aside from the military-industrial-academic complex of the Cold War. Instead, drawing primarily on characterizations of the MIT Radiation Lab made by Peter Galison and David Mindell, he insists that these values united the counter culture with the elites of the Cold War research world. This argument implies that the book’s title might more accurately be reversed to read “From Cyberculture to Counterculture.”
The Whole Earth Catalog ceased publication in 1972, though Brand mined similar territory with successor publications such as CoEvolution Quarterly into the 1980s. As the commune movement fizzled Brand developed a growing interest in computer technology. A failed publication of the 1980s, The Whole Earth Software Catalog, merged his countercultural networks with the world of personal computer enthusiasts. This produced the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), an extremely influential online conferencing system marked by its sense of community and wide-ranging discussions of politics, culture, and technology. It was the WELL that inspired Howard Rheingold to devise the concept of “virtual community.” Brand’s cohort spearheaded what Turner calls a reversal of the “political valance” of computers from remote, impersonal things used by agents of government and big business to intimate devices able to knit communities together and unleash personal potential.
Brand’s personal networks extended ever further into the worlds of business and computing research. He formed an alliance with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s influential Media Lab. Brand’s popular book Inventing the Future celebrated the lab’s potential to reconnect individuals and rebuilt communities via computer systems. Brand founded another business, the Global Business Network, to bring executives to a series of seminars and retreats. In 1990 Brand helped charter the Electronic Frontier Foundation to keep “cyberspace” free of government regulation. Many of Brand’s associates became investors in, editors of, or contributors to Wired magazine. It was both a mascot and an early driver of the high-tech bubble of the 1990s. Embracing networks and computer technologies as both personally empowering and socially transformative, Wired promoted Brand’s friends (dubbed the “digerati”) as visionaries and advanced a libertarian political agenda. Like Brand, Wired claimed descent from the counterculture of the 1960s while supporting Newt Gingrich whose idiosyncratic blueprint for a “Republican revolution” mixed social conservatism with a rhetoric of decentralization, entrepreneurship, and technological transformation.
Turner writes clearly and concisely, organizing his sprawling story into a well crafted narrative around the twists and turns of Brand’s career. He nimbly summarizes the many relevant contexts and secondary literatures needed to address topics from the New Left to cybernetics to the founding of Wired magazine. He uses archival sources and access to the participants, including Brand’s personal diaries, to offer a seemingly authoritative telling of these stories. Some of these incidents are already familiar from journalistic accounts. Others are less well known. I was particularly interested in the explanation of exactly how “cyberspace” moved from its origins in the 1980s as a science fiction phrase to describe a deeply immersive virtual world to its vogue in the 1990s to describe text-based computer communication.
The book’s primary value comes from integrating all these episodes into a single story. This exposes the surprising consistence of Brand’s philosophy and method of operation. For example, Turner discovers commonalities between the organization of the Whole Earth Catalog and the later WELL network. The Whole Earth Catalog, cast here as “an information technology,” included heated discussion from readers and projected itself as the focal point of an intellectually diverse community. Brand retained his quasi-mystical faith in utopian transformation and the power of technologies and ideas to empower individuals. He worked by making himself the focal point of a broad network, using the rhetoric of systems theory as what Turner, following Galison, calls a “contact language” for symbolic trading between disparate intellectual communities. We also see parallels between Brand’s own career and the vision he espoused of a world of skilled free agents growing rich through networks and the exchange of information.
Turner resists the urge to editorialize but is unafraid to subject Brand to historical scrutiny, finding historical voices to note that his networks and communities were made up almost exclusively of young white men and that his ostensibly apolitical stance ignored the realities of social class. However it remains unclear whether Turner believes that the language of systems and cybernetics Brand and his counterparts appropriated represented a substantive transfer of concepts and methods from the Cold War elite or just a fashionable vocabulary on which to draw.
This book makes an important contribution to historicizing the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s and demonstrating to historians the centrality of insights from the history of science and technology in studying the cultural history of these turbulent decades.
From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of julie hugsted Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2010 8:06 AM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: H-Net Review Publication: 'The Evolution of Punched-Card Systems'
Hello,
For those of you that are not on the H-SCI-MED-TECH mailing list and have not seen this announcement, it might have interest Best
Julie
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————————————————— Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Professor of Information A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press 2010) School of Information 3078 West Hall University of Michigan 1085 South University Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu
participants (3)
-
julie hugsted -
Paul Edwards -
Thomas Haigh