Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/2398356.2398369
historical Reflections
Five Lessons from
Really Good history

MY LAst CoLuMn (Septem- ber 2012) explored the lessons to be found in “bad history” of the in- vention of email. One of the things this reminded me of is just how little many people whose work focuses on information technology know about its evolution over the past 50 years. In this column, I look at some of the very best historical writing about computing from the past few years. I highlight one big lesson from each of four books, giving four ways in which learning more about history can change the way you think about computing. A bonus lesson sums up what the books tell us about the field as a whole.

You do not just have to take my
word on the “very best” part of the pre-
ceding description. The four books
are the first winners of Computer His-
tory Museum Prize, given each year to
the author of an outstanding book on
the history of information technology.
The prize was created in 2008 by SIG-
CIS, the organization for historians
of computing, with money pledged
by networking pioneer and inventor
of packet switching Paul Baran. Like
many other pioneers, Baran felt a keen
interest in preserving and document-
ing the heritage of his field. He was
a keen supporter of the Charles Bab-
bage Institute, the leading academic
and archival center for the history of
computing, and a fellow and advisory
board member of the Computer His-
tory Museum, in whose honor he sug-
gested the name of the prize. When
Baran died last year he left instruc-
tions for a gift to SIGCIS of $25,000 to
endow the prize in perpetuity.

 

1. Making stuff Creatively Made silicon Valley Creative In Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930– 1970 (MIT 2006, CHM Prize winner 2009) Christophe Lecuyer tackles one of the most familiar stories in the history of computing: the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, through William Shockley’s creation of a company in California to exploit his invention and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor by refugees from his erratic management style to the founding of Intel by some of the same people. This is the creation myth for computing in Silicon Valley and has been told and retold by journalists and biographers over the years. It explains how, over the course of a single working lifetime, transistors went from sizable handmade blobs sold at prices only

the military could afford to microscopic metal smears so cheap that we package millions of them into singing greeting cards and other disposable fripparies.

Scholarly and journalistic histories generally rely on different kinds of evidence. Journalists tend to shun endnotes and conduct their research largely by interviewing people. Scholarly historians place great emphasis on finding original written documents from the time in question. If handed a new book close to his or her own research area a historian will often go first to the endnotes, thumbing the back pages to evaluate the range and appropriateness of archival sources used before looking at the main text.