Lecuyer’s book is a great example of the depth of insight and detail this approach can provide. He broadens the story out to encompass less widely celebrated firms, such as Litton Industries, National Semiconductor, and Varian Associates, and pushes earlier in time to document the importance of radio component manufacturing to the Valley. The book is based on careful research in the preserved archival records of the people and companies concerned, rather than the recycled anecdotes often used by journalists. While giving due credit to the importance of military sponsorship and Stanford University he puts the development of a pool of skilled labor and amateur electronics enthusiasts at the heart of the Valley’s success.

More than anything else, Lecuyer’s careful accumulation of detail shows that the early success of Silicon Valley was based on innovation in manufacturing techniques and processes, so that the design and production of its products was closely coupled. This makes one wonder how well the physical and organizational separation of the two now practiced by Apple and other modern firms will sustain long-term innovation.

2. Computing Was Built at the
intersection of Many other fields

Perhaps the most important choice facing a historian is the question of what it is that the book they are writing is really about. History is a kind of storytelling, and stories have protagonists. These protagonists might be specific individuals, as in biography, but they might also be technologies, ideas, companies, occupations, groups of people, countries, or even the entire world. There is also the question of when to start the story and when to stop, as it is rarely possible to cover the entire lifespan of the protagonist.

The topic of Atushi Akera’s book Calculating A Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (MIT 2007, CHM Prize winner 2010) is difficult to sum up in a single sentence, which is deliberate on his part. Like Lecuyer, Akera is bringing a new perspective to one of the best-known stories in the history of computing:

Historians make
an effort to write
clearly, at least
compared to a typical
technical paper in
computer science.

the creation during the 1940s of the programmable electronic computer, initially as a scientific instrument, and its rapid spread into universities, companies, and government agencies over the subsequent 15 years. One long chapter is a biography of John Mauchly, a creator of ENIAC ( remembered by historians as the first useful and flexibly programmable electronic computer). Other chapters explore topics as diverse as IBM’s drive to sell its equipment to the new market of corporate computing centers, the role of the SHARE user group in creating programming as a new occupation, and the connection work on timesharing operating systems in university computer centers and the emergence of computer science as an academic field of study. These choices reflect in part the availability of archival source material, but Akera’s shifts

of focus and topic from individuals to institutions and technologies are also supported by his choice of the “ ecology of knowledge” as an analytical framework. Put simply, this suggests that early computing developed as it did only because people with skills of many different kinds converged for reasons of their own around this new kind of technology. Because computer science, and computing more generally, emerged through the interactions of different kinds of experts and institutions we need to understand the entire intellectual “ecosystem” rather than fixating on any one part in isolation.

If that sounds daunting you might want to skip the introductory chapter. But the various stories told in the book are simply written and well researched, and the strength of Akera’s holistic approach is made tangible through many unexpected insights. For example, we learn that Mauchly flitted from topic to topic in his early career, trying to turn his Ph.D. in molecular physics into a stable research career in the dreadful economic climate of the 1930s. He approached computing through statistics, meteorology, and tinkering with electronics. Akera shows how this complex background influenced his design for the ENIAC.

 

3. scientists know the World through Computers Like most other academics, when historians of computing get together we tend to bemoan the tendency of the world to completely ignore our ground-breaking work addressing vital issues. We then go back to our studies and spend years writing narrowly focused, painstakingly researched, books of intense interest to a few dozen of our colleagues. Of the thousand or so copies published by a major academic press a couple of hundred are given away as review or prize submission copies and the rest, once purchased, usually languish unread on the shelves of the ever-dwindling number of libraries that can still afford to err on the side of completeness. The problem is that writing a book the wider world might actually notice takes a lot of work. It is not easy to tackle a big topic, or to