cial intelligence and cognitive science over the ostentatious universality of cybernetic theory.

Beer and his collaborators never came close to fulfilling their grand vision, though they did produce some economic models of little practical use and an “operations room” with an obvious debt to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. As the revolution crumbled under a U.S. economic blockade and a series of strikes their most practical contribution to its defense was the national telex network, low tech even by the standards of the 1970s, which proved useful for centralized control of emergency responses. Beer himself was changed by his experiences in Chile, devoting himself to fixing the world rather than making money. The urbane lover of fine living gave up his Rolls Royce to spend much of his later career as a mystic, living simply in a primitive rural cottage.

This would seem to offer rich materials for a farce, or perhaps a tragicomic opera like those featuring talk show host Jerry Springer and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. To her credit, Medina avoids mockery while doing justice to the gripping weirdness of the story. She puts the Chilean experience center stage, examining tensions between Beer’s vision and the agendas pursued by various hosts and collaborators. Media’s heart is open to the hopes for a better world that drove Allende’s revolution and the faith her characters put in Beer’s approach, but is not shy about speaking up when she catches them exaggerating its actual accomplishments or making contradictory statements. One contribution of her work is to remind us that computer technology has been in use outside the U.S. and Western Europe for a long time, and that its history in the developing world may follow a quite different path.

To me, the most fundamental lesson is that all technology is political and most new approaches to computing are promoted with utopian fantasies that later come to seem embarrassing. We instantly recognize the political nature and unhinged ambition of the Cybersym project because they are alien to our own experience

these books
demonstrate
the rewards of
tackling big topics
of fundamental
importance.

in wealthy countries during an economically liberal era. But, as I have discussed elsewhere, a similarly impractical vision of gigantic, real-time systems incorporating forecasting models was a mainstream part of corporate America in the 1960s. 1 Even the science fiction control room idea was already established in the business press. 2 Likewise, the banking industry first embraced the idea of the “ cash-less society” almost 50 years ago, but it still retains a futuristic allure. You may also remember all the predictions that the Internet would transform politics, revitalize democracy, and solve the problems of U.S. education. Snake oil, utopian dreams, and science fiction narratives have played a much more important role in the adoption of information technology than we would usually like to admit.

5. the History of
Computing is Maturing

This kind of prize plays an important role in the development of a field. By honoring excellence it helps to shape a canon of exemplary work and to build a consensus on topics and approaches of central importance. So what can we learn about the history of computing by looking at the books together?

One thing that jumps out is just how far the field has developed from its earliest days in the 1970s. The history of computing used to focus on the history of computers themselves. While many scholars continue to look closely at particular machines, such as ENIAC, there has been an unmistakable shift from hardware to applications and from narrow technical histories to broad portrayals of technologies in their social contexts.

These books, in particular, demonstrate the rewards of tackling big topics of fundamental importance such as the rise of Silicon Valley or the rise of computer use within scientific practice.

There has also been a shift in the kinds of people telling the stories. Early activity on history of computing was driven by computer scientists and pioneers such as Herman Goldstine, Brian Randell, Bernie Galler, Donald Knuth, and Nick Metropolis. In contrast, all four prize-winning authors discussed in this column have Ph.D.’s in some variety of science and technology studies or history of technology. Two also hold degrees in computer science or electrical engineering. Three hold faculty positions—one in a department of science and technology studies and two within information schools. None are appointed primarily in history departments or history of science programs.

This hiring pattern reflects the openness of other disciplines to historical scholarship in computing, but also has a negative impact on the development of the field as most of the best scholars have limited opportunities to teach in their specialist areas or to train doctoral students in historical research. I recently learned that Medina’s book is also the first history of computing book to win the annual Edelstein prize from the Society for the History of Technology, which is indisputably a good sign for the recognition of work on computing by other historical specialists. Hopefully this column and other historical commitments by the ACM and IEEE can maintain a similar connection between computer people and historians. I like to think that Paul Baran would have approved.

 

References

1. Haigh, t. Inventing information systems: the systems men and the computer, 1950–1968. Business History Review 75, 1 (2001), 15–61.

2. Widener, W.R. new management concepts: Working and profitable. Business Automation 15, 8 (1968), 28–34.

 

Thomas haigh ( [e-mail]) is an associate professor of information studies at the university of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and chair of the sIGCIs group for historians of computing. a guide to other outstanding historical work is at http://www.sigcis.org/resources.

Copyright held by author.