Projects Underway

Archival

ACM Oral History and Archives Project

Description: The Association for Computing Machinery has a History Committee, charged with fostering the collection, preservation, and interpretation of the history of the ACM and its role in the development of computing. To this end, the committee provides guidance within the Association and carries out activities independently and in collaboration with other groups.

Methodology: Another project is the deposit of historical records of the Association in a recognized public archive that, as of October 2007, is soon to be chosen.

Deliverables: Its major, ongoing product is a series of historical interviews of past ACM leaders and Turing-Award winners. These can be found as an overlay journal in the ACM Digital Library at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1141880

More information: http://history.acm.org

Exhibit

Computing: The First 2000 Years (working title)

Description: The purpose of this project is to present a history of computing using the physical artifacts, archives and recorded material in the Computer History Museum’s collections. The mission of the Computer History Museum is “to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age”. Its collections are already well established and unrivalled in their historical coverage of the electronic age of computing; this project is the first large-scale initiative in fulfilment of its mission to present and interpret its holdings to the public and represent a culminating point of a period of major expansion. An aim of the exhibition is to broaden the circle of appreciation of computing history beyond the computing and IT industry and its practitioners. While the exhibition is for both specialist and non-specialist visitors, non-specialists are the primary visitor group.

Methodology: There are three main phases of development: (1) research and content development, (2) design, (3) delivery. The research, content development is being carried out by five in-house researchers under the direction of the PI. Historical coverage has been divided into some 30 topics in the form of a Content Outline. Each topic is surveyed, an overview written, and material under the following categories of interest identified for each: Technical/Technological; Applications/Usage/Users; Business/Company History; Human interest/People; Social/Cultural; Objects; Videos/Interactives; and Fun Facts. This material provides the basis for the exhibition scheme that maps the material and associated artefacts into some 20 exhibition topic areas. These are carried forward into the design stage. Software and hardware are treated through a systems approach i.e. these are regarded as elements or ingredients of systems to provide useful function. The focus is on systems, their function and use: ‘world firsts’ and failed technologies are treated as back-stories for historic systems that had significant influence. There is an extensive consultative, review and advisory process. The project is overseen by an Exhibitions Committee consisting of five members four of whom are members of the CHM’s main Board, all of whom are industry leaders, active practitioners, engineers or computing pioneers. CHM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) play an essential specialist advisory role. These include the Semi-conductor SIG, two Software SIGs, and the Storage SIG. All are populated by leading figures in their specialist fields. In addition there are two levels of external review. Leading historians of computing (‘meta-reviewers’) are invited to review the scope and structure of the treatment, and ‘thread advisors’ are invited to review the material from particular perspectives.

Deliverables: The project will deliver a 14,000 square feet interpreted exhibition in the Computer History Museum building in Mountain View, CA, as well as a cyber version launched at the same time. The target launch date is Fall 2009. Special publications are under consideration. It is expected that there will be lectures and articles on museological aspects of the treatment model as well of course as on historical and historiographic aspects of research and interpretation.

Project timeline: September 2006 – October 2009

More information: http://www.computerhistory.org

Contact:
Doron D. Swade and Kirsten Tashev
Computer History Museum
swade@computerhistory.org

Historical

Information's Acolytes: Experts, Systems and Technologies in Corporate Administration 1917-2000

Description: To write the first overall history of the institutional, ideological, and occupational evolution of information technology use within the American corporation over the course of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, expertise in the technologies and techniques of managerial systematization was the hallmark of the modern manager inseparable from general management expertise. But subsequent decades saw the profusion of specialist groups and functions within corporate America around the combination of administrative management and information technology: office managers, systems and procedures specialists, punched card supervisors, data processing managers, operations research experts, management information systems specialists and chief information officers. Each group united corporate staff with consultants, business school staff and technology suppliers. Each supported one or more professional organizations with chapters, newsletters and journals. The interests and identities of these managerial technicians co-evolved with changing technologies and corporate institutions. From the mid-1950s onward, businesses began to use computers to automate their routine administrative work. Today, American corporations employ around ten million computer specialists, and annually spend around eight thousand dollars per employee on computer systems. As computers were applied by ever more firms, to ever broader areas of their operations, key administrative functions such as payroll, accounting and order processing became the domain of new kinds of specialist. As well as a history of these specialist groups, this is also a history of the concepts of information, system, and science as applied within the world of corporate management. From the 1960s onward, corporate computer managers have increasingly defined their expertise in terms of information. I like to think of it as history from the middle-out: studying the identities, ideologies, and skills of people in the central areas of the corporate pyramid using the same tools applied to those at its base. This approach is in accordance with the new institutionalism in organizational study, which emphasizes the study of change as a collective shift within a population of organizations rather than a single firm.

Methodology: This project breaks new ground by applying the techniques of social history, labor history and the history of science to the study of corporate quasi-managerial quasi-professionals. Unlike most business histories, this book does not rely on highly detailed histories of a tiny sample of firms. Instead, my focus is on representative shifts in corporate practices and structures. I do, however, use many short illustrations taken from specific firms. It examines each group in turn (Office Managers, Systems & Procedures Specialist, etc) in chronological order. Each chapter integrates discussion of technological developments with analysis of the ways in which these technologies were perceived and applied. Each chapter includes empirical evidence on the use of technologies and the prevalence of particular practices, based on contemporary survey data. To humanize the story, I look wherever possible at the careers of a small number of individuals (most but not all prominent experts). My intention is to reconstruct the information and ideas to which people were exposed and so recreate their understandings of the world. This is particularly important in computing, where firms began with no internal experience and have constantly looked outside for new ideas. I have prepared prcis of more than three thousand historical sources. The perspectives of general managers are recreated through publications such as Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Duns Review and Fortune. The specialist journals, magazines and newsletters of corporate accountants, operations researchers, and computer managers gave insight into these corporate subcultures. Particularly valuable were the journals and conference proceedings of groups such as the National Office Management Association, the Systems and Procedures Association and the National Machine Accountants Association. I made extensive use of obscure published and archival sources, particularly the extensive archival collection of the Data Processing Management Association.

Deliverables: A book manuscript, to be submitted to Johns Hopkins University Press for consideration in its Studies in Industry & Society series.

More information: http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom

Contact:
Thomas Haigh
thaigh@computer.org

Revolutionary Computing: Technology, Politics, and the Chilean Road to Socialism

Description: This project studies the history of cybernetics and computation during the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Chile created a computer network in the early 1970s, decades before the Internet became a feature of everyday life. This technological innovation coincided with a unique moment in Chilean political history, namely the election of the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende to the Chilean presidency. The computer network, known as Project Cybersyn in English and Proyecto Synco in Spanish, used a mainframe computer, customized software, and a network of telex machines to transmit data rapidly from the nationalized factories. From 1971-1973, a team of Chilean and British engineers, working under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, designed and constructed this unprecedented computer system with the support of President Allende. Although Allende’s brief presidency and his program for socialist change have arguably inspired more historical scholarship than any other moment in Chilean history, little is known about the Chilean government’s experiment with computing during this period. Even less is known about how this technological system contributed to the goals of Chile’s peaceful socialist revolution. Documenting the history of Project Cybersyn brings to light new and unstudied facets of Chilean history and will demonstrate how political ideas and political ideologies became inscribed in the form and function of Chile’s technological systems. It also brings a Latin American perspective to the history of technology and the history of computing and will bridge two disparate literatures, namely the history of technology and the history of Latin America.

Methodology: This project uses accepted historical methods, including archival research and oral history interviews. Source materials include documents from archival repositories in the United States, Britain and Chile and more than forty oral history interviews the PI conducted in English and in Spanish.

Deliverables: This project will result in an academic book on the history of Project Cybersyn and scholarly articles on the history of Chilean computing. The project builds upon previous doctoral dissertation research, which the PI started in 2001 and successfully defended in 2005. However, this project constitutes new and original research and is not a revision of the PI’s dissertation.

Project timeline: 2006 - 2009

Contact:
Eden Medina
edenm@indiana.edu