History of Computing. Learning from the Past

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2012

This narrative on computing history reflects the experiences of the author and his involvement with computing history over a quarter century. The discussion portrays a transition from loathing history as a student to embracing computing history as a professional. The author shows how storytelling can produce interesting excursions on technical subjects and ways in which teaching computing with history can elevate student interest. He also provides examples showing ways in which historical events could complement computing studies. The article also explains how the author's earlier efforts in using history to teach computing led to a landmark publication and subsequent activities within IFIP leading to conferences and related publications.

The history of information technology is not the history of how wires got into boxes. Technological developments are intertwined in the social fabric, and their story includes the direct experience of individuals and the impacts felt by communities. Computers were once thought to be relevant only to specialists, but people today are more aware of the reach of computers into their lives. Similarly, the history of computing has traditionally been the focus of specialists in technology, but a greater variety of scholarly researchers is now studying archival collections about computing. The Social Issues in Computing Collection at the University of Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute seeks to collect a wider array of perspectives on the industry and even to change the way people think about computing and archives.

Joseph saidu , 1

Preprints zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik, 2019

The historicization of the computer in the second half of the 20th century can be understood as the effect of the inevitable changes in both its technological and narrative development. What interests us is how past futures and therefore history were stabilized. The development, operation, and implementation of machines and programs gave rise to a historicity of the field of computing. Whenever actors have been grouped into communities – for example, into industrial and academic developer communities – new orderings have been constructed historically. Such orderings depend on the ability to refer to archival and published documents and to develop new narratives based on them. Professional historians are particularly at home in these waters – and nevertheless can disappear into the whirlpool of digital prehistory. Toward the end of the 1980s, the first critical review of the literature on the history of computers thus offered several programmatic suggestions. It is one of the peculiar coincidences of history that the future should rear its head again just when the history of computers was flourishing as a result of massive methodological and conceptual input. The emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, which caught historians totally by surprise, led to an ahistorical, anthropological, aesthetic-medial approach to digitization. The program for investigating the prehistory of the digital age was rewritten in favor of explaining the development of communication networks. Computer systems and their concepts dropped out of history. This poses a problem for the history of computers, insofar as the success of the history of technology is tied to the stability of its objects. It seems more promising to us to not attribute the problem to the object called computer or to the “disciplinary” field, but rather to focus entirely on substantive issues. An issue-oriented technological history of the 21st century should be able to do this by treating the history of computers as a refreshing source of productive friction.

2018

This paper examines the development of a number of computers designed and built in Australia that really changed everything! Australia designed and built CSIRAC, the fourth stored program computer in the world. Prior to this however, in 1913 the Automatic Totalisator, although not a computer, performed many of the calculations later done by computers. SILLIAC, based on the ILLIAC was built in Australia. UTCOM and WREDAC, although built in the UK, were extensively modified in Australia. In the early microcomputer era the Australian designed and built Microbee computer was used extensively in homes and schools. The paper then discusses the ill-fated project to design and built an Australian Educational Computer. These computers were each designed and built for a purpose and the paper looks at the people, technologies and events that propelled this process. Actor-network theory is used as a lens for understanding the human and non-human elements of these historical developments.

In the initial period of electronic computing, it is important to recognise that most of the imaging was done by scientists for scientific purposes. These include data reduction and graphing and the visualisation of simulations made to ascertain that their theoretical work matched the results of their experiments. It is only because of the people who were more involved in computing at the computing level, for example programmers and mathematicians, that computer images in their own right began to be thought of as art. The interesting thing here is that many of the people involved in early computing were not simply doing a job but were very much enthusiasts spending large parts of their lives working with the machines. This could involve a large amount of their leisure time. Many of the odder manifestations of computing, for example the banners, calendars, and games, were the result of this use of time. 1

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2002

While Computing is a relatively new field, the true history of information technology is being confounded by the promulgation of myths that hide and confuse the truth. The current students of computing and information technology grew up not knowing that there was a world before the personal computer, or monitors, or the mouse. or Windows. and have little concept of where we came from or the steps that led to the present-day state-of-the-art. Bringing an understanding of computing into the classroom has the effect of bringing humanity to an otherwise androidal society, to recognize those who have made important contributions to the world of information technology, and to identify ideas and concepts that have been lost in the plethora of innovation.

Annals of the History …, 1999

Although history is a part of arts and sciences, the history of computing has yet to receive uniform acceptance in the academic community. The history of computing should be considered as a part of human understanding and how the development of computing has affected the ...