CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTECHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER CBI Vol. 40 No. 1/2 Fall 2018 In This Issue: Director’s Desk News from

CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

NEWSLETTER

CBI Vol. 40 No. 1/2 Fall 2018

In This Issue:

Director’s Desk

News from the Archives

Dryer Named 2018-2019 Tomash Fellow

Minnesota Computing History

2018 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients

Meritocracy in the IT Industry

Recent Publications

Featured Photograph

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CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER Fall 2018

Vol. 40 No. 1/2

In This Issue:

Director’s Desk 3

News from the Archives 5

Dryer 2018-2019 Tomash Fellow 9

Minnesota Computer History 10

2018 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients 13

Tracking Meritocracy in the IT Industry 14

Recent Publications 15

Featured Photograph 18

CBI Newsletter Editor: Juliet Burba

Charles Babbage Institute 211 Andersen Library University of Minnesota 222 21st Avenue South Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (612) 624-5050 Fax: (612) 625-8054

www.cbi.umn.edu The Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Technology is sponsored by the University of Minnesota and the information technology community. Charles Babbage Institute Newsletter is a publication of the University of Minnesota. The CBI Newsletter reports on Institute activities and other developments in the history of information technology. Permission to copy all or part of this material is granted provided that the source is cited and a copy of the publication containing the copied material is sent to CBI. © Charles Babbage Institute

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Director’s Desk From the origin of the Charles Babbage Institute nearly four decades ago, CBI historians and archivists have been dedicated to publishing impactful books, edited volumes, journal special issues, and articles. Nearly all of the more than 20 books and most of our many dozens of articles are peer-reviewed scholarship. These books and articles, along with our more than 500 oral histories, often were deliverables on sponsored research we conducted for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Department of Energy (DOE), and others. We have also edited multiple IT history book series as well as IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Alongside this focus on writing, editing, presenting, and facilitating IT history scholarship, CBI has engaged in public history—popular history for broad audiences—through print and online works, and public lectures intended for local, national, and even international audiences. Over the past few years, CBI Archivist Amanda Wick has been extremely important to these efforts and frequently does public programming and classroom instruction in addition to running the CBI Archives. A quick sampling of our past public history work here at CBI includes a short book former director Arthur Norberg and I published: IBM Rochester: A Half Century of Innovation (IBM, 2006). IBM printed 8,000 copies and freely distributed them to stakeholders in Minnesota and beyond. (It is also available as a CBI web hosted publication). As another foray in writing for larger audiences, I recently published biographical articles on public key cryptography co-inventors and Turing Award Winners Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman for the frequently visited ACM Turing Award site. Former CBI Director Tom Misa published multiple major reviews on popular IT history books in the wide-circulation journal Nature. And while his Digital State is unquestionably a deeply insightful scholarly book, it has a public history topic and stylistic flair that grew out of his ten-part evening CBI lecture series—geared for a general audience—on Minnesota’s computer history. Digital State was the inspiration for a recent year-long public history collaboration CBI just completed with the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA), the Dakota County Historical Society, local public television channel TPT, and industry veterans, to produce a major new Minnesota computing history website and to conduct video interviews toward a future TPT documentary. Funding for this endeavor was provided by the Minnesota Cultural and Historical Heritage Grants program administered by the Minnesota Historical Society. We are very pleased with the outcome of this multi-institutional effort (see related article), a project for which History of Science, Technology, and Medicine doctoral candidate and lead researcher and project manager Elizabeth Semler deserves special credit for her terrific work. Even though public history is not new to us here, moving forward we want it to be equally prominent to scholarly research in our programming—and with both scholarly and public history publications and projects we want to connect to ever broader audiences. After all, many people are deeply interested in the IT revolution and how it has and is changing our world. To this end, I

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am thrilled to announce a new hire, CBI Outreach Historian and Administrator Dr. Juliet Burba, who will be key to this effort. Dr. Burba comes to us from a highly distinguished career at two major history of science museums—the Science Museum of Minnesota (in St. Paul), and, more recently, The Bakken Museum and Library (in Minneapolis), where she served as Chief Curator and Director of Exhibits and Collections. It is, in fact, a return to CBI for Juliet; she worked with me on CBI’s NSF-sponsored Software History Project in the early 2000s as a doctoral candidate GSRA. While I will split my time but be more engaged in scholarly research, Juliet will concentrate on public history, in addition to her important administrative leadership role at CBI. Her tremendous knowledge and skills have already had a major positive impact and will help us raise CBI’s public history and outreach to the next level. As just one example with regard to outreach, Juliet is taking over as the editor of the CBI Newsletter. As we welcome Juliet, we are also extremely sorry to see CBI Administrator Kathryn Charlet move on (in May) after more than a dozen years. Katie’s work for CBI was truly exceptional. Some of her efforts were more public, while much was behind the scenes and greatly added to the institute’s productivity and success. We cannot thank her enough for her extraordinary dedication and the important role she played at CBI. She is pursuing an exciting new venture in leading/managing/working an organic farm. We wish her all the best with this opportunity. Finally, recent Carlson School of Management (Univ. of Minnesota) graduate Dr. Paul Nary, a CBI fellow last year, accepted an offer of Assistant Professor at the Wharton School of Management (Penn). Paul made extensive use of the Control Data Corporation Records in examining mergers and acquisitions in IT, as well as other coordination mechanisms between IT firms. We congratulate Paul on his doctorate and this prestigious appointment.

Jeffrey R. Yost

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News from the Archives

Arrival of the Jean E. Sammet Collection Previous newsletter columns have provided me with a platform to discuss the wide-ranging activities that have taken place in the archives and by archival staff in intervening months. This column will be slightly different as I hope to tell the story of the Jean E. Sammet papers and their subsequent arrival at the University of Minnesota in early March 2018. While a great many achievements and accomplishments have occurred within the archives since the last newsletter, this truly is the biggest story of the year for us! The story of how Jean Sammet’s papers came to the Charles Babbage Institute Archives (CBIA) is one that is more than 30 years in the making. In 1990, after considerable negotiation, the initial installment of Jean’s papers arrived at the archive. This installment comprised 178 boxes of material that included her personal research notes,

correspondence and membership documentation for some of the many organizations that she had been professionally involved in over the years (AFIPS, ACM, etc.), and her professional files from her tenure at IBM. This installment promised a taste of the collection in total, the remainder of which would not come to CBIA for some time. As documented in one of the most complex Deeds of Gift ever executed by the University of Minnesota Libraries, the remainder of Sammet’s papers would include selections from her personal library, her voluminous personal correspondence, presentations from speaking engagements, and her subject files utilized in the authoring of her seminal history of programming languages. So complex was the Deed of Gift with levels of restriction and dates for accessibility, that the initial installment was never processed beyond a basic survey. When Jean Sammet passed away in the spring of 2017, she left behind an immense legacy of professional contributions and accomplishments. An engineer with IBM for much of her career, she was formative in the development of numerous computing languages, including COBOL, FORMAC, and Ada. She was also the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a leader in the SIGPLAN group. This legacy is firmly documented in the remainder of her collection, which became available to CBIA for acquisition upon her death.

Sammet papers in original storage, Silver Spring, MD

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Another view of the Sammet papers in original storage

In the Deed of Gift, executed in 1990, Sammet indicated that the final installment of her papers would consist of “three bookcases, 36 five-drawer file cabinets, and five shelving units of miscellaneous materials housed at a remote storage unit.” When I read this short notice within the Deed, I admit to being filled with some trepidation. As many know, “collection creep” is a reality and I fully anticipated that the volume of Sammet’s papers to come would exceed the original estimate. I visited the remainder of the collection twice in 2017, the first to ascertain any collection creep and make an initial survey of the material and the second to prepare the collection for transfer to the University of Minnesota. Working hand in hand with the executors of the estate at Mt. Holyoke College (Sammet’s alma mater), I was pleasantly surprised to find that the collection had not ballooned in size and, moreover, was in pristine condition despite sitting for more than 20 years in a storage unit in Silver Spring, MD.

While sorting through the file cabinets, book shelves, and boxes in the storage units, I quickly realized that the collection would be a breakthrough for CBIA’s researchers. Touching on issues of gender hierarchies in technology, programming language development, the organizational

shifts and politics within major computing professional organizations, and tantalizing hints of Sammet’s forceful personality, this collection is an incredible resource. A small bequest in Sammet’s will allows staff to process the now 438 boxes of material and we look forward to sharing it with you early next year. Staff will provide periodic updates via the Charles Babbage Institute Facebook page, so be sure to check back in for pictures and stories from the collection.

After the Sammet papers arrived at Andersen Library, CBI Archivist Amanda Wick and student worker Mitchell Iverson work on rehousing the materials.

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Jean E. Sammet Papers upon arrival at Andersen Library

From the Jean E. Sammet Papers

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New and Notable Collections: Ben Shneiderman Photographs

In late August, Dr. Ben Shneiderman completed the donation of his significant collection of photographic prints and digital images. These still images document key figures in computing history and significant happenings at events and conferences, as well as some personal and biographical photographs. Dr. Shneiderman is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, the Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and a Member of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, as well as the nephew of world-renowned photojournalist David Seymour. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and NAI, as well as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. Dr. Shneiderman’s most widely-used contributions include

clickable highlighted web-links, high-precision touchscreen keyboards for mobile devices, and tagging for photos, among many others. Dr. Shneiderman is the author and co-author of numerous publications and his book Leonardo’s Laptop (2002) won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution. An important (and often personal) component of Dr. Shneiderman’s work has been related to photography, including development of the Photofinder and PhotoMesa tools. During his professional career Dr. Shneiderman photographed conferences and colleagues, and his MyLifePix archive of 12,000 photos is available with descriptions and indexing by name, date, and location. He has selected a set of key personalities who are leading HCI researchers and developers to profile through text and photos with Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal Photo Journal, which was featured in the New York Times (September 7, 2015). The Computer History Museum features Shneiderman’s photos of 22 key personalities in its exhibit Computer Pioneers: Photos from the Field. The Archives at CBI is honored that Dr. Shneiderman selected us as recipients of his significant collection, and we look forward to sharing it with our researchers in coming months.

Amanda Wick Interim CBI Archivist and Curator

Dr. Ben Shneiderman

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Dryer Named 2018-2019 Tomash Fellow The Erwin and Adelle Tomash Fellowship for 2018-2019 was awarded to Theodora J. Dryer, a doctoral candidate in History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Dryer completed her MA in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and has a BA from St. John’s College, Santa Fe, where she specialized in philosophy and history of science and mathematics. She has a recent Think Piece published with IEEE Annals of Computing titled “Algorithms under the Reign of Probability” and several manuscripts under review. Dryer has been actively presenting her research at a number of conferences, including the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), the History of Science Society (HSS), and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). Her dissertation, Designing Certainty: The Rise of Algorithmic Computing in an Age of Anxiety, 1920-1960, will trace the history of a single data architecture, Jerzy Neyman’s Confidence Interval Parameter, from its origins in Polish agricultural planning shortly following WWI, to its implementation in a variety of transnational contexts through WWII and into the Cold War. Confidence Intervals initially facilitated mathematical decision-making by allowing for uncertainty and real-world limits to knowability, instead of being limited to yes-no outcomes. Along the way, Dryer will show how Confidence Intervals were integrated into various calculating machine technologies, elucidating the technical, political, and economic connections between early twentieth century computing machines and the rise of electronic memory-stored computers following WWII. Dryer will argue that understanding the logic and philosophy behind algorithms in the interwar period is critical for understanding late twentieth century computing.

Juliet Burba

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Minnesota Computing History

Over the past year Charles Babbage Institute staff, a University of Minnesota History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (HSTM) doctoral student and an HSTM postdoc collaborated with the Minnesota High Technology Association, the Dakota County Historical Society, Twin Cities Public Television (the local PBS affiliate), the VIP Club (a local IT retirees group), and industry veterans (especially Rich Daly and Dale Weeks), to conduct a major research and public history project on computing history in Minnesota. This has been a very rewarding partnership, and we have just completed this important one-year project, funded by the state of Minnesota through the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants program, which is administered by the Minnesota Historical Society. CBI Archivist Amanda Wick has been the chief archivist advisor on the project, and I have been the chief historian advisor to it. University of Minnesota History of Science, Technology, and Medicine doctoral candidate Elizabeth Semler has served with great distinction as the lead researcher and project manager, and HSTM graduate Dr. Jonathan Clemens has been an important consulting advisor. The goal with the grant was two-fold: first, to develop and disseminate information and resources on Minnesota computing history, primarily focusing on the unparalleled sets of collections from the partnering organizations; and, second, to conduct video interviews with Minnesota computing pioneers and former CBI Director Tom Misa, author of Digital State: The Story of Minnesota’s Computing Industry. The latter goal—the interviews/footage—is a major first step toward a documentary film on Minnesota’s computing history that TPT is planning. CBI has rich resources on Minnesota computing in many collections, with none more prominent in scale or scope than the 350+ linear feet of Control Data Corporation Records. This includes

Homepage of the new Minnesota Computing History website

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records on the facilities, finances, marketing, social responsibility efforts, products, services, strategies, and leadership of this path-breaking international company that largely made Minneapolis a high-tech city. A small sampling of CBI’s other collections wholly or largely on Minnesota computing include the William C. Norris Papers (CDC’s first and longtime CEO), the Robert M. Price Papers (Norris’ successor as CEO), the Engineering Research Associate-Remington Rand-Sperry Rand Records, the Total Information for Educational Systems Records, the Mark P. McCahill Papers (inventor of internet Gopher), and the Minnesota Joint Computer Conference (MJCC) Records. Our collections range in format from manuscript materials and digital records to photographs and video/film. We also have many dozens of oral histories that focus heavily on Minnesota’s computing history, especially with individuals from ERA/Sperry-Univac and Control Data. Right next door to CBI in Andersen Library is University Archives, which has materials on supercomputing on the University of Minnesota campus, as well as records related to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Computer Science and Engineering Department. It also holds records on medical informatics and other computing and software applications at the university. Dakota County Historical Society has a large and impressive photograph collection that focuses primarily on St. Paul’s Engineering Research Associates (one of the first two digital computer firms in the world), and its descendants through mergers and acquisitions—Remington Rand, Sperry Rand/Sperry Univac, Unisys, and Lockheed Martin. Meanwhile, the VIP Club has digitized their newsletter and made it available online. Early on, the group shifted from its original vision and agreed that the website should highlight and sample resources, instead of attempting to create a comprehensive joint index, and serve as a major public history website that would be engaging to high school students, college students, and the general public. With broad consensus on this from the group, Elizabeth Semler took the lead in researching, organizing, and working with web developers to create “Minnesota Computing History.” This major new website has both a general interactive timeline (for broader context), which complements its core, a Minnesota computing history interactive timeline. Each interactive timeline has dozens of key data points for additional historical information, images, and resources. The site also contains a number of videos, including “In Your Defense,” a short film developed on the history of Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) and SAGE computing by one of the key industrial partners, the Burroughs Corporation (CBI holds the Burroughs Corporation Records), a video from Unisys on “New Power Under the Sun,” and a video on Sperry-Univac’s (1956) Univac Scientific Computer.

Navigating the Minnesota Computing History website

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The site includes scores of carefully selected photographs, many of which are from the Charles Babbage Institute Archives and the Dakota County Historical Society. It also includes a section where key topics and themes are explored through in-depth essays. This section was launched with critical essays in place, and will be expanded as time allows in the future. The site includes essays on Engineering Researching Associates, IBM, Control Data, the Oregon Trail computer game, among others. I was delighted to attend a wine and cheese reception at the Dakota County Historical Society museum on September 13th to celebrate the completion of the Minnesota Computing History website and hear updates on the TPT documentary under development. At the event, Elizabeth Semler gave a terrific presentation on the website and documentary projects. VIP Club (Univac) member Keith Myhre kindly provided me a personal tour of museum as well as an overview of

the important volunteer processing work he and Univac retirees are doing with the photograph collections on computing history at DCHC. Lockheed Martin donated substantial records to CBI on Sperry-Univac history, as well as a very impressive collection of artifacts and photographs to the DCHS. (Our institutions have a cooperative relationship in sharing digitized photos and records.) The Charles Babbage Institute is very glad to be a partner in this important public history effort. We are especially grateful to the scholar whose research, creativity, and project management was so crucial to the production of the online exhibit/website, Elizabeth Semler.

Jeffrey R. Yost

Elizabeth Semler and Harvey Taipale celebrate the launch of the website.

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2018 Norberg Travel Grant Recipients This year, three scholars will receive Arthur L. Norberg Travel Grants to facilitate travel to the Charles Babbage Institute to conduct archival research. These awards are made possible through the generous support of our donors in honor of CBI’s founding director, Arthur Norberg. Congratulations to Jillian Foley, doctoral student in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago; Gili Vidan, doctoral candidate in History of Science at Harvard University; and Avery J. Wiscomb, doctoral student in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Foley’s research addresses the history of information security and cryptography as security technologies expanded from military-only usage to widespread use throughout industry and law enforcement. Her work at CBI will inform her dissertation proposal. She plans to examine several collections, including the Stephen J. Lukasik Papers, as well as the papers of Donn B. Parker, who, with colleagues at Stanford Research Institute, collected the Computer Crime Case files, the largest collection of its kind in the world. Foley will examine other collections, too, such as the Daniel D. McCracken Papers and the Association for Computing Machinery Records, review oral histories, and draw on other resources from CBI’s ongoing Computer Security History project. Foley is completing an M.S. in Computer Science the University of Chicago, in addition to pursuing her Ph.D. Vidan will focus on collections related to U.S. cryptographic policy during the 1990s, in particular the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Records, the Donn B. Parker Papers, the James W. Cortada Papers, and the Walter L. Anderson Papers. A chapter of her dissertation, Technologies of Trust: The Pursuit of Decentralized Authentication and Algorithmic Governance in the United States, 1967-2017, will be based on research conducted at CBI and will address debates about the Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES), proposed by the Clinton administration, and the subsequent equation of strong cryptography with decentralized architecture. Vidan completed on M.Sc. at Oxford University in Social Science of the Internet and has received several awards to support her doctoral research and travel, including the SIGCIS Michael S. Mahoney Travel Award and the Erwin N. Hiebert Fellowship for Dissertation Research. Wiscomb is interested in the relationship between post-World War II science and technology, the counterculture revolution, and the shaping of ideas about the future and utopia from 1966 to 1981. He plans to examine collections that can shed light on ways in which business institutions and research labs conceptualized the role of science and technology in shaping the future, including the Lockheed Martin Records, Gordon Everest Monographs on Database Development, Charles T. Casale Collection of Computer Industry Strategies Reports, and EDUCOM Working Papers. Wiscomb will use digital methods to analyze the data he collects. He has engaged in a number of training opportunities in digital humanities scholarship and received several grants and fellowships to support his work in this area, including an A.W. Mellon Fellowship in the Digital Humanities for 2017-2018.

Juliet Burba

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Meritocracy in the IT Industry Many engineers, programmers, and other computer workers today insist that their field, unlike others, is a “meritocracy,” where the best inevitably win. Yet others, both within the field and from outside, point to continuing discrepancies based on gender, race, or other factors. In the 2000s, for instance, Google, Apple, Intel, and other firms initiated a wage-fixing scheme that, when discovered, led to a pay-out of $324 million, while gender discrimination lawsuits in Silicon Valley have in recent years made national news. While the belief in meritocracy is widespread in contemporary American society—whether as a reality already achieved, or an ideal to be sought—the idea seems to be particularly concentrated in computer-related fields. My research charts the evolution of this ideology, both as an idea and as a practice, from the 1940s to the 1990s. Some chapters of my dissertation focus on intellectual history, education history, and political history. But my ambition has always been to follow how meritocracy was put to work—and there seemed to be no better place to pursue that project than in the history of computing. The archives at CBI proved to be extraordinarily helpful because of their astonishing breadth. While it has proven relatively easy to chart the rise of meritocratic discourse among leading CEOs such as Andy Grove at Intel (whose speeches are held at the Silicon Valley archives at Stanford), it has been far more difficult to find material about how these ideas were implemented at the ground-level, for example, among human-relations officers or middle managers. The collections of the Control Data Corporation, which include several boxes from the human relations division, proved particularly rich. But of equal importance were CBI's collections from a wide range of middle-managers at a panoply of firms and divisions. On my visit I was able to work in more than 25 collections—thanks to the unmatched help of CBI interim archivist Amanda Wick—and found early excursuses on the distinctive nature of managing computer work, dozens of personnel evaluations covering every decade from the 1940s to the 1990s, explicit directives documenting changing ideas about “merit pay,” handwritten drafts of stock option agreements (with speculations about options’ motivating effects), and detailed charts demonstrating how HR professionals changed their approach to determining compensation from a focus on age and seniority to a focus on specific claims of ability. All of these materials will be crucial as I begin to track the rise of meritocracy in the postwar United States.

Charles Petersen [email protected]

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Recent Publications Adams, Stephen B., Dustin Chambers, and Michael Schultz. “A Moving Target: The Geographic Evolution of Silicon Valley, 1953-1990.” Business History 60: 6 (2018): 859-883.

Allen, Ben. “Common Language: Business Programming Languages and the Legibility of Programming.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:2 (April–June 2018): 17-31.

Ausiello, Giorgio. The Making of a New Science: A Personal Journey Through the Early Years of Theoretical Computer Science (Springer, 2018).

Berghoff, Hartmut. “‘Organised Irresponsibility’? The Siemens Corruption Scandal of the 1990s and 2000s.” Business History 60:3 (2018): 423-445.

Bruderer, Herbert. Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, Band 1: Mechanische Rechenmaschinen, Rechenschieber, historische Automaten und wissenschaftliche Instrumente, 2nd rev. ed. (De Gruyter, 2018).

Bruderer, Herbert. Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, Band 2: Erfindung des Computers, Elektronenrechner, Entwicklungen in Deutschland, England und der Schweiz, 2nd rev. ed. (De Gruyter, 2018).

Cox, Donna, Ellen Sandor, and Janine Fron, eds. New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts (University of Illinois Press, 2018).

Crooks, Roderic. “Critical Failure: Computer-Aided Instruction and the Fantasy of Information [Think Piece].” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:2 (April-June 2018): 85-88.

Dasgupta, Subrata. The Second Age of Computer Science: From Algol Genes to Neural Nets (Oxford University Press, 2018).

De Mol, Liesbeth, Bullynck Maarten, and Edgar G. Daylight. “Less Is More in the Fifties: Encounters between Logical Minimalism and Computer Design during the 1950s.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:1 (January-March 2018): 19-45.

Dooley, John F. History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms (Springer, 2018).

Dritsa, Konstantina, Dimitris Mitropoulos, and Diomidis Spinellis. “Aspects of the History of Computing in Modern Greece.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:1 (January-March 2018): 47-60.

Dryer, Theodora. “Algorithms under the Reign of Probability [Think Piece].” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:1 (January-March 2018): 93-96.

Elish, M. C. “Remote Split: A History of US Drone Operations and the Distributed Labor of War.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 42:6 (2017): 1100-1131.

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Finn, Ed. What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2017).

Ford, Heather and Judy Wajcman. “‘Anyone Can Edit’, Not Everyone Does: Wikipedia’s Infrastructure and the Gender Gap.” Social Studies of Science: 47:4 (2017): 511-527.

Frana, Philip L. “Telematics and the Early History of International Digital Information Flows.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:2 (April–June 2018): 32-47.

Gaboury, Jacob. “The Random-Access Image: Memory and the History of the Computer Screen.” Grey Room 70 (2018): 24-53.

Halsted, David. “The Origins of the Architectural Metaphor in Computing: Design and Technology at IBM, 1957–1964.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:1 (January-March 2018): 61-70.

Hepler-Smith, Evan. “‘A Way of Thinking Backwards’: Computing and Method in Synthetic Organic Chemistry.” Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences 48:3 (2018): 300-337.

Hintz, Eric. “Susan Kare: Design Icon.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:2 (April–June 2018): 48-61.

Hollings, Christopher, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice. Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist (Bodleian Library, 2018).

Igo, Sarah E. The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Jaton, Florian. “We Get the Algorithms of our Ground Truths: Designing Referential Databases in Digital Image Processing.” Social Studies of Science 47:6 (2017): 811-840.

Jones, Monty. A Civic Entrepreneur: The Life of Technology Visionary George Kozmetsky (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Jones, Raya A. “What Makes a Robot ‘Social’?” Social Studies of Science 47:4 (2017): 556-579.

Kennedy, Devin. “The Machine in the Market: Computers and the Infrastructure of Price at the New York Stock Exchange, 1965–1975.” Social Studies of Science 47:6 (2017): 888-917.

Le Deuff, Olivier. Digital Humanities: History and Development (Wiley, 2018).

Leimbach, Timo. “Path Creation in the Software Industry—The Case of Software AG.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:4 (October-December 2017): 59-80.

Loughnane, Christopher, and William Aspray. “Rethinking the Call for a US National Data Center in the 1960s: Privacy, Social Science Research, and Data Fragmentation Viewed from the Perspective of Contemporary Archival Theory.” Information & Culture 53:2 (2018): 203-242.

Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).

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Maxigas. “Hackers Against Technology: Critique and Recuperation in Technological Cycles.” Social Studies of Science 47:6 (2017): 841-860.

McCray, W. Patrick. “The Biggest Data of All: Making and Sharing a Digital Universe.” Osiris 32 (2017): 243-263.

Montagnini, Leone. Harmonies of Disorder: Norbert Wiener: A Mathematician-Philosopher of Our Time (Springer, 2017).

Na, Ali. “The Fetish of the Click: A Small History of the Computer Mouse as Vulva.” Feminist Media Studies 18:2 (2018): 221-234.

O'Reagan, Douglas, and Lee Fleming. “The FinFET Breakthrough and Networks of Innovation in the Semiconductor Industry, 1980–2005: Applying Digital Tools to the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 59:2 (2018): 251-288.

Paju, Petri, and Thomas Haigh. “IBM's Tiny Peripheral: Finland and the Tensions of Transnationality.” Business History Review 92:1 (2018): 3-28.

Petrick, Elizabeth. “Imagining the Personal Computer: Conceptualizations of the Homebrew Computer Club 1975–1977.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:4 (October-December 2017): 27-39.

Qin, Zheng, et al. Fundamentals of Software Culture (Springer, 2018).

Radin, Joanna. “‘Digital Natives’: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data.” Osiris 32 (2017): 43-64.

Rohde, Joy. “Pax Technologica: Computers, International Affairs, and Human Reason in the Cold War.” Isis 108:4 (2017): 792-813.

Schlombs, Corinna. “The ‘IBM Family’: American Welfare Capitalism, Labor, and Gender in Postwar Germany.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39:4 (October-December 2017): 12-26.

Stilgoe, Jack. “Machine Learning, Social Learning and the Governance of Self-Driving Cars.” Social Studies of Science 48:1 (2018): 25-56.

Suominen, Jaakko, Antti Silvast, and Tuomas Harviainen. “Smelling Machine History: Olfactory Experiences of Information Technology.” Technology and Culture 59:2 (2018): 313-337.

Tozzi, Christopher. For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution (MIT Press, 2017).

Compiled by Juliet Burba

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Featured Photo

A pile of office machines, ca. 1910(?)

This image, from the Burroughs Corporation Records Early Office Machine photographs (CBI 90, series 35), comes with no information—no source, date, location, or other information to place it in context. If you can provide any, please write us and let us know.