Andrew L. Russell

The internet that wasn't

If everything had gone according to plan, the Internet as we know it would never have sprung up. That plan, devised 35 years ago, instead would have created a comprehensive set of standards for computer networks called Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI. Its architects were a dedicated group of computer industry representatives in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States who envisioned a complete, open, and multilayered system that would allow users all over the world to exchange data easily and thereby unleash new possibilities for collaboration and commerce.

Histories of the Internet: Introducing a Special Issue of Information & Culture

We explore the gap between broad conceptions of the Internet common in daily life and the rather narrow framing of most existing work on Internet history. Looking at both scholarly histories and popular myths, we suggest that the expanding scope of the Internet has created a demand for different kinds of history that capture the development of the many technological and social practices that converged to create today’s Internet-based online world. Finally, we summarize the articles in this special issue that collectively demonstrate that there is more than one history of the Internet.

Modularity: An Interdisciplinary History of an Ordering Concept

In the final decades of the twentieth century, experts in a wide variety of disciplines—such as computer science, evolutionary biology, management studies, and educational theory—introduced the concepts of modular design into their professional discourses and practices. In each of these disciplines, modular systems called for standardized, interchangeable components (or modules) that could be recombined within a predefined system architecture. This article explores the modern history of modularity as it was imagined and applied in two specific settings: the architectural theories of Albert Farwell Bemis in the 1930s and the construction of electronic computers in the 1950s and 1960s. By framing this account as a history of an ordering concept, I hope to persuade information historians to look across traditional disciplinary boundaries and examine the more general set of concepts, strategies, organizations, and technologies that humans have used in their unending efforts to order and make sense of information.

In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: : Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s

During the 1970s, French engineer Louis Pouzin led a small team of researchers who designed an experimental packet-switching computer network they named “Cyclades.” Despite the technical successes of Cyclades—especially Pouzin’s “datagram” concept that was adopted by the American networking researchers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn—the French authorities starved Cyclades by 1979 and split up Pouzin and his team. This article describes the opportunities that the Cyclades group pursued and the obstacles it encountered in its efforts to cooperate with peers in the United States, France, and Europe. Rather than squeezing Pouzin and Cyclades into a teleological narrative that seeks only to explain the rise of the Internet, the article suggests that its broader rubric of “networking history” allows historians to recover the political and human complexities of digital convergence—such as the bold words and disruptive work of Louis Pouzin.

Standards, Networks, and Critique

From a technical point of view, standards make it possible to combine a variety of components into a functional system or network. From a strategic point of view, stories about standards are necessarily about power and control-they always either reify or change existing conditions and are always conscious attempts to shape the future in specific ways. Historians of computing also should think about the process of standardization in terms that are more common for cultural theorists and about conceptualize standardization as a process of critique. In some cases, engineers offered explicit critiques in published works, conference presentations, and statements to the press-candid commentary on existing market, regulatory, and technical controversies. In other cases, engineers challenged the status quo implicitly, not by dwelling on existing conditions but by building new standards, network architectures, and institutions. Attention to both explicit and implicit forms of critique can help historians to situate innovations in computer networking more deeply in the social worlds that created and used them.

After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance

In the fall of 2014 the best-seller lists featured a hot new book with an unlikely cast of characters: pioneers in the history of computing. The book’s author, Walter Isaacson, had established impeccable credentials as a hagiographer with books on Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. Reviewers showered Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, with praise that was befitting an author of American media royalty (Isaacson was the former managing editor of Time and the former chairman and CEO of CNN). The Innovators was a born best seller, capturing the era’s enthusiasm for all things digital and new. It even had one of those splashy subtitles, pulled from a genre of subtitles that would enrage dissertation committees: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital

Reviews [3 books reviewed]

The following books are reviewed: Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Campbell-Kelly, M. et al; 2013); Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (Slayton, R.; 2013); and Centre de Calcul Coelacanthe, 1963-1970 (Kaiser, C.; 2011).

The innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution (Isaacson, W.; 2014) [book review]

When chroniclers of technological change in the 20th century worship innovation as if it were a god, they often feel freed of the obligation to define the object of their worship. So it is with Walter Isaacson and his popular 2014 book, The Innovators, which begins with a beguiling confession by the author that innovation is “a buzzword, drained of clear meaning.” Rather than address the implications of the elusiveness of the innovation concept or set down the terms of his engagement with the history of computing, which is more closely the subject of his book, the authod does neither, thus squandering a chance to present himself as what he probably aspires to be: a bridge builder between the two mighty rivers of innovation studies. On the one hand, the author recounts the birth, life, and death of digital artifacts; on the other hand, he highlights the people and subcultures that shape digital innovations. But without a framework for understanding innovation, as activity and aspiration, the author squanders an opportunity to clarify the relationship between the imperatives of digital electronics and the various ways in which cultures and personalities construct and reconstruct their computers and computer networks in pursuit of human aims.

Reviews [Book review and Play review]

The following book is reviewed: A Truck Full of Money (Kidder, T.; 2016). The following play is reviewed: Privacy (written by James Graham and directed by Josie Rourke). Many historians of computing will know Tracy Kidder’s name from his second book, The Soul of a New Machine (Little Brown,1981), which featured engineer Tom West managing a small group working on a tight deadline within a substantially antithetical Data General corporate culture. In this ,the authors 11th book, Kidder returns to the world of computing. Kidder’s featured character is Paul English, who is most known for cofounding the Kayak travel website, which was sold in 2012 to Priceline for

Reviews [2 book reviews; 2 film reviews]

1.8 billion. Anyone interested in the worlds of computer programming, technical leadership and product development, venture capital and entrepreneurship, and philanthropy circa 1990–2015 (the Web era to date) should find the book interesting. It is an easy read about a guy with a good number of eccentricities, so the book will also be fun for general readers who enjoy accounts of interesting personalities. The play, Privacy, premiered at London’s DonmarWarehouse in 2014 and transferred to New York’s Public Theater in 2016. Privacy starred Daniel Radcliffe is a writer and pursues his boyfriend to New York City. But that thin plotline is almost beside the point. What actually occurs is that Radcliffe’s character takes a journey through the Internet and comes to an understanding of how pervasive and powerful the tools of surveillance are. The five remaining members of the cast take on approximately 60 different roles. Some are simply the Writer’s parents and psychiatrist, but most are journalists, activists, intellectuals, and academics who are on the front lines of the public conversation about surveillance.