Jennifer S. Light

Taking Games Seriously

Historians have expressed growing interest in the intellectual influences of systems thinking during the early decades of the cold war. Taken together, studies of the military, business, government, and academia between the late 1950s and the late 1970s portray the period as one when systems analysis, operations research, cybernetics, information theory, and related fields came to shape—and in many cases to dominate—myriad professional pursuits.1 In these accounts of the development and diffusion of systems think-

Separate but Equal?: Reasonable Accommodation in the Information Age

Abstract This article points to regressive effects that may result from uncritical interpretations of technologys role in achieving the employment goals of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Historical perspectives on reasonable accommodation, the emergence of new technologies, and the construction of public problems offer insights for planners as we consider how an information society could unintentionally subvert social policies that now tilt towards reducing physical barriers for people with disabilities. This article explores the extent of the phenomenon and urges planners to join the conversation about reasonable accommodation in the information age.

The Changing Nature of Nature

he blossoming field of information technology is increasingly adopting the T languages of architecture and urban planning. New terms such as ’information superhighways’, ’electronic cities’, ’virtual pubs’, ’electronic saloons’, ’cities of bits’, ’virtual town meetings’ and ’Internet malls’ are flooding the American media in article after article about the implications of new technologies for social environments. Observing growing popular enthusiasm for virtual geographies, scholars are offering the striking conclusion that Americans’ developing relationships with these technologies are redefining historically complex ideas such as ’community’, ’public space’ and ‘identity’.1 I

Discriminating Appraisals: Cartography, Computation, and Access to Federal Mortgage Insurance in the 1930s

Histories of the emergence of national standards for underwriting at the US Federal Housing Administration (FHA) during the 1930s focus on the discriminatory aspects of agency practices. Yet the officials who designed the FHA’s risk-rating system believed they were building a neutral tool to ensure quality control in lending. This article situates risk-rating within the history of real estate science and technology, and links the agency’s risk-mapping techniques to the era’s similarly aspirational social “science,” to reveal how discriminatory practices could be regarded as apolitical. Its account of the FHA’s risk-rating system in general and neighborhood risk-rating in particular provides a compelling addition to studies of statistics and social control. This article’s broader insights into maps’ uses for social data-processing argue for including cartography alongside other twentieth-century computational tools.

Before the internet, there was cable

2 over the past several years, historians of computing have turned the increasingly pervasive present-day network into a subject for rigorous historical inquiry. As we continue to uncover more details to explain the Internets metamorphosis from a defense communications system to a civilian communications network, it is important to recognize how many of its uses today realize the fantasies and forecasts attached to earlier innovations. This is most clear when we examine the Internets development in light of cable television history. To date, historians of computing have paid limited attention to cable television. Cable, a broadcast system delivering information via underground coaxial cables rather than over-the-air signals, has been a popular medium for entertainment in recent years. Yet earlier in its history , cable looked quite different. Developed in the 1940s as a technical solution to retransmit broadcast signals for residents of mountainous areas with poor television reception, in its infancy, cable functioned as an alternative television technology—it was sometimes called community antenna television. By the 1960s, however, the potential of cable-based networks to deliver two-way communications led users to reconceptualize the technology as a provider of services beyond the traditional network shows. For two decades, the innovation we today think of as an extension of television came to be known as cable communications, a system not merely for broadcasting but also for communication and information exchange. With channels planned to deliver advanced interactive services ranging from continuing education to home banking to participation in local government meetings, cable was the information technology forecast to provide the route to a future networked society that looks strikingly familiar to Internet enthusiasts today. 3 Early aspirations Consider the work of RAND Corporation analyst Paul Baran. Working on contract military research in the early 1960s, Baran was keenly aware of vulnerabilities in the nations centralized defense communications systems; a single strike could disable the entire network. Baran sketched plans for a distributed system designed to survive a nuclear attack, and Arpanet, the militarys precursor to the Internet, followed from his proposal. These ideas, as Baran explored them in On Distributed Communications, 4 are well known to computer scientists and computing historians. Less well known is how Baran built on the concepts in a later paper, Urban Node in the Information Network, 5 a collaboration with Martin Greenberger of the Massachussets Institute of Technology and Project MAC. 6 As his RAND colleagues began to …

Women in Computing

The history of computer science is composed mainly of male achievements and involvements, even though women have played substantial roles. Although women are a significant part of computing history, the numbers of women in computing still have yet to reach parity with men. This article covers womens experiences and impact in the computing history of the United States and in several other nations and explores some of the reasons for the disparities between the number of men and women in this field. Keywords: women in computing; pipeline shrinkage problem; early computing history; gender equality; support; recruitment; retention

Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957 (review)

Computers and Commerce recounts the history of two important players in American computing: the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and Engineering Research Associates. Arthur Norberg’s book begins with the creation of the two firms and continues through their eventual consolidation at Remington Rand and later at the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand. Norberg’s primary interest is the individual personalities and corporate cultures at both firms, and the ways in which their interactions were revealed in the machines they produced. Engineering Research Associates, headquartered in Minneapolis, was created out of the Communications Division of the United States Navy. EckertMauchly Computer Company, based in Philadelphia, was the brainchild of J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, formerly on the engineering faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. These two small companies, Norberg explains, took different approaches to similar problems. What they shared was an overarching creativity: “The computer designs of these firms constituted a revolutionary technology. They required a rethinking of how problems should be solved and a search for ways to improve business practice” (p. 11). Norberg is most interesting in his discussion of the difficulties the firms faced in developing and marketing their products. Launching itself as a business for government clients was a particular challenge for newly established Engineering Research Associates, seeking to become a navy contractor in the 1940s. At that time, government policies restricted contracts to firms with a record of success, making it nearly impossible for new businesses to get off the ground. Engineering Research Associates found a creative solution by identifying a more established firm as its front and becoming its subcontractor. The historical period in question was one of intense innovation in the fledgling computer industry, a decade that took computers out of their origins in military contexts and delivered them to a broad set of clients in government, academia, and business. Norberg provides a close reading of the histories of two important companies, and he details the creation and diffusion of many specific machines in an effort to bring smaller actors to the table in a period whose histories are dominated by accounts of IBM. He uses the histories of these companies as windows onto larger forces that defined this decade in computing history. First, strong networks connecting academia, government, and industry were vital to the development and diffusion of computing machines. Second, a shift from calculating machines and punch-card storage to automatic computing characterized much of the technological innovation of the period. Third, technical needs T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

Computers and urban security

Operation in 1941–1942 MIT’s use of the analyzer for classes or study was minimal. Power companies were the major users and they sent one or two engineers to MIT to study their problems. General Electric and Westinghouse had built network analyzers and rented them, but many power companies preferred to come to MIT rather than expose their design and procurement plans to a major supplier. Because of World War II, power companies were faced with needing to expand generation and network facilities at a time when it was hard to buy such equipment. It was also difficult for them to obtain analyzer time so the engineers arrived at MIT full of energy, and we worked about 12-hour days. I learned much during the year. I was surprised by the fact—which was not really brought out during my electrical engineering education— that transmission lines could be either net inductive or capacitive. Depending on which each was, the voltage on lines could rise or fall from start to end. I did appreciate this aspect about loads. These effects are an important aspect of network design and considerable equipment in power system networks is devoted to correcting for this or making use of this characteristic. Whereas a good portion of my electrical education up to that point was directed at power application, this was the only time I worked in the power field. At a salary of

Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (review)

150 per month, made possible by the rental of the analyzer, I was told that I was the highest paid research assistant at MIT. In the summer of 1942, I was transferred to the Department of Physics as a research associate to work on high-voltage research for a classified US Navy development program. My supervisor was Robert (R.J.) Van de Graaff. It has been a novel experience, in preparing this article, to look back on my association with Bush and Van de Graff—now both gone—and find their names in the dictionary and many tens of references to them on the Internet. A large part of my 60-year career, starting at MIT, was spent in many aspects of computers with a large variety of technologies.

Rethinking the Digital Divide

In their new book, Steve Graham and Simon Marvin demonstrate once again their talent for crafting works with value for both academic specialists and for undergraduates. Like their previous effort, Telecommunications and the City, this book’s strengths include its synthetic perspective and clarity of expression, this time on the subject of infrastructure networks across the globe. In the authors’ own words, their approach is “athletically interdisciplinary,” and pulls together scholarly literatures from urban studies, science and technology studies, geography, sociology, architecture, engineering, and communications. Their basic argument is that urban infrastructure networks, once developed and maintained by the public sector, have been opened to private competition, a shift with a range of consequences for politics, culture, and society. The book’s title is shorthand for their claim that, of these consequences, most notable are the increasing (and oftentimes invisible) forms of segregation occurring within metropolitan areas. Like many other scholars of material culture, Graham and Marvin contend that infrastructure has been an overlooked area of inquiry. This, they argue, means that readers need to become familiar with the history of infrastructure development before they can understand what has changed and what continues to change. The book begins with a concise historical account of the rise of networks in cities across the world, focusing on the growth of technical standards and centralized operations. “Constructing the Modern Networked City, 1850–1960,” the first chapter, treats the development of public networks, including roads, water, electricity, telephones, and public spaces, charting both physical developments (with wonderful illustrations) and the growth of regulatory frameworks to sustain them. It T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E