Nathan Ensmenger

Letting the ''Computer Boys'' Take Over: Technology and the Politics of Organizational Transformation

In the decades following the development of the first electronic digital computers, the computer industry in the United States grew from nothing into an important and expansive sector of the American economy. Whereas in the early 1950s electronic computers were generally regarded as interesting but extravagant scientific curiosities, by 1963 these devices and their associated peripherals formed the basis of a billion-dollar industry. By the beginning of the 1970s, more than 165,000 computers had been installed in the United States alone, and the computer and software industries employed several hundred thousand individuals worldwide.

Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm

Since the mid 1960s, researchers in computer science have famously referred to chess as the ‘drosophila’ of artificial intelligence (AI). What they seem to mean by this is that chess, like the common fruit fly, is an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be used productively to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems. But for historians of science and technology, the analogy between chess and drosophila assumes a larger significance. As Robert Kohler has ably described, the decision to adopt drosophila as the organism of choice for genetics research had far-reaching implications for the development of 20th century biology. In a similar manner, the decision to focus on chess as the measure of both human and computer intelligence had important and unintended consequences for AI research. This paper explores the emergence of chess as an experimental technology, its significance in the developing research practices of the AI community, and the unique ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s. More broadly, it attempts to open up the virtual black box of computer software – and of computer games in particular – to the scrutiny of historical and sociological analysis.

The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society

In recent decades, the history of computing has moved beyond its traditional focus on machines towards a broader study of people, processes, and practices. The study of software in particular has opened up new avenues for exploring questions about gender, labor history, organizational politics, users and use-practices, expertise, and professional identity as they relate to the changing role of computers in society. Beginning with a creative re-imagining of Bruno Latour’s classic study of laboratory life in the context of modern computational biology and bio-informatics, the author argues that the ubiquitous presence of the computer in the material practices of the laboratory reflects a larger shift in the epistemological foundations of science from experiment to simulation. He suggests that by focusing on digitization, rather than computerization, historians can better understand the range of technological and conceptual innovations that have dramatically transformed the work of scientists and engineers in almost every discipline.

Software as labor process

For almost as long as there has been software, there has been a software crisis.1 Laments about the inability of software developers to produce products on time, within budget, and of acceptable quality and reliability have been a staple of industry literature from the early decades of commercial computing to the present. In an industry characterized by rapid change and innovation, the rhetoric of the crisis has proven remarkably persistent. The acute shortage of programmers that caused “software turmoil” in the early 1960s has reappeared as a “world-wide shortage of information technology workers”2 in the 1990s. Thirty years after the first NATO Conference on Software Engineering, advocates of an industrial approach to software development still complain that the “vast majority of computer code is still handcrafted from raw programming languages by artisans using techniques they neither measure nor are able to repeat consistently.”3 Corporate managers and government officials release ominous warnings about the desperate state of the software industry with almost ritualistic regularity. The Y2K crisis is only the most recent manifestation of the software industry’s apparent predilection for apocalyptic rhetoric.

Power to the People: Toward a Social History of Computing

When the Annals of the History of Computing was first established 25 years ago, it assumed for itself an ambitious agenda: by publishing “scholarly papers and anecdotal notes, rigorously researched material and controversial remembrances,” it would serve as a “living history” of the computer revolution’s unprecedented scientific and technological accomplishments. If in practice, its contributions were more often first-hand practitioner accounts rather than scholarly treatises, more often nutsand-bolts descriptions of specific machines and developments rather than richly contextual histories, this was entirely understandable. The field was new, its full scope and boundaries were as yet undefined, and it had not yet captured the attention of the larger scholarly community. In recent years, the history of computing as a discipline—and the Annals as its most prominent professional journal—has evolved into something more broadly encompassing, intellectually sophisticated, and engaging. Both have attracted a diverse group of professional scholars who bring with them new questions, perspectives, and methodological tools. Mirroring developments in the larger field of the history of technology, the history of computing has increasingly situated seemingly internal developments in electronic computing within their larger social, technological, and political context. The result has been more rigorous, convincing, relevant explanations of how the computer shapes, and is shaped by, modern society.

Software as History Embodied

Examines the history of software by looking at the challenge of software maintenance.

Computation, Materiality, and the Global Environment

The point of this series on the global life cycle of computer technology was not to be negative or alarmist, but to make an important point about the material underpinnings of the modern information society. There has been some popular attention paid to the material life of information technology. The history of computing has a long and admirable traditional of dealing with both the material and intellectual elements of information technology. But in turning its attention to the larger systems of material production and distribution essential to (and enabled) by computer technology, we can further expand the scope of our discipline, addressing issues concern to the entire global community.

The Multiple Meanings of a Flowchart

From the very earliest days of electronic computing, flowcharts have been used to represent the conceptual structure of complex software systems. In much of the literature on software development, the flowchart serves as the central design document around which systems analysts, computer programmers, and end users communicate, negotiate, and represent complexity. And yet the meaning of any particular flowchart was often highly contested, and the apparent specificity of such design documents rarely reflected reality. Drawing on the sociological concept of the boundary object, this article explores the material culture of software development with a particular focus on the ways in which flowcharts served as political artifacts within the emerging communities of practices of computer programming.

From Computer Celebrities to Historical Biography

In the wake of the recent passing of the legendary personal computer pioneer and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, journalists and bloggers around the world rushed to publish their reflections on his life and legacy. The focus of some of this coverage was speculation about the future of the company that Jobs has been intimately associated with since its creation, but much of it was also historical, or at least biographical, in nature. Even before his untimely death, the biography of Steve Jobs has long been a subject of sustained popular interest, and for very good reasons. Not only was Jobs a seminal figure in the development of several revolutionary new industries but he was an attractive and charismatic figure. Stories about his personal idiosyncrasies, perfectionist tendencies, and confrontational leadership style are legion, and he has been the subject of hundreds of journalistic profiles and several full-length biographies. With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs is the computer industrys most visible representative, and its paradigmatic exemplar: the brash young kid turned computer revolutionary turned accidental billionaire turned industry visionary.

Open Source's Lessons for Historians

Of all the developments in the recent history of computing, none has attracted such widespread attention as the emergence of the open-source software movement. In part, this is due to the remarkable successes of such open-source projects as Linux, Sendmail, and Apache. Versions of the GNU/Linux operating system are used by 40 percent of large American corporations, 65 percent of the world’s Web servers run Apache, and Sendmail manages 80 percent of the world’s email. Even traditional commercial vendors such as IBM, Apple, and Novell have jumped on the opensource bandwagon; the Macintosh OS X operating system is based on a BSD derivative, and IBM recently announced a