Computer History – the Pitfalls of Past Futures

Research Collection Working Paper Computer history – The pitfalls of past futures Author(s): Gugerli, David; Zetti, Daniela Publication Date: 2019 Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000385896 Rights / License: In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection. For more information please consult the Terms of use. ETH Library TECHNIKGESCHICHTE DAVID GUGERLI DANIELA ZETTI COMPUTER HISTORY – THE PITFALLS OF PAST FUTURES PREPRINTS ZUR KULTURGESCHICHTE DER TECHNIK // 2019 #33 WWW.TG.ETHZ.CH © BEI DEN AUTOREN Gugerli, Zetti/Computer History Preprints zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik #33 Abstract 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. Developer discourses and obsolete futures “Inventors” search for components for potential devices, cast a fresh eye on what they find, and seek to assemble the parts in a new way. “Developers,” inventors’ industry colleagues, may be more systematic in recovering useful parts for new devices. But both inventors and developers have a reasonably clear idea of what is to be created. They try to find und unwrap things that have possible future areas of application. These hypothetical applications, conceived in the workshop or in the laboratory, are often later reengineered, both as devices and as solutions. Many tests are needed until the practical application approaches the hypothetical one. The utility of devices, substances, programs, and processes as imagined in the workshop or laboratory quickly becomes obsolete and is cast aside. It was a long way from Marconi’s work on wireless torpedoes to the actuarial 1 Gugerli, Zetti/Computer History Preprints zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik #33 application of radiotelegraphy, which steamships used to transmit emergency call signals or to transmit and receive weather reports, although the “invention” was practically the same.1 Reengineering does not imply that technological designs were fantasies nor does it turn them into visionary products. Before a design is dismissed as the former or raised to the status of the latter, it must first build up even more radical expectations and withstand many failures. In other words, it takes time for an invention to become distinguishable from just another crazy idea and to find its proper place. Without reference to designs, technological developments have no future, and without anticipating the future, what is the point of development? Technologies that are considered to be unprecedented, like the programmable electronic computer, are particularly difficult to justify. Early advocates of computers had to be willing to explain the sterling future of their machines to all who would listen, over and over again, as well (and especially) to those who remained skeptical, perhaps with good reason. With the past as the argumentative resource, very little could be achieved under these circumstances. However, estimates about what the future might bring were usually overtaken by the present more rapidly than expected. And in order to remain credible, they had to be continually projected into a new future, which is to say revised. At such times, computer technology was unexpectedly provided with a historical narrative. “Original[ly],” observed computer developers Murray L. Lesser and John W. Haanstra in December 1956, computers were created to process administrative tasks on a quasi-industrial scale. Lesser and Haanstra did not specify the details of this origin. But it was definitely situated in the past and could be addressed narratively. Most important is that origins are typically invoked precisely when a new future is being produced. At IBM this happened in 1956. Data processing would no longer be done in conveyor-belt fashion, with elaborately sorted, neatly stacked punched cards. The goal was emancipation from batch processing of uniform data and an attractive future for computers with random access to novel drum memories. This required creating a past that could be evoked by the word “original[ly].” The development of computers gives rise to historical interpretations, even history, because when developer discourse requires a new future, it must argue historically.2 In the 1960s, the history of computers also was the product of state-of-the-art computer operations: in data centers, it was inevitable that old and new machines would come together. Printers and punching devices for punch cards, which had been connected to the Hollerith machines used by data processors, shared space with drum memories, magnetic tape stations, and hard disks. The old functioned alongside, in front of, and behind the new (or vice versa), leading to operational expense and annoyance. In addition, the data centers of the 1960s kept and archived long registers of applications that had “burnt” the precious good of computing time. They kept job records, printed out reports on error messages and documented which programs had been used. What was kept in these listings was the operative history of a 1 Garratt, G. R. M. (1994). The Early History of Radio. From Faraday to Marconi. London, Institution of Electrical Engineers; White, L., Jr. (1997). The Technical Act. The Act of Invention: Causes, Contexts, Continuities and Consequences. Technology and the West. A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture. T. S. Reynolds and S. H. Cutcliffe. Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press: 67-82; Scholl, L. U. (1998). Marconi versus Telefunken. Drahtlose Telegraphie und ihre Bedeutung für die Schiffahrt. Sozialgeschichte der Technik. Ulrich Troitzsch zum 60. Geburtstag. G. Bayerl and W. Weber. Münster, New York NY, München, Berlin, Waxmann. 7: 277-286 2 Gugerli, D. (2018). Wie die Welt in den Computer kam. Zur Entstehung digitaler Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt am Main, Fischer; Hollander, G. L. (1956). "Data processing with a quasi-random-access memory." Electrical Engineering 74(June 1955): 466- 468; Lesser, M. L. and J. W. Haanstra (1957). The RAMAC Data-Processing Machine, New York NY, ACM Press. 2 Gugerli, Zetti/Computer History Preprints zur Kulturgeschichte der Technik #33 computing center. This documented knowledge and data eventually went into those documents produced for evaluation purposes when new computing equipment was to be acquired. Computers did not forget their operational past and marked records with “time stamps,” logged “interventions” by components and users, and recorded who had changed the valid version of an application program or operating system. Whenever operations stalled or the system crashed, the chronicle recorded in log files became the prerequisite for getting all interrupted processes running again.3 While data centers recorded their own operational activities, and developers needed an origin for their futuristic concepts, the computer industry developed an entire range of protohistoric orientation aids. In the 1950s and 1960s, several forms of self-historicization were discernible. The most popular and perhaps most obvious was genealogical numbering. Konrad Zuse’s Z1, Z2, Z3, and in particular Z4 offer one such example. In naming this series of machines, which emerged out of the ruins of the Third Reich, Zuse wished to genealogically connect with the electronic and programmable computers of the post-war period.4 The four Harvard computers known as Mark I–IV also relied on this family history technique. Machine numbering at IBM was somewhat more complex.5 This was due on the one hand to the substantially larger product range, and on the other hand to the fact that

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