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The Government Machine a Revolutionary History of the Computer The Government Machine History of Computing I. Bernard Cohen and William Aspray, editors Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch, editors, Makin’ Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer John Hendry, Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry Michael Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage, and Georg and Edvard Scheutz David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac René Moreau, The Computer Comes of Age: The People, the Hardware, and the Software Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology Emerson W. Pugh, Memories That Shaped an Industry Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM’s 360 and Early 370 Systems Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen, editors, The First Computers—History and Architectures Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy John N. Vardalas, The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence Maurice V. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer The Government Machine A Revolutionary History of the Computer Jon Agar The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Baskerville by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agar, Jon. The government machine : a revolutionary history of the computer / Jon Agar. p. cm.—(History of computing) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-01202-2 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Computers—Government policy—Great Britain—History. 2. Public administration—Great Britain—Data processing—History. 3. Civil service—Effect of technological innovations on—Great Britain—History. I. Title. II. Series. QA76.9.G68A33 2003 004'.0941—dc21 2003042121 Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction: The State of Knowledge 1 1 The Machineries of Government 15 2 “The Parent of a Totally Different Order of Things”: Charles Trevelyan and the Civil Service as Machine 45 3 “Chaotic England” and the Organized World: Official Statistics and Expert Statisticians 75 4 “One Universal Register”: Fantasies and Realities of Total Knowledge 121 5 The Office Machinery of Government 143 6 An Information War 201 vi Contents 7 The Military Machine? 263 8 Treasury Organization and Methods and the Computerization of Government Work 293 9 Privacy and Distrust 343 10 Computers and Experts in the Hollowed-Out State, 1970–2000 367 Conclusions and International Perspectives 391 Notes 433 Index 535 Acknowledgements When I started this project I knew that I wanted to write about computing in a different way, but beyond that I only had some rather disconnected ideas concerning machines and metaphor. If these ideas have been sharpened over the years it is because I have benefited from many formal and informal dis- cussions with colleagues. At Manchester University I was lucky enough to work at the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the home of the National Archive for the History of Computing. My Mancunian colleagues probably heard more versions of The Government Machine than was good for them, and I say a hearty thanks to them: Jeff Hughes, John Pickstone, Roger Cooter, Jack Morrell, Penelope Gouk, Carsten Timmermann, Aya Homei, Simone Turchetti, Helen Blackman, Alison Kraft, Jon Harwood, Paolo Palladino, Ian Burney, Vladimir Jankovic, Roberta Bivins, Chandak Sengoopta, Sam Alberti, David Cantor, Lyuba Gurjeva, Jay Kennedy, Joan Mottram, Helen Valier, Abigail Woods, Rebecca Herzig, Lyn Schumaker, Patrick Joyce, Penny Harvey, and Sarah Green. On moving to London, I found an equally congenial intel- lectual atmosphere at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL. Others to whom I have incurred a debt of gratitude include Ben Marsden, Stephen Twigge, Thomas Kaiserfeld, Ian Miles, Andrew Warwick, David Edgerton, Mats Fridlund, Graeme Gooday, Marc Berg, Geof Bowker, Simon Schaffer, Doron Swade, Robert Bud, Tim Boon, Stephen Johnston, Rhodri Hayward, Iwan Morus, Will Ashworth, Adam Tooze, Jane Caplan, John Torpey, Sally Wyatt, Stephen Brown, Steve Woolgar, John Krige, Delphine Gardey, Michael Allen, David Vincent, Jim Bennett, Arne Kaiser, Thomas Hughes, Tom Haigh, Charlie Gere, Dorothy Porter, Andrew Hodges, Ludmilla Jordanova, and staff of the Public Record Office, BT Archives, and the British Library. For help with the illustrations and photographs of this book I would like to also thank Philip Hoare, John Jensen, and Emily Lewis. viii Acknowledgements My study certainly benefited from the hospitality, interest, and sense of com- munity of historians of computing. In the UK, Martin Campbell-Kelly offered me much useful advice, while his colleagues Mary Croarken, Steve Russ, and Ross Hamilton have made the University of Warwick a campus I am always happy to visit. In the United States, I particularly want to thank Bill Aspray, Bob Seidel, and Janet Abbate. Finally, I would like to recommend The MIT Press to aspiring authors. Larry Cohen is a patient and wise editor, the copy editing is diligent, and the books are always beautifully designed and produced. The Government Machine This page intentionally left blank Introduction The State of Knowledge Sitting in the reading rooms of the Public Record Office in London, a histo- rian is in the center of a museum of organization. Copies of the catalogue to the museum fill several walls (although these are now complemented by on- line versions). The catalogue lists are dominated by references to objects of one kind: the file. The file has in its lifetime been registered at least twice: once by the government body that produced it and once by the Public Record Office when, after surviving many reviews considering its historical worth, it was selected as worthy of being kept for posterity. If the file is more than 30 years old, the historian notes the latter number, types it into a computer terminal, and waits a while for the pager to beep, indicating that the file has arrived at the collection desk. Although it might be weeded for duplicate or sensitive papers, the file the historian sees is usually the same artefact handled by civil servants and politicians. Typically the file has a card cover, its ruled jacket bearing the signatures of those who have handled it. Inside are notes, letters, minutes, memoranda, or reports, often ordered chronologically and annotated as work was done. At this point nearly every historian forgets about the form of the file and reads the content.1 This historian did not, and the book that follows is the result. However, this book is not just about files. (Even though I have argued elsewhere that what society designates as uninteresting makes for rich sociological study, I would not write solely on filing systems.2) But what files do leads to the concerns of this book. Consider the following points. First, files are information technologies: they are material artefacts that store and organize information. A file is a part of a technological system: its number refers to its place in a registry. The efficient organization of registries for a particular department at a particular time was never a trivial problem. And the file, as an information technology, would not work without a range of asso- ciated devices: ink pens, typewriters, standardized paper, Treasury tags. The civil servant, certainly in this crude sense but also in others ways that are 2 Introduction explored in this book, has always been a technophile. But the academic specialty of history of technology has not centered its study on the office as often as it should. Second, consider again the historian of the state confronted with a file and avidly reading the contents. The encounter is pre-structured to a profound degree: the material form is shaped by choices in information technology, and the text is shaped by the rules and models of writing—civil servants are skillful literary practitioners. The file being examined is the end product of a massive expenditure by the state of “paperwork” that gives the text much of its meaning. To put such work aside and consider the file as objective evidence is, to say the least, a leap of faith by the unwary historian. This problem is felt with even greater force when the historian lifts official sta- tistics, also produced by the state, for use in his or her arguments. The temp- tation to use the statistics is understandable, since only governments have the powers, resources, and geographical reach to manufacture much statistical knowledge. But such knowledge has been produced under conditions depend- ent not only on the bureaucratic technologies mentioned above but also on techniques developed—and made sense of—within government. As the influ- ential early-twentieth-century statistician Arthur Bowley emphasized, under- standing what a statistic says requires knowledge of the state’s “methods of collection and compilation.”3 Prior to such historical facts is the practice of government. However, the historian is not alone. Perhaps the most commonplace encounter between citizen and state is the filling out of a standardized form. Again notice that the encounter is already mediated by an information tech- nology of a simple but important kind.
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