Organizer: Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Chair: William Aspray, Indiana University

Presenters:

Challenging the Engineering Perspective: A New Look at the Development of the World’s First Stored Program Computer, David Anderson, University of Portsmouth

From Technological Mimesis to Creativity: Early Online Rail Reservations in Japan, Chigusa I. Kita, Kansai University

Open Source Software at 50: Its Corporate and Mathematical Origins, Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

Beyond Computer Exceptionalism: Open Source Aeronautics Before 1903, Peter B. Meyer, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Commentator: Lars Heide, Copenhagen Business School

Relationship to Conference Themes:

These papers have a strong historiographical content, in accordance with the conference focus on more reflective panels.

The panel is organized by the SIG on Computers, Information and Society

“The Historian and other Disciplines” & request for “Diversity of Approaches” within a panel: one of the presenters is an economics researcher with the Bureau of Labor Standards, and two combine graduate degrees in the history of science and technology with current appointments in departments of informatics. The commentator has a business school appointment. There is also a diversity of national approaches: the panelists are British, American, Danish and Japanese.

The papers meet the challenge to consider “‘IT’s’ origins and ascendance in relation to other technologies” particularly by including contrasting accounts of open source development in early computing and early aeronautics.

Session Abstract
Networks of Knowing – Technology Transfer & Open Source Innovation

This panel explores the process of knowledge transfer in technological innovation, looking particularly at the role of social institutions. In keeping with the conference theme, this panel revisits the events of the 1950s and returns attention to fundamental issues in the innovation process. The papers integrate the human and institutional aspects of knowledge transfer, documenting personal networks, the use of published materials, tacit knowledge, and the creation of formal and informal mechanisms for information dissemination similar to those associated with today’s open source software movement. Three panelists focus on information technology, while, to provide a comparative perspective, the fourth addresses early aeronautics.

Within the history of computing, work on the early hardware and software of the 1940s and 1950s has generally been carried out either from an internalist engineering approach or a business history perspective. Anderson revisits one of the most famous innovations, Manchester University’s creation of the first stored program digital computer. Using new archival evidence he argues for the importance of mathematicians and their expertise in the creation of this computer, looking particularly at the process of knowledge transfer from the then-classified Colossus project. Kita picks up the theme of knowledge transfer in early computing in her analysis of the creation of a pioneering electronic seat reservation system by Japan National Railways in 1959. She suggests that expertise transferred from MIT and a foreign supplier was reshaped within the institutional context of this firm to produce a distinctive and successful technological system. Both papers reconnect the history of technology with the history of science by turning attention to the institutional dimensions of knowledge transfer.

The other two papers look at antecedents to today’s open source development practices, rooted in the free exchange of technical information and computer code. Open source, as a combination of development methods, a social movement, and a set of licensing arrangements, has not yet received much attention from historians. But the many journalistic and popular works on the topic trace it to work on operating systems software in the 1980s and 1990s. Haigh and Meyer both explore continuities between the modern open source movement and the practices of earlier technological communities. Haigh argues that all of the formal characteristics of open source and many of its cultural practices can be traced back to the mathematical software libraries produced by IBM user organization SHARE in the 1950s onward. Meyer goes even farther back, using a painstaking examination of publications by experimenters and patent lists to argue that open source methods are visible in the community of aeronautical pioneers during the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. Seeing open source development as a technique already used in several historical contexts and eras, rather than an entirely new invention, helps us to better understand its strengths and weaknesses and so understand how and where it is likely to function most effectively.