Organizer: Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Chair: Michael S. Mahoney, Princeton University
Presenters:
David Hemmendinger. Union College, Schenectady, “50 Years of Programming Languages”
Greg Downey. University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Library vs. the Computer: Five Decades of Premature Obituaries?”
William W. McMillan. Eastern Michigan University, “Fifty-Plus Years of Amnesia in Computing: The Disappearance and Resurrection of Virtual Machines as a Case Study”
Roy G. Saltman. Consultant and Writer, “50 Years of Computerized Elections: Technologies and Institutions”
Commentator: Laurie Robertson. Virginia Tech
Relationship to Conference Themes:
All papers look back over the events of 50 years.
Panel is organized by the SIG on Computers, Information and Society
“The Historian and other Disciplines” & request for “Diversity of Approaches” within a panel: two members of the panel are academic computer scientists, one spent a career as a NIST researcher on computerized voting, while the fourth has a Ph.D. in History of Technology and Human Geography and has an appointment split between Information Science and Mass Communication. The commentator is an IT project manager currently undertaking a Ph.D. in STS.
Session Abstract
Computing is a field consumed by novelty, in which users and producers of technology both grapple with a constant stream of new products and technologies. Like science fiction writers and so-called futurists, computing professionals must make educated guesses about future developments in order to do their job. They understand that any product promised for delivery in five years is little more than a rumor, while truly speculative developments such as artificial intelligence have been forecast to arrive in about twenty years time for many decades.
Yet as historians, amateur or professional, it is our responsibility to redirect attention from the frothy uncertainty ahead of us to the surprisingly steady wake that the computer has left behind it over the past half century. As SHOT celebrates its anniversary, we explore four areas of computer application in which the constant stream of new hardware and software technologies has masked, and perhaps even caused, startling historical continuity in the use and social meaning of information technologies.
Hemmendinger explores the history of programming languages, going beyond the existing internalist literature on languages and their invention to consider programming languages as technologies. He explores the practice of programming and the needs of users, examining why the most widely used languages have retained a relatively low-level approach criticized by many academic researchers. McMillan applies a similar analysis to the history of virtual machines: a software technology created to run programs on a range of different computers without modification. He argues that this is one of many examples where earlier work has been forgotten, so that an apparently disruptive technology such as Java is actually a continuation of established practice. To explain this, McMillan explores the culture and social organization of the computing field as well as its commercial dynamics.
The other two panelists explore the use of computer technologies in different fields. Downey looks at popular representations of libraries and computers, documenting the reliance of the library and the printed book against consistently exaggerated reports of their demise. Saltman draws on long personal experience and historical analysis to document the mutual shaping of technologies and institutions in the controversial field of election technology. Both discover that the appeal of new technology in these fields rests in large part in its promise of a decisive break with the problems of the past. Yet the perspective of a half century, and the presentations of all four panelists, suggests that the influence of history is not so easily eluded.