Blogs

Somewhat accidentally, I've written a short book on the history of AI. This wasn't on my plan for 2021-5, which was supposed to be all about finishing up a project on digitality and finally publishing some of my dissertation work, but I accepted an invitation to write on the historiography of AI for a special issue of Social Studies of Science. The result was loved by the special issue editors but desk rejected by the real editor who seemed unfamiliar with the concept of a historiographic essay.

I'm spending November 2024 in Vienna, as a guest of the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences). Specifically, I was invited to be the Senior Digital Humanism fellow, part of an initiative run jointly between the institute and the Technical University of Vienna. I'd enjoyed participating in the Digital Humanism conference Can Machines Save the World? the previous year, so was pleased and surprised to be invited back for a full month.

I recently received word from MIT Press that two of my books have been translated and licensed in simplified Chinese.  My recent book (with Paul Ceruzzi) A New History of Modern Computing was published in December 2022 with Shanghai Science and Technology Press. I still did not get a paper copy, but here's a cover image from the web:

Translation carried out by Liu Taoying. Details at http://product.dangdang.com/29547879.html. 

I finally got around to putting up some web pages for my Retrocomputing Lab in the history department at UWM (Holton Hall, 402). It's a working collection of about 20 personal computer systems from 1981 to about 2005.

Rethinking and Rebuilding: Grand Narratives in the History of Computing

We are gathering in Siegen and online this July for a rather unusual purpose: two days of discussion of the historiography of computing. The event is prompted (with a pandemic-related delay) by the publication last year of my book with Paul Ceruzzi, A New History of Modern Computing but the idea is not so much to celebrate our achievement as to discuss everything it leaves undone.

As the rhythms of scholarly life slowly begin to reassert themselves I've been asked to do a few talks based on my new book A History of Modern Computing. They share their title with "Becoming Universal: A New History of Modern Computing" which appeared in the February 2022 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Katie Hafner, author and longtime NY Times reporter, is fronting a podcast called Lost Women of Science. It's a professionally produced project, in collaboration with PRX and Scientific American. Each season focuses on a single "lost woman" and the second season "A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass," released in April 2022, is all about Klara von Neumann.

Since 2011 I have written "Historical Reflections" columns for Communications of the ACM. That's a glossy publication that goes out on paper to around 65,000 members of the association, and in PDF form to its student members.

I gave one of the keynote talks at the 6th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing, scheduled for October 27-29, 2021. This iteration was hosted by the Turing Center at ETH in Zurich. The talk focused on the narrative adopted for A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), written with Paul Ceruzzi.

Big news: MIT Press has published A New History of Modern Computing, my collaboration with Paul Ceruzzi to produce a replacement for his classic A History of Modern Computing (1998).The book is ambitious, comprehensive, reliable and full of nice pictures. There's a hefty format that makes details legible, but the price ($40 list for paper, $30 for kindle) is reasonable.