Colossus & Programmability Wins SHOT's Finn Prize

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) presented me with a prize at its recent annual meeting in Milan. It’s called “The Bernard Finn IEEE History Prize” because it is sponsored by the IEEE, for “the best paper in the history of electrotechnology—power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science—published during the preceding year.” A huge thank you to my coauthor, Mark Priestley, who shared in the award and to Mrs. L.D. Rope's Second Charitable Trust (and Crispin Rope himself) who generously supported our investigation of Colossus.

The official citation from the prize committee is:

Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee & Siegen University), and Mark Priestley For “Colossus and Programmability,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 40/4 (October-December 2018): 5-30. This article examines the claim, often made by historians from the U.K., that the British “Colossus” machine, built to decrypt intercepted German communications during the Second World War, was the world’s first electronic digital computer. The authors challenge that claim, and in doing so provide a well-researched analysis of exactly what the Colossus was and what it did. While arguing that the Colossus was not in fact the first computer, the authors show that it was a well-engineered example of sophisticated electronics technology, which in a very short time advanced the state of the art of electronics engineering. The Colossus, they argue, was as remarkable as any of the other machines that historians have touted as the “first” computer. While analyzing the Colossus, the authors give a general and well-reasoned critique of the tendency for historians—both popular and scholarly—to identify “firsts” in the history of technology. For computer historians, they argue that such a tendency illuminates not only assumptions about what are the critical technical qualities that define a “computer,” but also the social and political environment of the 1940s and 1950s, when the first electronic digital computers emerged.

After 20 years of submitting many things for various SHOT prizes, without previous success, I was a little surprised to break the streak with this particular paper because this is one of my most technical papers, analyzing the capabilities of a specific old machine, rather than dealing as I more often have with social history, gender, labor, national and transnational idenity, etc. Although media and digital humanities scholars are excited about engaging with technological specifics, historians of technology have tended to move away from this over the decades in a quest for scholarly respectability. The paper even features a flow chart and a reproduction of a washing machine control dial! So an extra thank you to SHOT, and the members of this particular prize committee, for being open to work across a broad range of intellectual styles. If you have institutional access, you can read the published version of the paper here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8509146. Otherwise, I have a preprint on this website.