Blogs

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.

I am the lead organizer of a workshop to be held in hybrid format at Siegen University on Sept 21 and 22, 2021. In particular, I will be leading two intensive seminar sessions of three hours each on interviewing techniques. 

This workshop will be held in a hybrid format in English. Attendance in person is preferred if possible, to allow for easy discussion and informal chats over lunch. The events after lunch will be talks and a roundtable discussion featuring other experts on historical interviewing, most of whom are participating remotely. 

I was recently the guest on an an episode of Shelly Lesher's history podcast My Nuclear Life. It's a nice podcast, which has approached nuclear history from a variety of perspectives. Previous guests have included Richard Rhodes on the core bomb story, Robert Franklin on the Hanford story, and Adam Higginbotham on Chernobyl.