Keynote at HAPOC 2021 in Zurich

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.

You can watch the video of this talk at https://video.ethz.ch/events/2021/hapoc/c78227a5-4f48-443f-bc48-f56125e654c3.html. 

Here is the abstract:

Becoming Universal: A New History of Modern Computing

Haigh will discuss the new overview history of computing he has written with Paul Ceruzzi, exploring the challenges involved in producing a coherent and comprehensive synthetic history of computing and the choices and trade-offs the authors made during the process. The biggest challenge is the remarkable flexibility of the electronic digital computer, which from 1945 to 2020 has evolved from a specialized and hugely expensive technology used for scientific computation to an inexpensive and ubiquitous technology embedded into devices of all kinds and used in almost every human activity. From this viewpoint, the computer became an (almost) universal machine only incrementally, a contrast with the theoretical perspective from which even the simplest programmable devices are often equated with Turing’s Universal Machine.

Existing overview histories have not fully engaged with now-central topics such as the Internet, smartphones and mobile apps, cloud computing, video games, digital media, or automotive computing. The era saw repeated shifts in users, producers, applications and affordances which make it hard to construct a coherent narrative. The new structure addresses this by basing each chapter around a specific group of users and applications, around which “the computer” is remade with the addition of new capabilities such as interactivity or graphical communication. Given HAPOC’s focus on more technical analysis, he will give particular attention to efforts made in the new book to weave discussion of computer architecture and system software into these application-led stories.

Other challenges explored during the talk include the balancing of technical detail against narrative, presentation of the computer’s continuities and discontinuities with other technologies, incorporation of perspectives from social and cultural history into a technology-centered story, and engagement with an increasingly broad and diverse secondary literature. Haigh explains the decisions made by the book’s authors and their relationship to its multiple intended audiences.