he lab was created to support my work teaching a UWM Honors College seminar called How The Computer Became Universal, based around my book A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021). In the fall of 2023 I am teaching the course for a second time, and hope to do so regularly in the future.
We meet regularly in the lab so that the hardware and software the students were reading about can be demonstrated. In the 1990s, when the long-dominant scholarly overview histories of computing were written by Paul Ceruzzi and Martin Campbell-Kelly & William Aspray, these authors knew that they had to explain what the ENIAC or an IBM 7094 mainframe were. Those were long-obsolete machines that had only ever been used by specialists behind closed doors. They did assume that the readers of their books would be familiar with the mass market machines of the 1980s and 1990s: how big a Macintosh was, what it was like to type commands into MS-DOS, the way that a cheap home computer hooked up to a television, or the experience of booting an Apple II from a floppy disk.
That’s not true anymore, which is why we needed a lab component to the course. Today the Apple II and IBM PC are more distant from us than ENIAC was when I first started to research the history of computing. Even elementary schools have long since on to newer platforms. Today’s students in their teens and early twenties do not remember floppy disks or modems. For them CD-ROMs and heavy, flickering monitors may be no more than a hazy memory from early childhood. Without such hands on experience it is hard to appreciate the development of computer technology and user experiences over the last forty years, however carefully someone reads.
In my class, each student worked with me to define and carry out a hands-on computing exercise, then write a paper in which they discussed the experience and how the insights from working hands-on with period hardware and software differed from what they could have learned from written sources. They were also challenged to relate details of their experience back to the big-picture changes over time in the affordances of computer hardware and software they had studied in the course. Some students also incorporate hands-on lab work into their final course projects. I was thrilled by the students’ engagement with the systems and the thoughtful papers they wrote. Among the projects were:
- The desktop publishing experience in 1991 – using a boxed copy of PageMaker 4 (discovered in the history department basement) on a Windows 3.1 computer to lay out a short newsletter, creating artwork with Corel Draw 3 and printing the results on a LaserJet 4.
- Getting to grips with the 1984 video game Elite (discussed in several course readings) running on a BBC Microcomputer. Students were shocked at how steep the learning curve was on this classic open world space game, and intrigued by the elaborate posters, manual, and novella that came with it.
- Exploring the history of spreadsheets. One student used VisiCalc running on an Apple IIe to recreate the spreadsheet she uses to run a bakery business. Another looked at the development over time of VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 (a boxed copy running on an IBM Portable PC) and Excel 4 on the Macintosh.
- Recreating the user experience of a home computer purchaser in the early 1980s. Students sat down at the BBC Micro or Apple II with the original instruction manual and tutorial software, to understand what users were told the machines were for (mostly programming) and how their applications were imagined.
- Exploring the history of Windows – hands on experience with Windows 1 and 2 running on an IBM Portable PC, Windows 3.1 on a 386 PC compatible, Windows 95 on a Pentium computer, and Windows 2000 on a Pentium III.
- Exploring changes in adventure games. One student played the simple tape-loaded Adventure A on a Sinclair Spectrum, the more complex text game Zork on the Apple II, and The Secret of Monkey Island on an IBM compatible.
