About Me

Basic things about me? Well, the resume is on-line. But briefly: I grew up in England, where my youthful passions included reading, politics, magazine editing and computers. I did two degrees in computer science, where I discovered a natural affinity for programming, analysis and design. But I found more challenged by the social and philosophical issues around technology, and in the relationship between the world of code and world of people, than in the very narrow questions addressed by most computer science projects. So I looked around and decided to come to America and to do a Ph.D. on these topic. I was able to win a Fulbright award, which from the British point of view is like a Rhodes or Marshall to an American. I found myself in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Over six great years in Philadelphia, I slowly became an historian specializing in 20th Century America, in the history of technology and in the social history of work and business.

I was also able to educate myself in the theory and sociology of organizations through work with the Wharton school.  For a change of pace, and a better standard of living, I worked for three or four months every year as a computer consultant, tackling a number of database and internet-related development projects. I also taught a course of my own at Penn on the cultural history of the PC and the Internet, and another at Drexel (just round the corner) on data base management. From 2001 to 2003 I was at Colby College in Maine, first as a visiting instructor and then as a visiting researcher. During the fall of 2003 I taught in the Informatics school of Indiana University, and from 2004 to 2007 I was working as consultant on an historical project to capture the history of software packages and libraries for numerical mathematics on behalf of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics via my partnership, The Haigh Group. The Haigh Group has been active since then on a number of other projects, including prior art research for several software patent lawsuits and the ENIAC project described below.

From 2004 to 2017 I was a faculty member in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, promoted to associate professor in 2010. My wife, Maria Haigh, is also an associate professor in the school. While the benefits of both finding academic jobs in the same place was considerable, this wasn't the best fit for me. My teaching was largely confirmed to teaching project management and systems analysis to undergraduates in the applied IT program, though I was occasionally able to offer a seminar on IT and Organizations.  In the academic year 2008-9 I was a fellow of the Center for 21st Century Studies, which was a very rewarding and productive period and led to increasing involvement in digital humanities initiatives across campus. To complement these within SOIS I founded the Social Studies of Information workgroup, which ran a busy speaker and event series for several years until budget problems hit.

My dissertation was called "Technology, Information and Power: Managerial Technicians in Corporate America, 1917-2000.” This is full of still-unpublished material, which suitably revised will make two fairly hefty books (I like to blame its inordinate length on the vagaries of US immigration law, specifically the threat of deportation upon graduation that hung over me, rather than on logophilia or egomania although others may reasonably disagree). However, the pressures on junior faculty in information science are quite different from those in history, meaning that a couple of publications a year were expected and a book would be no substitute. Hence I repeatedly put this material on one side, working on smaller projects leading to articles and chapters on topics such as (the history of) word processing, data base management systems, web browsers & email, web portals & search engines, gender and data processing, computer science, the software industry,  the political economy of the US computer industry, computer use in Mexican business, and so on. Also a big fat chapter reviewing the literature on the history of information technology, and a meditation on the relationship of science fiction to the history of technology. I did edit a book collecting the work of the late historian Michael Mahoney for Harvard University Press. These projects have increasingly been collaborative -- a relatively unusual way to work for historians but something I've come to value as a way of dealing with topics I would never have the time or expertise to master on my own. One such paper, "IBM Invents Europe: The Curious Case of the Transnational Typewriter" won both the Wilkins Prize and the Scranton Prize from the Business History Conference. 

From late 2011 to 2015 my main research focus took an unexpected but rewarding shift, delaying some of my other projects. I took an opportunity to focus on the history of ENIAC and the origins of modern computing, leading to an MIT Press book ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope) and a series of articles exploring the concept of the stored program computer, the first Monte Carlo calculations, the conversion of ENIAC to become the first computer run a program coded in the modern style, and the relationship of Alan Turing to the invention of the computer. Our book tells the ENIAC story in an entirely new way, challenging a lot of widely held beliefs about the history of early computing and grounding its design in the broader development of scientific and technical practice. More on this at www.EniacInAction.com. In 2015 we began a follow on project, looking at the history of the British codebreaking machine Colossus and its place in the history of computing. This produced two articles, a technical report (Colossus the Missing Manual), a biography and a short article for a broad audience. One of those articles, Colossus and Programmability, won the IEEE Finn prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

As well as the associations for history of technology and history of business I am active within the history of computing community, and served from 2003 to 2013 as editor of the Biographies Department of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and from 2005 to 2014 as chair of the Special Interest Group on Computers, Information and Society of the Society for the History of Technology. SIGCIS grew significantly in my years as chair, introducing an annual workshop series, an endowed book prize, online resource guides, a syllabus collection, and an active program of graduate student travel awards. In 2007-8 I also chaired the corresponding group with ASIS&T, the main professional association in the information science field. Since 2011 I've had the opportunity to contribute regular "Historical Reflections" columns to Communications of the ACM, where I've tried to give computer scientists a sense of how historians think and why what we do is important rather than just telling anecdotes about old computers. I've also been editing the Turing Award website as a contractor for ACM since 2015, a role that's grown to include overseeing video interviews with award recipients, writing or procuring biographical profiles, and creating short video clips from the full length interviews to be embedded in profiles and shared on YouTube. Since 2024 I've been chairing the History Committee of the IEEE Computer Society, a volunteer position.

In 2016 I accepted an invitation from colleagues at Siegen University for an ongoing appointment as a part time visiting professor in connection with its Media of Cooperation collaborative research center. My time in Germany was focused in January and June, those being the times when people are on campus in Siegen but there are no courses being taught in Milwaukee. The central activity for the first few years was a series of "Early Digital" workshops, aimed at broadening the focus of history of computing work and combining it productively with German traditions studying the historical materiality of media technology. I also led the organization of several workshops on oral history methods and worked with colleagues to organize conferences including Computing is Work! and Digital Matters. This led to two book projects, the edited volume Exploring the Early Digital (Springer, 2019) based on one of the workshops, and the forthcoming Defining Digitalities. My participation lasted through the first two phases of the project (2016-2023) though as you can imagine the pandemic caused some disruptions to our plans and forced many events into online or hybrid formats.

My collaboration with Paul Cerruzi of the Smithsonian to coauthor what became a substantively new replacement book for his classic A History of Modern Computing (the most cited overview history of IT) began in 2017. That gives us the opportunity to rethink and broaden the core history of computing narrative to reflect things like smartphones, the Internet, video games, and modern personal computers. The result, A New History of Modern Computing, appeared with MIT Press in 2021 with me as the lead author. I described our approach in a working paper while the book was in progress, summarized its contribution in a Communications of the ACM article, and pondered its place in the history of computing literature at length in a historiographic book chapter so I won't say more here.

2017 was a year of change. I was able to transfer within the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee to the History Department, which offers a more supportive environment for historical scholarship. That meant a complete change in my teaching -- it felt like going back to a first job after graduate school. As things settled down my main teaching has been an undergraduate survey course on the history of health and race, another undergraduate survey on the history of capitalism in the US, and the graduate historical methods course. I've found this a much more congenial home. My colleagues promoted me to full professor in 2019, nominated me without success for distinguished professor a few years later, and persuaded me to undertake a term as department chair beginning in 2024.

In 2021 I had an opportunity, for the first time since 2001, to teach the history of computing. Three times so far I have taught an undergraduate seminar with the honors college called How the Computer Became Universal, with A New History of Modern Computing as the core text. Whereas a generation ago undergraduates could be assumed to have some knowledge of what the difference was been an IBM PC and an Apple Mac, today they find such distinctions hard to grasp without encountering the technology in question. I therefore built up a small retrocomputing lab in preparation for the course, to provide hands-on exposure to systems from the 1980s and 1990s. Getting all the computers refurbished and ready for students to use has been a big job, but brought some real rewards in deepening my scholarship and understanding of the technology of the era.

My main project 2022-25 has been work on a short history of artificial intelligence. As explained elsewhere on this site, this grew out of an unsuccessful attempt to write a review essay. That led to an abridged history as a series of columns for Communications of the ACM and a forthcoming book, Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand. My work on AI history also led to an ongoing connection with the Digital Humanism project in Vienna, including a spell as the Senior Digital Humanism fellow at the IWM and a chance to teach a course based around the book at the Technical University of Vienna.

All this has constituted an endless string of diversions from getting my long ago dissertation published in book form, but I do really plan to get back to this as my next major project and hopefully will complete the task before I die.