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  • The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence
  • Edward Jones-Imhotep (bio)
The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence. By John N. Vardalas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Pp. vi+409. $45.

Histories of computing often exhibit a fascinating tension. On one hand, they point us to the computer's place in integrating the vast technohuman systems of the cold war and to the concepts and practices—cybernetics, feedback, packet switching—that made those integrations possible. On the other, they remind us again and again that, beneath the surface, electronic material cultures were crucial sites of resistance to integration, that complexes of silicon and solder formed technopolitical entities through which identities and autonomies were carved out of the totalizing dichotomies of the cold war. That tension—between integration and autonomy—is at the heart of The Computer Revolution in Canada, which explores efforts "to create a self-reliant capacity to use, adapt, invent, and commercialize digital electronic technology" in the three decades after World War II (p. 1).

In exploring this complex history, John Vardalas takes aim at two intertwined nationalist historiographies. The first holds that the lassitude and ineffectiveness of the postwar Canadian military, heavily reliant on foreign technology, was partly responsible for the development of Canada's branch-plant economy. The second holds that foreign-owned branch plants, as the virtually powerless agents of their parent companies, actually [End Page 659] contributed to a process of postwar deindustrialization by serving as conduits for the resource exploitation that had dominated Canada's economy since the seventeenth century.

In place of these narratives, Vardalas argues that both the military and the Canadian subsidiaries played central roles in creating and sustaining Canada's postwar expertise in digital electronics. Shocked out of complacency by the war, eager to assert their country's independence from the United States and Britain, Canadian defense officials turned in 1946 to computer development as a way of creating "self-reliance" in advanced weapons systems. Computers, in the military's view, would furnish its engineers with experience in digital techniques while freeing the military from dependence on U.S. and British computational facilities so crucial for advanced weapons development.

Canadian subsidiaries, Vardalas explains, were early collaborators in these efforts, often sending their engineers to learn digital design techniques in military laboratories. After the military's retreat from self-reliance in the late 1950s, those subsidiaries turned for support to public enterprises (such as Trans Canada Airlines and Canada Post) and then to their own commercial ventures for survival. Often initiating bold projects independent of their parent companies, firms like Ferranti-Packard and Sperry Canada helped sustain the practices and techniques of digital design long after the military had withdrawn its tutelage and financial support.

Well-researched and clearly written, The Computer Revolution in Canada is at its best in these careful demonstrations of how the history of technology can inform the wider spheres of history tout court. The seven case studies making up the book—the first three on the military, the others on industry—showcase Vardalas's strengths as a business historian. And the book as a whole skillfully situates each study within wider business strategies, political calculations, and management struggles. Absent, however, is a coherent analytical framework to hold the work together. Vardalas does introduce Joseph Schumpeter's notion of the innovation wave, but leaves its analytical force undeveloped. The book also has a tendency to essentialize electronic techniques and practices through references to idealized "learning curves" and "digital paradigms" that are never fully explained and seldom instantiated. Even a concept as central but amorphous as "technological self-reliance" is treated as a historically stable category rather than a term in need of historicization.

A stronger conceptual structure would have pulled the case studies together and allowed them to engage some of the most interesting work on systems, electronics, and engineering. But even this oversight cannot diminish the value of these case studies in broadening our understanding of the tensions inherent in postwar electronics, and in exploring the detailed technological [End Page 660] history of a nation that has always seen in technologies the promise of autonomy and independence.

Edward Jones...

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