From the Editor’s Desk

Most histories of the personal computer have traditionally focused on the United States (and to a much lesser degree Western Europe), but as Zbigniew Stachniak reminds us in his cover article “Red Clones: Soviet Computer Hobby Movement of the 1980s,” the personal computer attracted the attention of enthusiasts around the globe. In the Soviet Union, electronics hobbyists discovered the computer later than in the West, but once they did they embraced it with enthusiasm. Fortunately for them, the Soviet government approved of, and in fact supported, microcomputer-oriented groups and publications, and by the early 1980s, there was a thriving computer hobbyist community in the USSR. In tracing the shift from indigenous, Soviet-built machines such as the Radio-86RK to the mass appeal of ZX Spectrum clones, Stachniak provides an important contribution to the growing literature on the global history of the personal computer.

In his overview of the history of computing in India in the period 1955–2010, Vaidyeswaran Rajaraman extends our global perspective in a different direction. His careful attention to the larger political economic context of technological innovation reminds us that, as first a newly independent nation and later as a developing economy, India necessarily pursued a different strategy from those of the Western industrial powers. The long-term investments that India made in education proved particularly fruitful, and they eventually allowed India to assume its current status as a powerhouse of software development and services.

Speaking of educational infrastructure, in his insightful and very personal history of the IBM Sales School, James Cortada provides a vivid reminder of the central role of the distinctive “IBM culture” in the success of that organization. This culture has often been mocked by early personal computer entrepreneurs as stale and old-fashioned, but Cortada reveals a lively, productive, adaptive, and extraordinarily durable system that served to capture, disseminate, and create new knowledge within the firm. “There is no saturation point in education,” said the sign above the IBM Education Center in Endicott, New York, and although the wording might today sound antiquated, the sentiment would be familiar to any modern start-up company.

In our third article dealing with education (the emerging theme was unplanned but auspicious), Peggy Kidwell describes how technical workers learned to use slide rules, as well as how slide rules were used to learn. Although the Scottish mathematician John Napier first published his work on logarithms in 1614, and instrument makers were producing slide rules within a few decades after that, it was not until the late 19th century that slides rules became an important part of American mathematical practices. As with all of the history of computing, the technology alone was not enough to drive history: equally important were schools, textbooks, educators, and manufacturers.

The sketch map of the early ARPANET that first appeared in 1969 has assumed iconic status among historians and the public alike. It features in many a book, website, documentary, and museum exhibit illustrating the “origins of the Internet.” In their article on the production and interpretation of this and other ARPANET maps, Bradley Fidler and Morgan Currie trace the assumptions, strategies, and meanings associated with such representations. Like all maps, the ARPANET maps are historically situated documents; they cannot be seen as merely descriptive, but are intentionally designed to highlight and reinforce certain values. In the case of the 1969 ARPANET map, for example, the visual representation emphasized decentralization and equality among nodes, and it concealed hierarchies of login access and the directionality of communications. There is a growing literature on the material culture of information, software, and other virtual artifacts, and Fidler and Currie provide us with an exemplary case study in the value of such analyses.

On a final note, this issue represents the first for which I am the nominal editor in chief. But as I only assumed that role on the first of this year, all of the real work was done by David Walden, who for the past several issues has served as not only the acting EIC of the Annals, but in a variety of other informal roles as well. I cannot thank Dave enough...