Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of US Cold War Research (review)

Akera has written a complicated and nuanced retelling of Cold War computing history in the United States. He argues that "the intensity of technological innovation during the Cold War years resulted neither from military foresight nor from academic influence, but rather from a fundamental pluralism in the demands that were placed upon research" as it unfolded in a myriad of different "institutional ecologies" across the nation (1). In this way, Akera agrees with other "constructivist" scholars of technology that "the study of innovation is as much about institutional innovation as it is about technological innovation" (338). His conclusion that "the field of computing depended on individuals who were willing to move beyond their disciplinary training and their institutional allegiances" crowns an innovative study of how, in the broad history of computing technology, interdisciplinary experimentation changed over time (and space) into disciplinary tradition (343).

Akera's argument unfolds in three parts. The first five chapters revisit the traditional history of computing research and development as tied to the emergence of the military-academic-industrial complex from the early twentieth century to the height of the Cold War. Those without extensive familiarity with this history will find this the most challenging part of the book, even though it covers territory previously explored by other authors, such as the eniac, edvac, and Whirlwind projects.¹ Even for the expert well versed in the standard computer-history narrative, following Akera's path through these cases demands serious engagement with a vast toolkit of concepts from science and technology studies—Pickering's "mangle of practice," Anderson's "circulation of knowledge," and Galison's "trading zones" to name a few—that Akera uses to deconstruct and reassemble that narrative.²

Akera offers two chapters each on the way in which industry and academia participated in the development of computing, first taking a look at ibm from the dual point of view of its sales force and its user community during the 1950s and then analyzing the engagement between computing and academia, contrasting the case studies of MIT and the University of Michigan during the 1960s. These sections are more accessible to non-experts. The dual views of ibm, in particular, provide a corrective to more traditional corporate histories that avoid both the realities of sales work and the difficulties of end-user consumption. The contrast between MIT and Michigan allows Akera to explore "the differences between what occurred at the center and periphery of Cold War research" (277).

For all his insightful engagement with the latest theories about sociotechnical knowledge production and "institutional ecology," however, the bulk of Akera's book relies on traditional methods of case study and biography. Whether telling the story of Vannevar Bush in the National Defense Research Committee, John von Neumann at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, or Jay Forrester at MIT, his book combines the best available secondary sources together with new archival research to illuminate a small and familiar set of complicated and contingent life paths that wound through the early ecology of computing. Thus does Akera negotiate the dialectic between institutional and individual histories in the history of computing in a new and productive way.