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  • The Purloined Mainframe:Hiding the History of Computing in Plain Sight
  • John Laprise (bio)

I have heard many times from my colleagues that I am lucky to be involved in such an edgy, greenfield area as the history of computing. We are unconstrained by the shackles of decades of prior scholarship and find ourselves with an abundance of relevant, important topic areas for which there is high demand. We are fortunate that our focus lies on a moving technological area that constantly presents us with new material for research. Moreover, the history of computing is a foundational field for even newer, hotter fields of inquiry such as the Internet and "new media" studies. I smile and nod.

Still, I have also heard said that abundance and a lack of restraint come with their own challenges. This is nowhere more apparent than when we look at how the US federal government uses computers. I am not talking about the frequently cited narratives of Paul Edwards, Thomas Hughes, and James Beninger1 nor the influence of the Department of Defense on early innovation initiatives such as Arpanet.2 I am referring to a narrative like Jon Agar's excellent work chronicling the use of computers by the British government.3 Scholars in the US have ignored Agar's lead and avoided negotiating the labyrinthine federal records system. To date, scholarship on the US government's use of computers has been broad and general, as in the early economic work of Kenneth Flamm and the recent work of James Cortada.4

The US federal government is immense. Executive branch departments are the size of large multinational corporations, with similar reach and power. Yet historians of computing looking at government have largely focused on elements in the Department of Defense not related to cryptography and NASA. Both of these organizations have a well-documented interest in computer technology. What about everyone else?

Computers in the White House

One would suppose that the White House might have been somewhat influential in the evolution of computers since the federal bureaucracy was IBM's largest client prior to 1970. Imagine my surprise four years ago when I discovered a proverbial "gap in the literature." A discovery like this is every doctoral students' dream, and as I came to realize, something of a nightmare. I started out small, just trying to trace the history of one innocuous agency within the executive office of the President (EOP), the Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP), which had the unusual early mandate to make federal computer policy. This organization's administrative history led me into the administrative records of the Department of Commerce (DoC). In the meantime, I stumbled into the records for something called "information automation" within the records of the Secretariat of the National Security Council (NSC).

To my great surprise, there they were: the documentary record of the very first computer system adopted by the White House including technical specifications, software manuals, and memos from White House officials, the RAND corporation, the DoD's Defense Communications Agency (DCA), and the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), most of them lying in a series of dusty folders in a box from the NSC administrative records that had never been classified. The very helpful archivist at the National Archives remarked to me that, according to his records, some of these boxes had never ever been checked out. Needless to say, I put the OTP on the back burner and refocused.

In the following year, I expanded my focus to uncover the story of White House computing during the 1970s. I was constantly surprised by the availability of records regarding what I considered sensitive topics such as telecommunications security during the Ford administration and the technological debacle that was the Carter White House. I learned to make sense of the alphabet soup of agencies that comprise the federal government. I was even fortunate enough to collect an oral history from the White House's first computer project manager. I then found myself in an academic sinkhole.

My colleagues were very excited by my research, but the persistent and omnipresent critique of my work was the absence of a sufficient literature review. Many scholars...

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