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4 Software Brasileiro Unlike Mauricio, Jason, Rodrigo, and most of my other interviewees, Ivan da Costa Marques did not grow up playing with computers.1 The first time he saw a computer was in college, which he entered in 1963. Ivan studied at ITA, an elite technical school located around 300 km away from Rio de Janeiro, which had been established over a decade earlier and was closely modeled on MIT and other US universities. A key center of electronics training and research, ITA was the first Brazilian university to build a computer, and one of the first to receive a computer from abroad. As a Carioca dedicated to spending his summers in Rio de Janeiro, however, Ivan had his first substantial exposure to the world of computing at PUC-Rio’s recently established Data Processing Center. Ivan quickly became interested in software and its potential. When Rio’s Federal University (UFRJ) established its own Data Processing Center a few years later, Ivan started working there, teaching courses in Fortran and writing software in machine language “just for fun.” A decade later, Ivan came to play an important role in the history of Brazilian computing, becoming a coordinator for the Brazilian government’s policy of limiting import of foreign computers in order to create space for local computer makers. The later years of the policy, which became known as “the IT market reserve” (a reserva de mercado de informática), cause painful memories to my younger interviewees, who often feel that the policy deprived them of access to proper computing tools in their childhood and youth, requiring them to resort to Brazilian surrogates. My older interviewees provide more nuanced accounts. I will not attempt in this chapter to judge the Brazilian government’s policy toward computing technology in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, I examine the history of the different efforts to establish computing practices in Brazil, placing the market reserve in this larger context. 94 Chapter 4 Looking closely at such efforts will help us understand the constructed nature of the world that Jason, Rodrigo, and their peers entered in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it will help us see more clearly the extensive local work undertaken to link the world of computing with local and national contexts, and the many choices involved in this process. While my story here focuses on Brazil, I believe a similar tale can be told about many other places. And while the history of the establishment of the software practice in each place has its idiosyncrasies, the result of this process is a remarkable similarity of computing practices around the world. This similarity is, of course, not incidental. After all, the efforts I describe in this chapter did not, for the most part, aim to create “Brazilian” practices of computing and software development. Rather, they aimed to establish global practices in Brazil. Even Brazil’s closing of its market to companies such as IBM represented , perhaps paradoxically, a globalizing project, as it aimed to bring to Brazil global practices of which, the participants felt, IBM was depriving their country. It is such constant global orientation of nearly all the participating actors, I argue, that ensures that the result of their effort is not a collection of idiosyncratic practices, but rather a set of linkages between the global world of software and specific places—a set of linkages that makes it so easy to think of the world of software as naturally placeless. The establishment of the practice of software development in Brazil and other places cannot be understood in isolation from the larger system of practices related to computing, including the production of hardware and the many uses of computers. It is also important to consider the processes of synchronization that preceded the arrival of the first computers to Brazil , which created in Brazil the context that information technology today takes for granted, from the existence of basic research institutions to the availability of electricity with compatible voltage, frequency, and plugs. Global software has power in Brazil because it is applied in a controlled and constructed environment, a “software laboratory,” to borrow Latour’s metaphor.2 To describe all the different processes of “enrollment” that went into constructing this laboratory, the story would have to start at least as far back as the beginning of colonization of Brazil in the mid-sixteenth century, if not with the earlier story of the beginning of Portuguese expansion . To keep this chapter to a reasonable...

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