Project MUSE®: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 30 (2008) through current issue Latest Articles: IEEE Annals of the History of ComputingTWOProject MUSE®IEEE Annals of the History of Computing1934-15471058-6180Latest articles in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editor's Desk
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876937
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We have an excellent special issue, "The IT of Demography: Computing Population Dynamics Past and Present." Its guest editors, Emily Rose Merchant and Myron Guttman, will introduce it in detail and so my own introduction will be brief. In addition to the special issue articles, we have a review of Corinna Schlombs' Productivity Machines by Devin Kennedy and a notice of the publication of a new edition of a book on the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office).As this Issue is the last of my term as Editor in Chief, I would also like to look back and look ahead. Gerardo Con Diaz, whose EIC term started in 2019, has been responsible for a fine series of special issues as well as regular ones. They began with two issues on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallFrom the Editor's Desk2023-01-11text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor's Desk2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®34132026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11The IT of Demography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876938
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The 1787 drafting of the U.S. Constitution triggered what Ian Hacking [28] has termed an "avalanche of printed numbers." Democratic self-government required an accounting of the demos that was to govern itself through elected representatives. As democratic revolutions swept across Europe and Latin America, countries in those regions also began to enumerate their citizens in new ways. In addition to counting, governments collected information about their citizens that facilitated state power over how people lived, and over life itself [21].In the United States, decennial censuses increased in size and complexity across the nineteenth century, and the information they collected became the focal points of a series of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallThe IT of Demography2023-01-11text/htmlen-USThe IT of Demography2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®1008092026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11The Present of the Past: A Sociotechnological Framework for Understanding the Availability of Research Materials
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876939
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The creation and survival of research materials are not neutral; they depend on historically specific sociotechnological processes that entail actors' and institutions' power and interests (review in [59, p. 318]). To elucidate these processes, we present a sociotechnological framework (see Figure 1) for understanding what research materials are available, that is, the present of the past. For research materials to exist, some aspect of everyday life must be captured, saved, and retrieved (cf. [86, p. 138]). As Figure 1 shows, each step of the process—capturing, saving, retrieving—depends on human intentions and methods. That is, there may be an explicit intention for capturing, saving, and retrieving a material
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallThe Present of the Past: A Sociotechnological Framework for Understanding the Availability of Research Materials2023-01-11text/htmlen-USThe Present of the Past: A Sociotechnological Framework for Understanding the Availability of Research Materials2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®1474532026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11Computing Counterinsurgency: The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) and Databasing During the Vietnam War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876940
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According to a famous yet unsubstantiated anecdote, in 1967, analysts from the US Department of Defense (DoD) asked one of the huge mainframe computers in the Pentagon's basement when the war in South Vietnam would be won. After some calculations, the machine responded that they had already won it in 1965.1 This anecdote most likely refers to the HES, one of the most important and still highly controversial database systems used by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Operational beginning in January 1967, the HES contained population demographics, geographic coordinates, and monthly updated rankings of the security situation for all villages and hamlets in South Vietnam. The system was revised twice, in 1970 and 1971, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallComputing Counterinsurgency: The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) and Databasing During the Vietnam War2023-01-11text/htmlen-USComputing Counterinsurgency: The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) and Databasing During the Vietnam War2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®1242432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11When the New Magic was New: The Claritas Corporation and the Clustering of America
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876941
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"Clusters" was a good title for the New Yorker's 1982 profile of the Claritas Corporation. The title came from Claritas's main product: clusters. Claritas sold its clusters as the latest innovation in marketing, part of what it called the new magic. From the outside, clusters could appear magical, conjuring new types of Americans from computer analysis of U.S. Census data. The clusters were distinct behavioral profiles associated to zip codes across the United States, and Claritas claimed that Americans' behavior could be predicted solely by their association with a cluster. These clusters could be ranked too. Claritas called its richest cluster "Blue Blood Estates," which New Yorker writer Lincoln Caplan described
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallWhen the New Magic was New: The Claritas Corporation and the Clustering of America2023-01-11text/htmlen-USWhen the New Magic was New: The Claritas Corporation and the Clustering of America2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®1259512026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11The Missing Link: Data Capture Technology and the Making of a Longitudinal U.S. Census Infrastructure
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876942
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Social scientists' use of linked decennial census data has grown extensively over the past two decades, with the number of published articles using linked census data more than quadrupling between 2000 and 2020. These articles provided ground-breaking research on various social processes in the U.S. over the century including understanding migration [6], [17], [27], social mobility [16], [45], family transitions [40], immigration [29], and public policy [38], [46].While the growing use of linked census data has benefited from the ever-increasing computational power available to researchers, it has also been made possible by significant advances in the capture, curation, and dissemination of large-scale data
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallThe Missing Link: Data Capture Technology and the Making of a Longitudinal U.S. Census Infrastructure2023-01-11text/htmlen-USThe Missing Link: Data Capture Technology and the Making of a Longitudinal U.S. Census Infrastructure2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®987772026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11The Effects of Increases in Computing Power on Demographic Analysis Over the Last 50 Years
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876943
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This anecdote discusses the relationship of changes in computer power to demographic analysis over the past 50 years, based on my work as a demographer in that time. Increases in processing power, and the growing complexity of software that this increased power enabled, opened new opportunities for researchers, but the greater ease of computing sometimes led them to be sloppy. Increase in computing power and development in statistics also led to tradeoffs between data usefulness and confidentiality.Computing for demographers in the late 1960s and 1970s relied on mainframe computers. Analysis was run by inputting programs, and often punched cards, at a computer center. Later iterations involved running a program
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallThe Effects of Increases in Computing Power on Demographic Analysis Over the Last 50 Years2023-01-11text/htmlen-USThe Effects of Increases in Computing Power on Demographic Analysis Over the Last 50 Years2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®333022026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11Challenges of Large-Scale Data Processing in the 1990s: The IPUMS Experience
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876944
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The U.S. Census Bureau played a key role in the development of computing technology. The two leading computer companies of the middle decades of the 20th century—IBM and Remington Rand's UNIVAC division—had roots as data processing companies that built equipment for the Census Bureau, and the Bureau indirectly funded the development of the first commercial computer beginning in 1946 [26].The 1960 census was fully computerized, and the Census Bureau began to publish data in machine-readable form. In 1962, the Census Bureau introduced the first machine-readable microdata file, a one-in-1000 sample of households drawn from the 1960 census. Following the 1970 census, the Census Bureau greatly expanded the quantity of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallChallenges of Large-Scale Data Processing in the 1990s: The IPUMS Experience2023-01-11text/htmlen-USChallenges of Large-Scale Data Processing in the 1990s: The IPUMS Experience2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®873692026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11Productivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technology From Mass Production to Computer Automation by Corinna Schlombs (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876945
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Productivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technology from Mass Production to Computer Automation [1] provides a methodologically innovative and archivally rich story about the idea of productivity and the machines that promise to deliver it. Speaking to audiences across the histories of technology, diplomacy, economic ideas, labor, and political economy, Corinna Schlombs offers a novel transatlantic framing of capitalism in the middle of the 20th century and its relation to technology, including computers. At the heart of the book are a series of interactions between workers, managers, and political figures from the United States and Germany, from the Weimar era to the 1950s about the notion of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallProductivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technology From Mass Production to Computer Automation by Corinna Schlombs (review)2023-01-11text/htmlen-USProductivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technology From Mass Production to Computer Automation by Corinna Schlombs (review)2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®121132026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11A New Book About the First Business Computer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/876946
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The LEO Computers Society with its partner, the Centre for Computer History, Cambridge, has published a second edition of its anthology of very personal memories about the earliest days of business computing: LEO remembered—by the people who worked on the world's first business computers.J. Lyons and Co, the huge catering company, developed Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) in the late 1940s; it ran a business application live for the first time in November 1951. LEO's amazing story has been retold recently in an award-winning 25 minute documentary film funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund that can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Rzu68nRVwtE.This new paperback more than doubles the size of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/393/image/coversmallA New Book About the First Business Computer2023-01-11text/htmlen-USA New Book About the First Business Computer2023-01-112023TWOProject MUSE®49822026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002023-01-11