Recent and future questions and answers about the history of computing and information technologies.(part :- 3))
Recent and future questions and answers about the history of computing and information technologies.
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| Recent and future questions and answers about the history of computing and information technologies. |
The Questions of the History of Technology
PART :- 3
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The Questions of the History of Technology
The state of the literature in history of computing emerges perhaps more clearly by comparison (and by contrast) with what is currently appearing in the history of
technology in general and with the questions That have occupied historians of technology over the past decade or so. Those questions derive from a cluster of seminal articles by George S. Daniels, Edwin T. Layton, Jr., Eugene S. Ferguson, Nathan Rosenberg, and Thomas P. Hughes, among others. How has the relationship between science and
technology changed and developed over time and place? How has engineering evolved, both as an intellectual activity and as a social role? Is technology the creator of demand or a response to it? Put another way, does technology follow a society's momentum or redirect it by external impulse?6 How far does economics go in explaining technological innovation and development? How do new technologies establish themselves in society, and how does society adapt to them? To what extent and in what ways do societies engender new technologies? What are the patterns by which technology is transferred from one culture to another? What role do governments play in fostering and directing technological
[6George Daniels (1970) put th e question as an assertion (p.6): "... the real effect of technical innovation [has been] to help Americans do better what they had already shown a marked inclination to do." The seeming "social lag" in adapting to new technology, he argued, is more likely economic in
natur e.]
innovation and development? These are some of the "big questions", as George Daniels (1970) once put it. They can be broken down
into smaller, more manageable questions, but ultimately they are the questions for which historians of technology bear specia responsibility within the historical community.
They are all of them questions which can shed light on the development of computing while it in turn elucidates them.
A few examples from recent literature must suffice to suggest the approaches historians of technology are taking to those questions. Each suggests by implication what
might be done in the history of computing. A spate of studies on industrial research laboratories has explored the sources, purposes and strategies of organized innovation, invention, and patenting in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, bringing out the dynamics of technological improvement that
Rosenberg (1979) suggested was a major source of growth in productivity. In Networks of Power Thomas P. Hughes (1983) has
provided a model for pursuing another suggestion by Rosenberg, namely the need to treat technologies as interactive constituents
of systems. Developments in one subsystem may be responses to demands in others and hence have their real pay-offs there. Or a
breakthrough in one component of the system may unexpectedly create new opportunities in the others, or even force a reorganization of the system itself.
In detailed examinations of one of the "really big questions" of the history of American technology, Merritt Roe Smith (1977) and David A. Hounshell (1984) have
traced the origins of the "American System" and its evolution into mass production and the assembly line. Both have entered the workshops and factories to reveal the quite
uneven reception and progress of that system, never so monolithic or pervasive as it seemed then or has seemed since. Daniel Nelson (1975) and Stephen Meyer (1981) have entered the factory floor by another door to study the effects of mass production on the
workers it organized.
Looking at technology in other
contexts, Walter McDougall (1985) has anatomized the means and motivation of government support of research and development since World War II, revealing structures and patterns that extend well
beyond the space program. Behind his study stands the ongoing history of NASA and of its individual projects. From another perspective,
David F. Noble (1984) has examined the "command technology" that lay behind the development of numerically controlled tools.
At a more mundane level, Ruth Cowan (1983) has shown how "progress is our most important product" often translated into More
Work for Mother, while her own experiments in early nineteenth-century domestic technology have brought out the intimate relationship between household work and
family relations.
In the late 1970s Anthony F.C.
Wallace (1978) and Eugene Ferguson (1979b) recalled our attention to the non-verbal modes of thought that seem more characteristic of the
inventor and engineer than does the
language-based thinking of the scientist.7 Brooke Hindle's (1981) study of Morse's telegraph and Reese Jenkins's (1987) recent work on the iconic patterns of Edison's thought provide examples of the insights
historians can derive from artifacts read as the concrete expressions of visual and tactile cognition, recognizing that, as Henry Ford
once put it,
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The Tripartite Nature of Computing
PART :- 2
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