{"id":32,"date":"2019-05-17T20:01:19","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T20:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/early.digital\/?page_id=32"},"modified":"2019-05-17T21:17:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T21:17:00","slug":"introduction-by-thomas-haigh-preprint","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/early.digital\/index.php\/introduction-by-thomas-haigh-preprint\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction by Thomas Haigh (preprint)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a preprint. Please cite and quote from the published version, as Thomas Haigh, “Introducing the Early Digital” in Thomas Haigh (ed.) Exploring the Early Digital<\/em> (Charm, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), pp. 1-18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the workshop held to prepare this book, Paul Ceruzzi noted that the digital computer was a \u201cuniversal solvent.\u201d This idea comes from alchemy, referring to an imaginary fluid able to dissolve any solid material. In the 1940s the first digital computers huge, unreliable, and enormously expensive, and very specialized. They carried out engineering calculations and scientific simulations with what was, for the time, impressive speed. With each passing year digital computers have become smaller, more reliable, cheaper, faster, and more versatile. One by one they have dissolved other kinds of machine. Some have largely vanished: fax machines, cassette players, telegraph networks, encyclopedias. In other cases the digital computer has eaten familiar devices such as televisions from the inside, leaving a recognizable exterior but replacing everything inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those of us who have situated ourselves within the \u201chistory of computing\u201d this provides both a challenge and an opportunity. An opportunity because when the computer is everywhere the history of computing is a part of the history of everything. A challenge because the computer, like any good universal solvent, has dissolved its own container and vanished from sight. Nobody ever say down in front of their television at the end of the day, pulled out their remote control, and said \u201clet\u2019s do some computing.\u201d Our object of study is everywhere and nowhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The startling thing is that \u201ccomputer\u201d stuck around so long as a name for these technologies. The word originally described a person carrying out complex technical calculations, or \u201ccomputations.\u201d (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray 1996<\/a>) The \u201cautomatic computers\u201d of the 1940s inherited both the job and the title from their human forebears and retained it even when, after a few years, their primary market shifted to administrative work. Well into the 1990s, everyone knew what a computer was. The word stuck through many technological transitions: supercomputers, minicomputers, personal computers, home computers, pocket computers. Walking through a comprehensive computing exhibit, such as the Heniz Nixdorf MuseumsForum or the Computer History Museum, one passes box after box after box. Over time the boxes got smaller and toggle switches were eventually replaced with keyboards. Computing was implicitly redefined as the business of using one of these boxes to do something, whether or not it involved computations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even then, however, other kinds of computers were sneaking\ninto our lives, in CD players, microwave ovens, airbags and antilock brakes,\nATMs, singing greeting cards and videogame consoles. Within the past decade the\nbox with keys and a screen has started to vanish.. Laptop computers are still\nthought of as computers, but tablets, smartphones, and high definition\ntelevisions are not. To the computer scientist such things are simply new\ncomputing platforms, but they are not experienced in this way by their users or\nthought of as such by most humanities scholars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead many people have come to talk of things digital:\ndigital transformation, digital formats, digital practices, digital humanities,\ndigital marketing, even digital life. Other newly fashioned areas of study,\nsuch as algorithm studies and platform studies, also define themselves in terms\nof distinctly digital phenomena. In some areas \u201cdigital\u201d now denotes anything\naccomplished by using computers which requires an above average level of\ntechnical skill. This is the usual meaning of \u201cdigital\u201d in the \u201cdigital\nhumanities\u201d and in various calls for digital STS, and the like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using \u201cdigital\u201d as a more exciting synonym for\n\u201ccomputerized\u201d is not wrong, exactly, as modern computers really are digital,\nbut it is arbitrary. Historians of computing have so far been somewhat\nsuspicious of this new terminology, only occasionally using it to frame their\nown work (Ensmenger 2012<\/a>). I myself wrote an article\ntitled \u201cWe Have Never Been Digital\u201d (Haigh 2014<\/a>). Yet historians of computing cannot\nexpect the broader world to realize the importance of our community\u2019s work to\nunderstanding digitality if we are reluctant to seriously engage with the\nconcept. Instead the work of conceptualizing digitality and its historical\nrelationship to computer technology has been left largely to others,\nparticularly to German media scholars (Kittler 1999<\/a>, Schr\u00f6ter and B\u00f6hnke 2004<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this volume, we approach digitality primarily from within\nthe history of computing community, rethinking the technologies of computation\nwithin a broader frame. Subsequent efforts will build on this\nreconceptualization of computational digitality as an underpinning to the study\nof digital media. This book therefore makes the case that historians of\ncomputing are uniquely well placed to bring rigor to discussion of \u201cthe\ndigital\u201d because we are equipped to understand where digital technologies,\nplatforms and practices come from and what changes (and does not change) with\nthe spread of the digital solvent into new areas of human activity. Hence the\ntitle of our book, \u201cExploring the Early Digital.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital Materiality<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s start with what digitality isn\u2019t. In recent usage, digital is often taken to mean \u201cimmaterial.\u201d For example, entertainment industry executives discuss the shift of consumers towards \u201cdigital formats\u201d and away from the purchase of physical disks. The woman responsible for the long running Now That\u2019s What I Call Music<\/em> series of hit music compilations was recently quoted (Lamont 2018<\/a>) as saying that songs for possible inclusion are now sent to her by email, unlike the \u201cmore glamorous\u2026 analogue era, when labels sent over individual songs on massive DAT tapes by courier.\u201d Such statements make sense only if one adopts a definition of \u201cdigital\u201d that excludes all disks and tapes That is a stretch, particularly as the D in DVD stands for Digital. So does the D in DAT. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recent idea of \u201cthe digital\u201d as immaterial is both ridiculous and common, deserving its own historical and philosophical analysis. Langdon Winner\u2019s classic Autonomous Technology<\/em>, which explored the history of the similarly odd idea of technology as a force beyond human control, might provide a model. Some important work in that direction has been done in \u201cA Material History of Bits\u201d (Blanchette 2011<\/a>). Although the modern sense of \u201cdigital\u201d was invented to distinguish between different approaches to automatic and electronic computing, the characteristics it described are much older. The mathematical use of our current decimal digits began in seventh century India before picking up steam with the introduction of zeros and the positional system in the ninth century. Devices such as adding machines incorporated mechanical representations of digits. For example, in his chapter Ronald Kline quotes John Mauchly, instigator of the ENIAC project and one of the creators of the idea of a \u201cdigital computer\u201d explaining the new concept with reference to \u201cthe usual mechanical computing machine, utilizing gears.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the chapters in this book deal with specific forms\nof digital materiality, emphasizing that the history of the digital is also the\nhistory of tangible machines and human practices. Ksenia Tatarchenko\u2019s\ncontribution deals with Soviet programmable calculators. These displayed and\nworked with digits, like the machines Mauchly described, but exchanged gears\nfor electronics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other digital technologies, used long after the invention of electronic computers, avoided electronics entirely. Doron Swade provides a close technical reading of the ways in which a complex mechanical odds-making and ticket selling machine represented and manipulated numbers.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Cerruzi\u2019s chapter explores Zatocoding, a digital method\nof categorizing and retrieving information using notches cut into the side of\npunched cards. Its creator, Calvin Mooers had early experience with digital\nelectronics and used information theory to help formulate a highly compressed\ncoding scheme able to combine many possible index terms. His work was\nfoundation for modern information retrieval systems, including web search\nengines. Yet when Moores went into business he was more excited by the promise\nof paper-based digital information media. The cards represented information\ndigitally, through different combinations of notches, which were read using\nwhat Ceruzzi calls a \u201cknitting needle like device.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital vs. Analog<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The antonym of digital is \u201canalog,\u201d not \u201cmaterial.\u201d As Kline\nexplains, this distinction arose during the 1940s, with the spread of automatic\ncomputers. He locates it in discussions between the creators of digital\ncomputers, tracing its initial spread through enthusiasts for the new\nmetascience of cybernetics, building on his work in (Kline 2015<\/a>). Both kinds of machine could\nautomate the solution of mathematical problems, whether at the desk, in the\nlaboratory, or, as control equipment, in the field. The two kinds of computer\nrepresented the quantitates they worked on in fundamentally different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital machines represented each quantity as a series of digits. mechanisms automated the arithmetic operations carried out by humans, such as addition and multiplication, mechanizing the same arithmetic tricks such as carrying from less significant digits to more significant digits or multiplying by repeated addition. Within the limits imposed by their numerical capabilities the machines could be relied upon (when properly serviced, which was not a trivial task) to be accurate and to give reproducible results. Machines with more digits provided answers with more precision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In analog machines, in contrast, each quantity being\nmanipulated was represented by a distinct part of the machine such as a shaft,\na reservoir, or an electrical circuit. As the quantity represented grew or\ndiminished the component representing it would change likewise. The shaft would\nspin more or less rapidly, the reservoir empty or fill, the voltage across the\ncircuit rise or fall. This explains the name \u201canalog computer.\u201d An analogy\ncaptures the relationship between things in the world, defining a specific\ncorrespondence between each element of the analogy and something in the system\nbeing modelled.  Some, like model\ncircuits used to simulate the behavior of electrical power networks, were\nessentially scale models. Others substituted one medium for another, such as\nwater for money. The accuracy of an analog computer was a matter of engineering\nprecision. In practice analog computers were specialized for a particular kind\nof job, such as solving systems of differential equations. They were often\nfaster than digital computers, but usually accurate to only a few significant\nfigures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the categories of analog and digital computers were\nestablished it became natural to project the idea of analog vs. digital back\nonto earlier technologies. In these broader terms any discreet representation\nof numbers appears digital, whereas continuous representations appear analog.\nKline notes that some computing specialists of the 1950s were wary of \u201canalog\u201d\nfor this reason, prefer the prevision gained by speaking of \u201ccontinuous\u201d\nrepresentations. Adding machines, calculating machines, cash registers,\ntabulating machines, and many other common technologies were digital. These\nmachines typically represented each digit as a ten-faced cog, which rotated to\nstore a larger number. Newer, higher speed, devices stored numbers as patterns\nin electromagnetic relay switches or electronic tubes. Other calculating\ndevices, going back to ancient navigational tools such as the astrolabe, were\nanalog. So was the once-ubiquitous slide rule (approximating the relationship\nbetween a number and its logarithm). Automatic control devices before the 1970s\nwere, for the most part, analog: thermostats, the governors that regulated\nsteam engines, and a variety of military fire control and guidance systems. As\nDavid Mindell has shown (Mindell 2002<\/a>), engineers across a range of\ninstitutions and disciplinary traditions developed these techniques long before\nthe mid-century fad for cybernetics provided a unified language to describe\nthem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the application of \u201cdigital\u201d to computing and\ncommunication was new in the 1940s and bound up with automatic computers, many\nof the engineering techniques involved were older and arose in other contexts.\nIn his chapter, Doron Swade explores several technologies from the nineteenth\nand early twentieth centuries including early recreational machines which\nembedded computational capabilities: a golf simulator, and \u201cautomatic\ntotalizator\u201d machines used by dog racing tracks to calculate odds in real time\nbased on ticket sales. Swade notes that these machines have been left out of\ntraditional master narratives in the history of computing, which focus on\nscientific calculator and office administration as the primary precursors of\ndigital computer technology. His paper demonstrates the benefits of moving\nbeyond the limitations imposed by this traditional frame, and taking a broader\napproach to the study of computational technology. Indeed, even the categories\nof digital and analog, according to Swade, are sufficiently tangled in\nengineering practice for him to challenge the \u201cfaux <\/em>dichotomous categories used\nretrospectively in the context of pre-electronic machines.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Computer Programs Are Inherently Digital<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Programmability, often seen as the hallmark of the computer,\nis itself a fundamentally digital concept. As John von Neumann wrote when first\ndescribing modern computer architecture, in the \u201cFirst Draft of a Report on the\nEDVAC,\u201d an \u201cautomatic computing system is a (usually high composite) device\nwhich can carry out instructions to perform calculations of a considerable\norder of complexity\u2026.\u201d (von Neumann 1993<\/a>). In that formulation,\nthe device is a computer because it computes: it carries out laborious and\nrepetitive calculations according to a detailed plan. It is automatic because\nlike a human computer, but unlike a calculating or adding machine, it goes by\nitself from one step in the plan to the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kline\u2019s contribution notes that digital and analog were not\nthe only possible terms discussed during the 1940s. Some participants advocated\nstrongly for the established mathematical terms \u201ccontinuous\u201d (instead of\nanalog) and discrete (instead of digital). These distinctions apply not only to\nnumber representations, which analysis has usually focused on, but also to the\nway the two kinds of computer carry out their calculations. The latter\ndistinction is perhaps the more fundamental, as it explains the ability of\ndigital computers to carry out programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analog computers work continuously, and each element does\nthe same thing again and again. Connections between these components were\nengineered to mimic those between the real world quantities being modelled. A\nwheel and disc linked one shaft\u2019s rotation to another\u2019s, a pipe dripped fluid\nfrom one reservoir to another, an amplifier tied together the currents flowing\nin two circuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The MONIAC analog computer (Figure 1) designed by William Philips to simulate the Keynesian understanding of the economy illustrates these continuous flows. Different tanks filled or emptied to represent changing levels of parameters such as national income, imports, and exports. Adjustable valves and plastic insets expressing various functions governed the trickling of water from one chamber to another. This gave a very tangible instantiation to an otherwise hard to visualize network of equations, as economic cycles played themselves out and the impact of different policy adjustments could be tested by tweaking the controls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fig. 1.1 The Philips Machine, or MONIAC, illustrates two key features of analog computing: the
\u201canalogy\u201d whereby different parts of the machine represent different features of the world and the
fixed relationships between these parts during the computation, which consisted of continuous
processes rather than discrete steps. (Reproduced from (Barr 2000), courtesy of Cambridge
University Press)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a very obvious sense, analog computations occur\ncontinuously. In contrast a computer, or to use the vocabulary of the 1940s an\nautomatic digital computer, breaks a computation into a series of discrete\nsteps and carries them out over time. At each stages in the computation the\nmechanism may work on a different variable. For example, most early digital\ncomputers had only one multiplying unit, so every pair of numbers to be\nmultiplied had first to be loaded into two designated storage locations. Over\nthe course of the computation the numbers loaded into those locations would\nrefer to completely different quantities in the system being modelled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first step in planning to apply a digital computer to a problem was to figure out what steps the machine should carry out and what quantities would be stored in its internal memory during each of those steps. Two of the earliest efforts to plan work for automatic computers were made by Lovelace and Babbage in the 1830s and 1840s for the unbuilt Analytical Engine (Figure 2) and by the ENIAC team in 1943 to plan out the firing table computations for which their new machine was being built (Figure 3). When I explored these episodes in collaboration with Mark Priestley we were startled to realize that both teams came up with essentially the same diagramming notation when setting out sample applications for their planned computers: a table in which most columns represented different storage units of the machine and each row represented one step in the algorithm being carried out. A single cell thus specified the mathematical significance of an operation being carried out on one of the stored quantities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fig. 1.2 This 1842 table, prepared by Ada Lovelace, is a trace of the expected operation of
Babbage\u2019s Analytical Engine running a calculation. Each line represents 1 of 25 steps in the computation (some of them repeated). Most of the columns represents quantities storied in particular parts of the engine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Fig. 1.3 A detail from the ENIAC project diagram PX-1-81, circa December 1943. As with the
Babbage and Lovelace table, the rows represent discrete steps in the calculation, and the columns
(32 in the full diagram) represent different calculating units within ENIAC.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word \u201cprogram\u201d was first applied in computing by the ENIAC team (Haigh and Priestley 2016<\/a>). Our conclusion was that its initial meaning in this context was simply an extension of its use in other fields, such as a program of study, a lecture program, or a concert program. In each case the program was a sequence of discreet activities, sequenced over time. An automatic computer likewise followed a program of operations. The word was first applied to describe the action of a unit within ENIAC that triggered actions within other units: the master programmer. (The same term is given to the electro-mechanical control unit in an automatic washing machine, though we are not sure which came first). Quickly, however, \u201cprogram\u201d came to describe what von Neumann called \u201cThe instructions which govern this operation\u201d which \u201cmust be given to the device in absolutely exhaustive detail\u201d (von Neumann 1993<\/a>). \u201cProgrammer\u201d became a job title instead of a control unit. Thus \u201cprogrammer\u201d and \u201ccomputer\u201d passed between the domains of human and machine at around the same time, but in opposite directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because each part of an analog computer carried out the same operation throughout the computation, analog computer users did not originally talk about \u201cprogramming\u201d their machines, though as digital computers became more popular the term was eventually applied to configuring analog computers. In contrast, digital computers build under the influence of von Neumann\u2019s text adopted very simple architectures, in which computations proceeded serially as one number at a time was fetched from memory to be added, subtracted, multiplied, divided or otherwise manipulated. Such machines possessed a handful of general purpose logic and arithmetic capabilities, to be combined and reused as needed for different purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an automatic computer begins work its instructions, in\nsome medium or another, are present within it and its peripheral equipment. If\nthe computer is programmable, then these instructions are coded in a form that\ncan be changed by its users. In operation it translates some kind of spatial\narrangement of instructions into a temporal sequence or operations, moving\nautomatically from one task to the next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early computers stored and arranged these instructions in a\nvariety of media. ENIAC, the first programmable electronic computer, was wired\nwith literal chains and branches, along which control pulses flowed from one\nunit to another to trigger the next operation. In his chapter, Tristan\nThielmann uses ideas from media theory to explore ENIAC\u2019s user interface,\nspecifically the grids of neon bulbs it used to display the current content of\neach electronic storage unit. Because ENIAC could automatically select which\nsequence of operations to carry out next, and shifted between them at great\nspeed, its designers incorporated these lights and controls to slow down or\npause the machine to let its operators monitor its performance and debug\nhardware or configuration problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapter Mark Priestley wrote with me for this volume explores\nthe range of media used to store programs during the 1940s and the temporal and\nspatial metaphors used to structure these media into what would eventually be\ncalled a \u201cmemory space.\u201d Several computers of the mid-1940s read coded\ninstructions one at a time, from paper tape. These tapes could be physically\nlooped to repeat sequences. Computers patterned after von Neumann\u2019s conception\nfor EDVAC stored coded instructions in one or another kind of addressable\nmemory. Whether this was a delay line, tube memory or magnetic drum had major\nimplications for the most efficient way of spacing the instructions over the\nmedium. Like ENIAC, these machines could branch during the execution of a\nprogram, following one or another route to the next instruction depending on\nthe results of previous calculations. These media held both instructions and\ndata, laying the groundwork for later systems that encoded text, audio, and\neventually video data in machine readable digital forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fundamental technology of digital computers and networks\ntakes many different shapes and supports many different kinds of practice. In\nhis chapter, Martin Campbell-Kelly explores the variety of use practices that\ngrew up around one of the earliest general purpose digital computers, the\nEDVAC. Its users were the first to load programs from paper tape media into\nelectronic memory, quickly devising a system that used the computer itself to\ntranslate mnemonics into machine code as it read the tape. The ability of\ncomputers to treat their own instructions as digital data to be manipulated has\nbeen fundamental to their diffusion as the universal machines of the digital\nage. Some practices from the first computer installations, such as the preparation\nof data and instructions in machine readable digital form, or the practice of\ndebugging programs by tracing their operation one instruction at a time, spread\nwith the machines themselves into many communities. Others were specific to\nparticular areas of scientific practice and remained local.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost all of the earliest projects to build automatic\ndigital devices were sponsored in some way or another by governments money.\nCharles Babbage was bankrolled by the British government, as was Colossus.\nKonrad Zuse relied on the patronage of the Nazi regime while ENIAC was\ncommissioned by the United States Army. With the exception of the (widely\nmisunderstood) connection of what became the Internet to the military\u2019s\ninterest in building robust networks the role of the state in the later\nexploitation and improvement of digital technology is less widely appreciated.\nYet, as William Aspray and Christopher Loughnane show in their chapter in this\nvolume, the state remained vitally important in structuring the early use of\ndigital computers as a procurer of digital technologies, a sponsor of research,\nand a regulator of labor markets. Their chapter illustrates the contribution\nbroader based historical analysis can provide to understanding the spread of\ndigital technology, in contrast to popular history with its focus on brilliant\nindividuals, as demonstrated by the title of the recent blockbuster \u201cThe\nInnovators: How Geniuses, Geeks, and Hackers Created the Digital Revolution\u201d (Isaacson 2014<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital Information<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chapters collected here give a new and broader idea of\nthe material culture of digitality. Nothing is immaterial. Yet there is\nsomething special about the relationship of bits to their material\nrepresentations: different material representations are, from a certain\nviewpoint, interchangeable. Digital information can be copied from one medium\nto another without any loss of data, and the same sequence of bits can be\nrecovered from each. Transcribe the text of a book into a text file, save that\nfile, compress it, email it, download it, and print it out. The text has been\nrepresented in many material forms during this process, but after all those transformations\nand transcriptions one retains the same series of characters. Matthew\nKirschenbaum called this the \u201cformal materiality\u201d of digitality (Kirschenbaum 2007<\/a>). Discussion of \u201cdigital\nformats\u201d as alternative to material media, misleading as it is, captures\nsomething about the truth of this experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claude Shannon\u2019s \u201cMathematical Theory of Communication\u201d (Shannon and Weaver 1949<\/a>), popularized as\n\u201cinformation theory\u201d is foundational to our sense of \u201cthe digital\u201d and to the\nmodern sense of \u201cinformation\u201d (Kline 2006<\/a>, Soni and Goodman 2017<\/a>). Maarten Bullynck\u2019s\nchapter in this volume examines the early adoptions and development of\nShannon\u2019s earlier efforts to \u201csynthesize\u201d networks of relay switches from\nlogical descriptions defined using Boolean algebra. Such circuits provided the\nbuilding blocks of digital machines, including early computers. He suggests\nthat it took a decade of work by practicing engineers, and the creation of new\ncraft practices and diagramming techniques, to turn his work into a practical\nbasis for digital electronic engineering. This also reminds us that Shannon\u2019s\nwork had a very specific institutional and technological context, looking\nbackward to new digital communication techniques developed during WWII and\nforward to anticipate the generalization of these as a new basis for routine\ntelecommunication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, the connection of digitality and information with\ncomputer technology grew ever stronger and tighter. \u201cInformation\u201d had\npreviously been inseparable from a process in which someone was informed of\nsomething, it now became what Jeff Nunberg memorably called an \u201cinert\nsubstance\u201d that could be stored, retrieved, or processed (Nunberg 1997<\/a>). \u201cInformation\u201d\nbecame a synonym for facts or data \u2013 and in particular for digitally encoded,\nmachine readable data. This processes gained steam with the spread of the idea\nof \u201cmanagement information systems\u201d within corporate computing during the 1960s\n(Haigh 2001<\/a>), followed by the widespread\ndiscussion of \u201cinformation technology\u201d from the 1970s and the introduction of\nthe job title \u201cchief information officer\u201d for corporate computing managers in the\n1980s. I suspect that the root of all this is in the digital engineering\npractices used to build computers and other devices during the 1950s.\nShannon-esque digital communication was taking place within computers, as\nmemory tanks, tape drives, printers, and processing units swapped signals. This\nthe context in which it became natural to think of a process of information\noccurring without human involvement and, with a slight linguistic and\nconceptual slippage, to think of the stored data itself as \u201cinformation\u201d even\nwhen it was not being communicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Was the Early Digital?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our sense of what, exactly, \u201cearly digital\u201d means shifted\nduring our discussions. It originally appealed as something indicating an era\nof historical interest, not unlike the \u201cearly modern\u201d period referred to by\nhistorians of science. This volume focuses primarily on a time period from the\n1930s to the 1950s, an era that provided the original locus for work on the\nhistory of modern computing. It is during this era that the concepts of\n\u201canalog\u201d and \u201cdigital\u201d were invented, as were the technologies such as\nprogrammable computers and electronic memories that we associate with \u201cthe\ndigital.\u201d It is the era in which digital computational technologies are most\nclearly defined against analog alternatives, and a period in which their\nunmistakable and sometimes monumental materiality makes it clearest that\ndigitality does not mean invisibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet \u201cearly digital\u201d has an attractive temporal flexibility,\nand encompasses other devices that are not always considered to be \u201ccomputers,\u201d\nstretching back in time to Babbage\u2019s planned difference engine and wartime\ndevices such as the codebreaking Bombes. The phrase initially appealed to me\nbecause, like \u201cmodern\u201d and \u201cearly modern,\u201d its boundaries are obviously\npermeable. Tatarchenko, for example, looks at a Late Soviet version of the\nEarly Digital, which spread during the early 1980s and centered on a more\nobviously digital technology: the programmable calculator. Users coded\nprograms, including games, as sequences of digits displayed on tiny screens. From\nthe viewpoint of a future in which humans have given up corporeal existence to\nlive forever in cyberspace, the present day would seem like the very early\ndigital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As our thinking evolved over the course of several\nworkshops, we came to think of \u201cearly digital\u201d less as something defining a\ngeneral epoch in a society and more as a very local designation describing the\ntransformation of a specific practice within a specific community. In\nparticular, we do not believe that there was a single \u201cearly digital\u201d epoch, or\nthat one can follow those who talk about \u201cdigital revolutions\u201d into a view of\nthe world in which a single event or invention creates a universal rupture\nbetween digital and pre-digital worlds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first instinct of the responsible historian is to challenge assumptions of exceptionalism, whether made for nations or for technologies. Discourses of the kind Gabrielle Hecht termed \u201crupture talk\u201d (Hecht 2002<\/a>) have grown up around many new technologies. These claim that the technology represents a break with all prior practice so dramatic that historical precedents are irrelevant. The now fashionable idea of the \u201cpost digital\u201d is likewise premised on the idea that we are currently on the far side of some kind of digital rupture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognizing that rhetoric of a \u201cdigital transformation\u201d\nparallels claims made for nuclear power or space exploration as the defining\ntechnology of a new epoch, the careful historian should begin with a default\nassumption that computer technology is neither exceptional nor revolutionary. Yet\nall around us we see the rebuilding of social practices around computers,\nnetworks, and digital media. Even  the\nmost careful historian might be moved to entertain the hypothesis that some\nkind of broadly based \u201cdigital transformation\u201d really is underway. The\nchallenge is to find a point of engagement somewhere between echoing the na\u00efve\nboosterism of Silicon Valley (Kirsch 2014<\/a>) and endorsing the reflex\nskepticism of those who assume that digital technology is just a novel fa\u00e7ade\nfor the ugly business of global capitalism and neoliberal exploitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the papers gathered in this volume begin to suggest, technologies\nand practices did not become digital in a single world-historic transformation\nsometime in the 1940s or 1950s (or the 1980s or 1990s) but a set of localized\nand partial transformations enacted again and again, around the world and\nthrough time, as digital technologies were adopted by specific communities.\nWithin those communities, one can further segment the arrival of the early\ndigital by task. The EDVAC users discussed by Campbell-Kelly were using a\ndigital computer to solve equations, reduce data, and run simulations but it\nwould be decades before they could watch digital video or count their steps\ndigitally. From this viewpoint, the early digital tag indicates the period\nduring which a human practice is remade around the affordances of a cluster of\ndigital technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The early digital is also structured geographically. For\nmost of humanity it arrived within the past five years, with the profusion of\ncheap smartphones. The poorest billion or two people are still waiting for it\nto begin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warming Up To the Early Digital<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our opportunity as historians of computing confronting a\nso-called \u201cdigital revolution\u201d is to explain, rigorously and historically, what\nis really different about digital electronic technology, how the\ninterchangeability of digital representations has changed practices in\ndifferent areas, and how the technological aspects of digital technologies have\nintertwined with political and social transformations in recent decades. This\nmeans taking the \u201cdigital\u201d in \u201cdigital computer\u201d as seriously as the \u201ccomputer\u201d\npart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one of the workshops in the Early\nDigital series the phrase \u201cI\u2019m warming up to the Early Digital\u201d was repeated by\nseveral participants becoming, by the end of the event, a kind of shared joke.\nThe new phrase was beginning to feel familiar, useful as a complement to more\nestablished alternatives such as \u201chistory of computing\u201d and \u201cmedia history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The identity of \u201chistory of computing was adopted back in\nthe 1970s, at a time when only a small fraction of people had direct experience\nwith digital electronic technologies. Its early practitioners were computer\npioneers, computer scientists, and computer company executives \u2013 all of whom\nidentified with \u201ccomputing\u201d as a description of what people did with computers\nas well as with \u201cthe computer\u201d as a clearly defined artifact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of computing community devoted a great deal of\nits early energy to deciding what was and what was not a computer, a discussion\nmotivated largely by the desire of certain computer pioneers, their family\nmembers, and their friends to name an \u201cinventor of the computer.\u201d As I have\ndiscussed elsewhere (Haigh, Priestley et al. 2016<\/a>) this made the\nearly discourse of the field a continuation of the lawsuits and patent\nproceedings waged since the 1940s. Though these disputes alas continue to\nexcite some members of the public, they have little to offer scholars and were\nresolved to our satisfaction (Williams 2000<\/a>) by issuing each early\nmachine with a string of adjectives its fans were asked to insert between the\nwords \u201cfirst\u201d and \u201ccomputer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This did not resolve the larger limitation of \u201cthe history of computing\u201d as an identity, which is that it makes some questions loom disproportionately large while banishing others from view. Our inherited focus on the question of \u201cwhat is a computer,\u201d defined with the fixation of some historically minded computer scientists and would-be philosophers on \u201cTuring completeness,\u201d has forced a divorce between closely related digital devices. Digital calculators, for example, have been discussed within the history of computing largely for the purposes of discounting them as not being computers, and therefore not being worthy of discussion. Yet, as Tatarchenko\u2019s chapter shows, electronic calculators (the most literally digital of all personal electronic devices) shared patterns of usage and practice, as well as technological components, with personal computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither can the history of computing cut itself off from\nother historical communities. Computing, informing, communicating, and\nproducing or consuming media can no longer be separated from each other. Thirty\nor forty years ago that statement might have been a provocative claim, made by\na professional futurist or computer scientist looking for a lavish book deal.\nToday that digital convergence is the taken for granted premise behind much of\nmodern capitalism, embodied in the smartphones we carry everywhere. Yet the\nhistories of these different phenomena occupy different literatures, produced\nby different kinds of historians writing in different journals and in many\ncases working in different kinds of academic institution. \u201cInformation history\u201d\n(Black 2006<\/a>, Aspray 2015<\/a>) happens for the most part within\ninformation schools, media history within media studies, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own recent experience writing about the 1940s digital\nelectronic codebreaking machine Colossus makes clear the distorting effect this\nboundary maintenance has had on our historical understanding. Since its gradual\nemergence from behind government secrecy since the 1970s Colossus has been\nclaimed by its vocal proponents (Copeland 2013<\/a>) to have been not just a\ncomputer, in fact the first fully operational digital electronic computer, but\nalso programmable. These claims, first made (Randell 1980<\/a>) at a time when its technical\ndetails were less well documented than there are today, do not hold up\nparticularly well \u2013 the basic sequence of operations of the Colossus machines\nwas fixed in their hardware and they could carry out no mathematical operation\nmore complicated than counting. So \u201ccomputer\u201d is a bad fit, whether applied\naccording to the usage of the 1940s (carrying out complicated series of\nnumerical operations) or that of later decades (programmable general-purpose\nmachines). The Colossus machines did, however, incorporate some complex\nelectronic logic and pioneer some of the engineering techniques used after the\nwar to build early electronic computers. Their lead engineer, Tommy Flowers,\nspent his career in telecommunications engineering dreaming of building an\nall-electronic telephone exchange (Haigh 2018<\/a>). Decades later, he was still more\ncomfortable viewing the devices as \u201cprocessors\u201d rather than computers. They\napplied logical operations to transform and combine incoming bitstreams,\nanticipating some of the central techniques behind modern digital\ncommunications. The Colossus machines played an appreciable, if sometimes\nexaggerated, part in determining the course of the Second World War. Within the\nframe of the \u201chistory of computing,\u201d however, they matter only if they can\nsomehow be shoehorned into the category of computers, which has motivated a\ngreat deal of special pleading and fuzzy thinking. Positioning them, and other\nrelated machines used at Bletchley Park, as paradigmatic technologies of the\n\u201cearly digital\u201d requires no intellectual contortions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cearly digital\u201d is also a more promising frame than \u201cthe\nhistory of computing\u201d within which to examine digital networking and the\nhistorical development of electronic hardware. Historians of computing have had\nlittle to say about the history of tubes, chips, or manufacturing \u2013 these being\nthe domain of the history of engineering. While important work (Bassett 2002<\/a>, Lecuyer 2006<\/a>). (Thackray, Brock et al. 2015<\/a>) has been done\nin these areas by scholars in close dialog with the history of computing, the\nmaterial history of digital technologies has not been integrated into the\nmainstream of the history of technology. Overview accounts such as (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray 1996<\/a>) have\nfocused instead on computer companies, architectures, crucial products, and\noperating systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The need to engage with the history of digital\ncommunications is just as important. Perhaps mirroring the origins of the\nInternet as a tool for the support of computer science research, scholarly\nInternet history such as (Abbate 1999<\/a>) and (Russell 2014<\/a>) has fallen inside the\ndisciplinary wall surrounding the computer as a historical subject. On the\nother hand the history of mobile telephony, which in the late 1990s becomes the\nstory of digitally networked computers, has not. At least in the United States\n(and particularly within the Society for the History of Technology) historians\nof communications have so far focused on analog technologies \u2013 though anyone\nfollowing the story of telephony, television, radio, or the successors to\ntelegraphy past a certain point in time will have to get to grips with the\ndigital. So far, though, the history of computing and history of communications\nremain largely separate fields despite the dramatic convergence of their\nrespective technologies and industries since the 1980s. Some scholars within\nmedia and communication studies have been more engaged than historians of\ncomputing in situating digital technologies within broader political contexts (Mosco 2004<\/a>, Schiller 2014<\/a>)  something from which we can surely learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media studies and media archaeology (Parikka 2011<\/a>) have their own active areas of\nhistorical enquiry. This work is often written without engagement with the\nhistory of technology literature, and in some cases, such as (Br\u00fcgger 2010<\/a>), has deliberately eschewed the\ndisciplinary tools and questions of history to situate the exploration of \u201cweb\nhistory\u201d as a kind of media studies rather than a kind of history. Enthusiasm\nfor \u201cplatform studies\u201d (Montfort and Bogost 2009<\/a>) has similarly\nproduced a new body of historical work only loosely coupled to the history of\ncomputing and history of technology literatures. Neither have the authors of\npathbreaking work at the intersection of digital media studies, cultural\nstudies, and literature such as (Chun 2011<\/a>) and (Kirschenbaum 2016<\/a>) found it useful to\nidentify as historians of computing. The \u201chistory of computing\u201d does not\nresonate in most such communities, whereas study of \u201cthe early digital\u201d may be\nmore successful in forging a broader scholarly alliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the computer dissolves itself into a digital mist we are presented with a remarkable opportunity to use lessons from decades of scholarship by historians of computing to bring rigor and historical perspective to interdisciplinary investigation of \u201cthe digital.\u201d By embracing, for particular questions and audiences, the frame of the Early Digital as a new way of looking at the interaction of people with computers, networks, and software we can free our work from its historical fixation on \u201cthe computer\u201d as a unit of study. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The papers gathered here form a series of provocative steps\nin this direction, spreading out from different starting points to explore\ndifferent parts of this new terrain. Our position recalls Michael Mahoney\u2019s\ndescription, a generation ago, of the challenge faced by the first historians\nof computing: \u201chistorians stand before the daunting complexity of a subject\nthat has grown exponentially in size and variety, looking not so much like an\nuncharted ocean as like a trackless jungle. We pace on the edge, pondering\nwhere to cut in.\u201d (Mahoney 1988<\/a>) Today we face in \u201cthe digital\u201d a\nstill larger and more varied jungle, but like so exotic places that daunted\nWestern explorers it is already inhabited. To comprehend it fully we will need\nto find ways to communicate and collaborate with the tribes of scholars who\nhave made their homes there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is a preprint. Please cite and quote from the published version, as Thomas Haigh, “Introducing the Early Digital” in Thomas Haigh (ed.) Exploring the Early Digital (Charm, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), pp. 1-18. At the workshop held to prepare this book, Paul Ceruzzi noted that the digital computer was a \u201cuniversal solvent.\u201d This idea comes … <\/p>\n

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