During the Cold War, the field of computing advanced rapidly within a complexinstitutional context. In Calculating a Natural World, Atsushi Akera describes the complicatedinterplay of academic, commercial, and government and military interests that produced a burst ofscientific discovery and technological innovation in 1940s and 1950s America. This was the era ofbig machines--the computers that made the reputations of IBM and of many academic laboratories--andAkera uses the computer as a historical window on the emerging infrastructure of American scientificand engineering research. The military-industrial complex is often spoken of as a coherent andunified power, but Akera argues that it was the tensions as much as the convergences among military,business, and academic forces that fueled scientific and technological advances.Akera's study isunique in its integration of a history of postwar computing--usually told in terms of eitherbusiness or hardware--and a mapping of an "ecology of knowledge" represented by the emerginginstitutional infrastructure for computing. For example, Akera sees John Mauchly's early work oncomputers as a product of his peripatetic career--his journey through different institutionalecologies--and John von Neumann's work as emerging from the convergence of physics and appliedmathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. Akera also looks at the ways in which theinstitutional contexts of the National Bureau of Standards and MIT's Project Whirlwind pulledresearch in diverging directions, and he examines IBM's dominance from the perspectives of bothbusiness and users. Finally, Akera compares the academic computing centers at MIT and the Universityof Michigan, tracing the tensions on those campuses over whether computers were a service facility,a commercial technology, or a subject of research.
Atsushi Akera is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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