Honghong Tinn, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025).
The CHM Prize Committee awards the 2026 prize to Honghong Tinn’s Island Tinkerers: Innovation and transformation in the making of Taiwan’s computing industry.
The committee members were impressed by the groundbreaking history contained within the pages of Island Tinkerers. This book is ambitious in scope and detailed in its analysis. Island Tinkerers skillfully explains how visions and practices of development and innovation transformed Taiwan, and along the way powerfully changed the history of computing since the Cold War. Tinn’s multi-sited research reassembles the gendered networks of technologists and labor needed to make computers into viable technologies. Modulating across multiple scales of inquiry, the book engages deeply with insights from East Asian studies, transnational American Studies, computer history, and STS, offering unique case studies that are as thoughtful about the personalities and desires of individual actors as they are about the development and economic goals of nations. A model for its depth and breadth, Dr. Tinn’s Island Tinkerers will make a major impact on computing history and scholarship on the history of technology in the years to come.