Founded in the mid-1980s, SIGCIS is the leading international group for historians with an interest in the history of information technology and its applications. Our primary activities include meetings held in connection with our parent society, the Society for the History of Technology; and a range of online resources hosted from this website.
Recent News
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2021 Computer History Museum Prize
Winner: Morgan G. Ames, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019). Prize Citation: Morgan G. Ames’s The Charisma Machine impressed the judges for both the clarity of its writing and its superlative scholarly achievement. Ames thoughtfully engages with the history of the One-Laptop-Per-Child dream, from Seymour…
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2020 Computer History Museum Prize
Winner: Gerardo Con Diaz, Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America (New Haven: Yale University Press 2019). Prize Citation: Gerardo Con Diaz’s Software Rights is the definitive account of the history of software patents in the United States. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, the book is notable for its original analysis and…
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2021 Mahoney Prize
Winner: Colette Perold, “IBM’s World Citizens: Valentim Bouças and the Politics of IT Expansion in Authoritarian Brazil,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 42, no. 3 (July-September 2020): 38-52. Prize Citation: Colette Perold is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her article follows a notable figure…
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Register Now! SIGCIS 2021: Online Edition
Registration is now open for the SIGCIS 2021 conference, to be held online on September 23, 24, and 25, 2021. We have an excellent program (available from http://meetings.sigcis.org/conference-schedule.html), featuring a keynote panel on Friday, September 24, with Rayvon Fouché, Jason Edward Lewis, Lisa Nakamura, and Lucy Suchman. Details and registration instructions are available from http://meetings.sigcis.org/.
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SIGCIS 2021: Online Edition
OPEN CALL SIGCIS 2021 is an open call for any and all work related to the history of computing and information systems, broadly imagined. The SIGCIS community is especially welcoming of new directions in research and creative production, and encompasses academic professionals, museum and archive professionals, IT practitioners, artists and creative technologists, and independent researchers…
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Technical Accomplishments of Ron Crane- RIP
Ron Crane may be best known for being an eccentric design engineer, but he had many technical accomplishments that were not documented. Those include: 1. Co-designing the 10M b/sec Ethernet adapter card for the XEROX Star workstation/server. Ron designed the analog front end circuitry which interfaced to the external transceiver and fully characterized the coaxial…
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2020 Mahoney Prize
Winner: Belcher, Oliver. “Sensing, Territory, Population: Computation, Embodied Sensors, and Hamlet Control in the Vietnam War,” Security Dialogue 50.5, 416-436 (2019). Prize Citation: Oliver Belcher – a geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University – has written a remarkable history of the…
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2019 Mahoney Prize
Winner: Menon, Nikhil. “‘Fancy Calculating Machine’: Computers and planning in independent India.” Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 421-457. Prize Citation: Nikhil Menon’s fascinating history details and contextualizes the efforts of statistician P. C. Mahalanobis to import a first digital computer to India in the 1950s. As Menon demonstrates, Mahalanobis’ many attempts to secure…
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2019 Computer History Museum Prize
Winner: Jaroslav Švelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). Prize Citation: Jaroslav Švelch’s Gaming the Iron Curtain makes an important and fascinating intervention into the history of computing, challenging many basic categories in the field. The history of computing has long…
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2018 Mahoney Prize
Winner: Joanna Radin. “Digital Natives: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data.” Osiris Vol. 32, No. 1 (2017): 43-64. Prize Citation:In “Digital Natives: How medical and Indigenous histories matter for Big Data,” Joanna Radin argues for critical engagement with “the metabolism of Big Data”. Radin presents the remarkable history of a dataset known…