Category: Uncategorized

Verónica Uribe del Águila, “Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981–2001),” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 46, no. 2 (April-June 2024): 24-37.

Verónica Uribe del Águila’s article “Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981–2001)” masterfully de-centres the history of computing from its typical focus on Europe and North America, while simultaneously charting the global and globalizing influence of Silicon Valley’s ideologies and work practice. Professor Uribe del Águila’s work highlights the power of “innovation” discourse as an avatar for anti-labour and anti-local business practices: Guadalajara’s El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (CTS), in the Jalisco IT cluster known as the “Mexican Silicon Valley, was initially intended to support domestic digital innovation, but ultimately became a vehicle for neoliberal knowledge and value transfer from Mexico to the United States. Uribe del Águila’s masterful synthesis of business, labor, and institutional histories provides a sterling example of how the computing industry has reshaped the world to its own needs, with Mexican white-collar workers one of the many groups who have suffered as a result. This is powerful and highly topical historical scholarship, and the committee extends its heartfelt congratulations.

Nominations are now open for the 2026 Mahoney Prize. Please find all instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize

Nominations are now open for the 2026 Computer History Museum Prize. Please find all instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize.

Theodora Dryer, “Settler Computing: Water Algorithms and the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990” Osiris 38 (2023): 265-285.

Following a careful review of submissions, we are proud to announce the awarding
of the 2025 Mahoney prize for outstanding article in the history of computing and
information technology to Theodora Dryer for Settler Computing: Water Algorithms
and the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990. In this
article Dryer demonstrates how the legal denial of Native American Water rights
coincides with the establishment of algorithmic systems driven by a colonial
approach to space and time termed settler computing. Settler computing, as a
concept, showcases the insight the history of computing and information technology
can provide to longstanding and urgent social struggles. It is a reminder that
colonialism is far from over and that water allocation and distribution systems can be
understood as material, infrastructural, and systemic forms of settler-colonial power.

In addition to providing a theoretical contribution to research on the temporal and
spatial extension of settler colonialism, Settler Computing: Water Algorithms and the
Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990 is unique from
a methodological perspective. Dryer’s analysis of linear programming algorithms
designed to quantify and monetize abstract conceptions of ‘western water’ is clear
and concise without sacrificing technical insight, connecting the optimization of ‘least
cost’ water use for agricultural production to the gatekeeping of water data and the
erasure of indigenous rights.

In closing, the committee would like to thank everyone who submitted an article for
consideration. The quality of research was high, and the scoring was close.

Avery Dame Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023)

The CHM prize committee awards this year’s prize to Avery Dame-Griff for The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023). The committee lauds Dame-Griff’s fascinating and nuanced study on a topic of critical importance to both the history of technology and the history of US social change in the 20th and 21st centuries. Dame-Griff skillfully argues that the “two revolutions” of trans political visibility and online community-building were inextricably linked—and shows how the technological affordances of the internet enabled and altered aspects of trans community, identity, and political organizing offline as well as online. Dame-Griff’s impressive use of different kinds of historical sources, and ability to also read against the archive and its silences, is a model for histories of computing that must consider the power relations inherent in modern technologies. The Two Revolutions promises to be a foundational work both for students of the history of computing and those studying the history of trans rights.

SIGCIS 2025 virtual meeting abstract submission deadline is THIS MON, 7/14 (extended)! This year’s theme is POWER SURGE, featuring keynote speaker Lily Geismer. Panel papers and grad student WIP workshop submission welcome. Details and CFP here: https://meetings.sigcis.org/

Nominations are now open for the 2025 Mahoney Prize. The deadline is April 15, 2025.

See full instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize

Nominations are now open for the 2025 Computer History Museum Prize. The deadline is April 30, 2025.

See full instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize.

Corinna Schlombs. “Built on the Hands of Women: Data, Automation, and Gender in West Germany’s Financial Industry” Technology and Culture 64, no. 1 (January 2023): 63-89. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.0002.

“Built on the Hands of Women” explores the topic of data entry which has been neglected in the history of computing. Though under-explored, achieving efficient, large scale data entry was a pressing concern in the early days of mainframe business computing, and continues to be important today. Schlombs’ detailed research consists of two in-depth case studies of different approaches taken by German finance companies to address this issue. Allianz insurance company adopted a technological solution, while Sparkassen savings bank went for a sociotechnical approach. Utilizing detailed archival sources Schlombs explores the implications of these differing tactics focusing particularly on the consequences for the female workforce employed for data entry. The cases are firmly situated in the social, political, and economic climate of midcentury post-war Germany.

The article offers an outstanding critique of labour relations and in particular establishes that white-collar work can have a real physical impact on employees, even down to the food they are provided with. The technological details of the development of equipment used for data entry are well positioned in the broader international literature. Schlombs draws on novel archival materials demonstrating expert use of sources in English and German. She offers a carefully written detailed history which is highly original. Her research into data entry undercovers a crucial component of computing history which has been overlooked despite being an essential precondition for computerization. The research is transnational in perspective and opens up a generative area for future scholarship.

Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press: 2023).

Balkan Cyberia, Victor Petrov’s history of computing in Bulgaria during the Twentieth Century skillfully and engagingly operates across multiple registers of analysis – from global political economies to regional histories and from detailed stories of individual contributors to cultural history – and diverse geographies – from cities and towns in Bulgaria itself to the “Second World” of Soviet-centered economies to India, Japan, and computing centers in the West. Petrov’s comprehensive approach to his central question, “Why did Bulgaria become such a predominant center for computer production in the decades between 1950 and 1990?” includes a detailed and nuanced account of the role of industrial espionage as industrial policy, an upacking of the complex political economy of what he calls the “Second World” of Soviet-centered economies, and rich accounts of how that political economy shaped interchanges and developments in Bulgarian computing with Japan and India. The result is a global history that both enriches our understandings of computing in multiple geographies, and shows the exciting potential for further studies in this mold.