2024 Computer History Museum Prize Winner

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.