From the Editor's Desk
This issue brings together a selection of history of computing and software papers from the Appropriating America Conference in Amsterdam in 2009.
Appropriating America: Americanization in the History of European Computing
Five articles resulting from the Appropriating America, Making Europe Conference (held in Amsterdam, 15–17 January 2009) are introduced in the light of the existing literature in American studies and the contrasting approaches of the history of postwar ...
Computing the American Way: Contextualizing the Early US Computer Industry
Drawing on work from business, social, and labor history, this article reinterprets the early domestic US computer industry in its broader economic and political context. Contrary to popular imagination, the early computer industry emerges as one ...
Sovietization of Czechoslovakian Computing: The Rise and Fall of the SAPO Project
After World War II, Antonín Svoboda returned to Czechoslovakia with experience in building analog computers, a keen interest in digital computing technology, and aspirations to establish a computer industry in his homeland. Svoboda's original ideas were ...
Appropriating American Technology in the 1960s: Cold War Politics and the GDR Computer Industry
Paradoxically, at the height of the Cold War, the Eastern and Western Blocs became increasingly technologically entangled. From 1964 onward, the German Democratic Republic drew greatly from US companies as role models when building a national computer ...
Cold War Origins of the International Federation for Information Processing
The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) was born as a nongovernmental federation with the main goal of bringing together computer professionals from countries in the East and West. This article examines the Cold War context of the ...
Unraveling Algol: US, Europe, and the Creation of a Programming Language
Current views on the programming language Algol assume its European origins. However, the inability to exchange information between computers affected both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas Algol promoters sought to create one universal programming ...
Israel
In the past four decades or so, Israel has become a center for high-tech research and development.
Reviews
Two books are reviewed in this issue: Simulation and Its Discontents and History of Nordic Computing 2: Second IFIP WG 9.7 Conference (HiNC2).
Heinrich Welker
Heinrich Welker's work as a theoretical physicist in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s focused on the then novel fields of superconductivity and CMOS technology. Specifically, his theoretical and experimental research on gallium arsenide laid the foundations ...
Anecdotes
The two anecdotes in this issue each give a flavor for a time and place in computing history. Specifically, Keith Smillie recounts the work of the small electronics firm Computing Devices of Canada and his experiences working there with Ted Codd in the ...
Technology in the Political Landscape
Politics can shape technology not only directly, but also via institutions and regulations that are the product of political choices. The different histories of videotex in France and the US provide such an example. The French state telephone company, a ...