IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

This issue brings together a selection of history of computing and software papers from the Appropriating America Conference in Amsterdam in 2009.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the past four decades or so, Israel has become a center for high-tech research and development.

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'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 ...

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 ...

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 ...