New Voices, New Topics

Abstract

Guest Editors William Aspray and Jeffrey R. Yost developed a workshop to focus on new topics and new authors, specifically designed to encourage talented scholars conducting cutting-edge research on largely unstudied, but highly significant topics of computer history who had not previously published an article in the Annals. The articles in this special issue Voices, New Topics are the result of that workshop, held at the University of Texas at Austin, in April 2010. Attention to the users and uses of computers are a common focus of all these articles, and most address the theme of user-driven innovation. The manuscripts by Honghong Tinn and Patricia Galloway concentrate on tinkerers, an important kind of user and builder of early personal computing systems. Social groups, networks, and contexts also figure prominently in all the articles. Explicit discussion of sources yielded numerous historiographical contributions, even though only one of the articles is framed as such (Galloway). Finally, the vastly understudied topic of embedded computing technology figures meaningfully in three of the articles (by Joseph November, Cristina Turdean, and Mara Mills) and George Royer's Think Piece on the videogame console industry.