History of computer design: Historiography - Why
this?
4-frogdesign || 5-Corporate focus || Conclusion || Bibliography & links
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The "machine politics" surrounding personal computers has received surprisingly little attention, and almost nothing has been done to study them as artifacts. Similarly, writing on the computer industry has become a kind of industry itself, but most of this work has neglected the social relationships among the designers and users, and how they affect and reflect the design of the computers themselves. Historical work on computers generally falls from two disciplines: economic history which neglects the computers themselves as objects; and history of technology which does not recognize that, as objects, they are quite literally socially constructed.
Since the manufacture of personal computers grew quickly in the late 1970s and 1980s from a small hobbyist market into a huge multinational industry, it is natural that economic historians are increasingly interested in this change, and that narratives of these formative years in the computer industry have generally been in terms of financial success or failure (q.v.. Smith). Computers themselves are regarded by these historians as products that sold well or poorly. Apple Computer often takes a special place in these histories of personal computing, its business success being legendary, if not mythical. The Edenic symbol of knowledge and temptation that is Apple's logo has doubtless helped generate this tendency to give an epic quality to personal conflicts that shaped the course of the company, but, then, few companies are so clearly - and publicly - driven by strong personalities. The story of the company's rise from a garage to a multi-billion dollar corporation is well known among technological writers and students of business. Apple's periodic and often dramatic shifts of fortune continue to regenerate the interests of historians who speak in awe or contempt of its unique "corporate culture", and while chastisement or reverence varies with both historian and situation, a prescriptive tenor is rarely far below the surface of academic interest (e.g. Carlton, 436-42). However, economic historians tend to refer vaguely to "technologies" and discuss products without any regard for them as concrete objects.
The history of technology has gradually developed self-consciously in the 1970s from a predominantly internalist methodology which "focuses only on the functional design of the given artifact(s)" to a contextual one which also "discusses some aspect(s) of the ambiance in which the artifact(s) exist(s)" (Staudenmaier, 205). In the history of computing, however, this shift in method is apparent largely in the amalgamation of economic detail into discussions of technological progress. The assumption of an autonomous progress pervades such internalist history of technology, implying "a radical disjunction of method from context and, therefore, of technological design from human culture" (Staudenmaier, 164). Very few studies in the history of personal computing have been made by professional historians of technology, but the topic has been the focus instead of technophiles, a disparate group of technology journalists and amateur historians. The result has been a largely internalist history for the personal computer that typically combines a faith in technical determinism with a genuine nostalgia; the technophile's concern for history is less for what has passed, than for what has been surpassed. The microcomputer is rarely regarded as a valuable historical artifact in itself, and generally its design is dismissed as largely determined by utility.
There is, then, a strange lacuna in the study of computer history. Personal computers are regarded by economic historians only as sets of features in a package that is ultimately evaluated by how well it sells, and by those more directly interested in technology as the reified state of the art, objects judged entirely on the basis of function. This is at least in part because historiographic models for the study of material culture do not easily apply to mass-produced instruments with few moving parts and very limited physical interaction for the user. Nonetheless, a direct evaluation of these artifacts and the ways in which they have been presented reveals that their function as well as their appearance has been shaped by very specific human interests which Lubar rightly describes as political.
To Early History
(1976-80) 
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