From the Editor’s Desk

Historians of technology have long argued for the value of learning from failure. If we accept that the success of any particular technology is not inevitable or predetermined by its inherent characteristics, but rather the product of complex social, economic, and political factors, so too must failure be understood in terms of historical context and contingency. In fact, failures can often be more revealing than success stories. Success is often exceptional, whereas failure reveals deeper structural patterns. In the cover article for this issue, “101 Online: American Minitel Network and Lessons from its Failure,” Julien Mailland amply illustrates the historical significance of understanding why and where technologies go wrong. By the early 1990s, the success of the French Minitel system had made that nation arguably the most well-connected in the world. In 1991, eager to export this technology, France Telecom partnered with Pacific Bell to provide a Minitel-like system called 101 Online to the San Francisco Bay region. The result was, by any measure, a complete and utter failure. As Maillard convincingly demonstrates, the reasons behind its failure are illuminating and provide a deeper understanding of the social, economic, and technological context in which early online services had to operate in the as yet poorly understood precommercial Internet era. On a related theme, Nicholas Lewis provides a welcome glimpse through the Iron Curtain at the history of Soviet-era computing as seen through the eyes of Western experts. The story of Soviet computing is too often interpreted only in terms of the rise and fall of the Soviet cybernetics model and the ultimate failure of this model in the face of Western-style commercial computing. In his fascinating examination of the trip reports from Western computer specialists, Lewis provides a nuanced picture of the mixed and sometimes contradictory perceptions of (and speculations about) Soviet capabilities, technologies, and ideologies during the crucial early Cold War era. In their article on the IBM Advanced Computer System (ACS), Mark Smotherman, Edward Sussenguth, and Russell Robelen show us how a computer that was never actually constructed can nevertheless be considered influential. As one of two IBM projects aimed at achieving leadership in the supercomputer market, Project Y (soon to be renamed the ACS-1) pioneered features that would later become standard in high-performance computing and brought together groups of engineers who would later contribute to developments at IBM and beyond. In his article “Contested Ontologies of Software: The Story of Gottschalk v. Benson, 1963–1972,” Gerardo Con Diaz explores how the legal system (along with users, designers, developers, and manufacturers) struggled with the definition of software in the early decades of electronic computing. Following the case of two inventors at Bell Laboratories, Gary Benson and Authur Tabbot, as they attempted to secure patent protection for a computer program, Con Diaz provides yet another layer of complexity to our understanding of the history of software. By challenging what he called the “myth of the nonmachine,” attorney Morton Jacobs attempted to dismantle the dichotomy between hardware and software first articulated by the statistician John Tukey more than a decade earlier. As Con Diaz ably demonstrates, his failure to do so would shape our understanding of software for decades thereafter. Finally, in the second of his series on the history of the history of information technology, James Cortada explores the formation of an “information ecosystem” that included museums, archives, and academic libraries essential to the development of a new historical subdiscipline. From philanthropies such as the Charles Babbage Foundation to funding from the National Science Foundation, the formation of such ecosystems of resources, academics, industry practitioners, and audiences are both essential to the shape of a discipline and reflect the social and intellectual context out of which that discipline emerges. As Cortada reminds us, publications such as the Annals play no small part in the construction and maintenance of such communities. Thus, we are particularly pleased to include his reminder of the ongoing work needed to maintain and develop such information ecosystems and infrastructures in order to ensure the continued success of this most valuable historical subdiscipline.