The Nakamura article told a story that complicates the narrative of Silicon Valley being the epicenter of the technological revolution. Rather than simply retelling the already household histories of tech giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Nakamura focuses on the contribution of Navajo women who worked at the Fairfield plant in New Mexico producing computer chips. Because the Navajo women were willing to work for a low wage and because Fairfield could avoid paying taxes by building on reservations, costs remained low.

Fairfield publicized that these women were particularly well suited for the job due to their transferable skill from their practice of weaving, an algorithmic art that was often overlooked due to its association with the domestic sphere. Because of the meticulous attention to detail necessary to weave rugs, Navajo women were seen as perfect for producing chips accurately, quickly, and painlessly. These women were also hailed as the ideal workforce because they were mobile, cheap, and above all, flexible; they could be laid off at any time. As a result, their previous experiences allowed for these digital circuits to be manufactured in such a large scale.

However, although this decision to insource work was advertised as of dual benefit to both Fairfield and Navajo women from both sides, the project did not result in a great economic payoff to the women themselves. Furthermore, the manufacture itself was made to seem like it was “preserving” Navajo culture. Nakamura describes a Fairchild brochure from 1969 in which the transition from weaving to circuit making is made to seem an “extension of Navajo culture. Through the reading we come to understand that it is not due to these traits that Navajo women were hired, but rather, as Nakamura eloquently explains, “these traits were identified after the company learned about the tax incentives available to subsidize the project, the lack of unions and other employment options in the area…” (Nakamura, 935). Thus, while on the base surface the whole project was seen in one light, Nakamura urges us to realize and understand the “cultural” rhetoric adopted for the exploitation of the fact that there was a lack of jobs for Navajo women.

This article comes from the tradition of critical theory, calling for us to look beyond the commonalities of the digital field and see this labor for what it is, digital manufacture, not an innate part of the “Indian psyche.”

• Sean → wrote the topic sentences for each paragraph, the introduction, and helped edit
• Luis →  wrote the second paragraph
• Kate →  wrote the third paragraph and part of the fourth paragraph

Transistors were the successors to the vacuum tube technology which dominated the electronics industry through the mid-1950s.  Following the invention of transistors, engineers began to design more complex electronic circuits with a variety of components.  In order to improve the performance of the electronics, more components were necessary. At the time, this meant that thousands components had to be connected by hand soldering a bunch of wire.  This was expensive, time-consuming, and faulty.

Jack Kilby realized that the resistors and capacitors used to make electronic circuits could be made from the same material and interconnected in a single circuit and thus, he built the first successful integrated circuit made of germanium in 1958 at Texas Instruments.  Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors built an integrated circuit on silicon in 1960 and along with Kilby is considered a co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Silicon is the most popular material for semiconductors today and Noyce’s design was overall more suited to mass production.  Noyce was also one of the co-founders of Intel, one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

In the late 1950s, Gordon Moore noticed that transistor density (as in the number of transistors) on integrated circuits was doubling each year. Moore eventually condensed these observations into Moore’s Law, which charts a progression of growth in transistor density eventually leading to exponential increase and thus an exponential increase in processor speed. So far, Moore’s Law has proven to be accurate.

The first uses of the newly invented integrated circuit were fairly select. Texas Instruments, the company where Jack Kilby worked, developed a handheld calculator using the technology. The military and space exploration agencies also made use of the integrated circuit.

Silicon Valley arises out the silicon chip manufacturers within the area because most semiconductors are made from silicon. The 1980s brought widespread use of the term Silicon Valley because of the IBM personal computer that used the chip as well as many semiconductor companies in the surrounding area. Silicon Valley is now the home of many technology giants as well as thousands of small start ups aiming to make a considerable impact.

Division of labor: Each group member summarized about two pages of the text.

Collaborative annotation document: Coover

Scholarship on computers has tended to focus on the history of machines, presenting the age of computers as a revolution of its own; the purpose of Mahoney’s piece is to decenter the machine and instead focus on the processes and what they represent. Scholarship has traditionally focused on a linear narrative of machines dating back from the abacus, to the mechanical calculator, all the way to the PC internet of today. This approach, in fact, ignores the context of the computer’s development and what is so significant about it. The development of computers is really the collective creation of various communities  adapting the technology to their own functions. Before data processing for businesses became the primary function of computing, industries from science and engineering to military operations made use of various functions, assisting anything from improving workplace flow in manufacturing to automation of military control systems. Community development shows that people saw and expecting different uses from the tech, but historians haven’t focused on this. 

The emphasis should be on software. Software reflects the real world and software engineers are required to thoroughly understand not only the software itself, but also the context of how the world is modeled. When these fundamentals lacked, a ‘software crisis’ occurred in the late 1960s. Understanding software requires precise analysis and interaction with computer behaviors, rather than its structure, and how they operate. As a whole, studying the history of computing should focus on what the development process looked like; what applications communities wanted and how they developed the technology to fulfill their specific needs. It should involve acknowledging that computers are an output of human goals and that computers, as tools, open up new possibilities but also limit the work for which we use them. Each aspect of computers has its own history that informs what it can and cannot do.

Work was divided evenly among Charles, Gabriel, Georgia and Sean, with Charles editing and posting the final outline.

This chapter summarizes the story of the origins of computing by focusing on several key historical figures including Leibniz, the creator of calculus and binary numbers, Charles Babbage, Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, George Boole, and Claude Shannon.

Gottfried Leibniz was a German mathematician and philosopher. Using Pascal’s calculating machine as inspiration, Leibniz developed a more sophisticated device called the step reckoner which could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots. Leibnitz also invented the binary system which used 1 and 0 to

Charles Babbage was an English inventor who created the difference engine which when given the solution to a polynomial, could then solve for the solutions to nearby values. Like Leibnitz, Babbage was interested in efficiently computing arithmetic statements and designed a machine that could compute trigonometric and logarithmic equations.

Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, a famous poet, contributed heavily to the computing world through both her writing and her visions for the capabilities of computing. Introduced to Charles Babbage at one of his many dinner parties in 1833, Lovelace saw the prototype for his difference engine, which inspired her future communication with Babbage. In describing possible applications for the analytic engine, which was never actually built by Babbage, Lovelace wrote out a program, thought to be the first computer program, for a calculation the engine could do. Furthermore, she foresaw the possible applications for the machine beyond calculation.

George Boole, an English mathematician, published many papers contributing mathematics, but his most notorious development was Boolean algebra. Although it was a theoretical approach to computing, his work is the foundation of modern computing. Using these theories, Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, discovered that Boolean logic is the perfect model for switching theory and the design of digital circuits which underlie all electronic digital computers.

Sean→  wrote the introductory paragraph and the paragraphs on Leibniz and Babbage

Kate→ wrote the paragraph on Lady Ada Lovelace

Luis→  wrote the paragraph on Boole and Shannon

Introduction

The history of computers begins not with computers but with groups of people in very focused disciplines doing very specific and diligent work largely unnoticed by the masses.  This is often overlooked and particularly erases the contribution that women played in the role of making computers the concrete, logarithmic machines they are today. The longevity and brilliance of the computer is attributed those who upon first glance appear they have no use for computers or computer science but instead find they are the very ones asking what’s the next set of limits to defy and what should we ask from computers in the future.

Chapter 2

Charles Babbage was an economist whose broad interests in economics, astronomy and literature lead him to develop an incipient computing machine called the Difference Engine. This device could perform simple mathematical operations and was mainly intended to compute squares. Babbage’s initial pioneering work in computing machines, using gears and levers instead of circuit boards, was a vital first step toward the modern computer we have today. Overall, the work of Babbage and his colleagues represents the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of computer science in its nascent stages.  Moreover, this section serves to underscore the importance of the diligent work of people in computer science more than the machines themselves.

TJ did the Introduction and Gray did Chapter 2. TJ then submitted the blog.