Symposium Discusses Communications Technologies Part of 50th anniversary of the Society for the History of Technology Jay Hauben A Symposium on the History of Communications Technologies was held on Oct. 17 at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington DC. The museum co-sponsored the symposium along with the Mercurians, an organization of scholars and others interested in the history of communication technology. The Mercurians is a special interest group of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). The Symposium was part of the 50th Annual meeting of SHOT. I will report on only one of the six sessions of the symposium. That session was titled "Internet(s)". The first speaker, Merlyna Lim spoke about the socio-political history of the Internet in Indonesia. Lim explained the use of technology as symbols. Indonesia being a collection of islands, the Indonesian government starting in the 1970s used telecommunications as a national symbol. Satellite technology was depicted as watching over Indonesia thus helping to give Indonesia some national cohesion. Computer and network technology was projected as a way to leapfrog Indonesia into modernity. Until the late 1990s all national communication via newspapers, radio, or television was initiated and controlled by the Indonesian state A different role of new technologies in Indonesia was demonstrated when in the late 1990s Indonesia experienced an economic and political crisis. The Internet was being introduced just at this time of the social ferment. Fax, fixed phones, mobile phones, email, computers and the Internet gave Indonesians on- and off-line added means by which they were able to bring about the end of the Suharto regime and enter a period of political reform. Lim reported that the Internet was portrayed as a symbol of the anti Suharto revolution because it was not identified with the state. But the role of the Internet has been misrepresented. It would be wrong to give all the credit to the Internet or to technology. The Internet had been preceded in Indonesia by bulletin board systems (BBS), newsgroups and mailing lists some from Indonesians abroad. Indonesians integrated Internet connectivity with the traditional snack cafe meeting places called warungs into warnet cybercafes. The events of 1998 were socio political events with technologies embedded in them and need to be seen in their social and well as technological contexts. Lim concluded that there is in fact a co-evolution of technical, economic, socio-cultural and political elements. The second speaker Ronda Hauben(*) discussed what she saw as the actual international origins of the Internet as contrasted with the often told story that the Internet started as a military project in the U.S. Hauben differentiated between the ARPANET and the Internet. The ARPANET started in the late 1960s as an experiment to connect diverse computers in the U.S. regardless of their different technologies. It was a U.S. project under the ownership and control of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The Internet in contrast started as a project in 1973 to learn how to connect dissimilar computer networks across geographical, political and technical boundaries. The foundation of the Internet was the principle of open architecture meaning that participation was based on gateways and adoption of a common communication protocol suite, eventually called TCP/IP. The Internet was international from the beginning Hauben stressed. To illustrate the international interest in computer networking, she discussed the example of efforts in the 1970s at the Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis (IIASA) to interconnect networks of computer centers in Eastern and Western Europe. Hauben showed diagrams and graphics presented at IIASA by Peter Kirstein from University College London illustrating the early efforts to solve the multi-network interconnection problem. In the diagrams satellites were seen as crucial even at the earliest days of the Internet experimentation. Satellites were used for example by U.S., Norwegian and UK researchers to test and develop the TCP/IP protocol suite which made the Internet possible. Hauben concluded that the Internet spread quickly in the 1990s because there had been 20 years of international networking collaboration including BBS and Unix networks that laid the foundation. I gave the third presentation, "The Computer as a Communications Device: Looking Back Almost 40 Years Later." I discussed the insights of Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and JCR Licklider in the 1960s that computers were not particularly calculating machines but most importantly communications devices. Wiener, a mathematician and philosopher by training, arrived at his insight while working during World War II on the design of systems to help shoot down war planes even when the pilots took evasive action. Such a human-machine system needed to locate and track an aircraft, calculate its probable future position, control the aiming and firing of the anti-aircraft gun and repeat the process if the first shot did not succeed in bringing down the craft. Such systems seemed to Wiener to be best understood as communications systems. For example, he conceived of the control signal to the anti-aircraft gun as a communication of aiming parameters. Wiener also realized a close resemblance between the systems he was designing and the nervous and brain systems of animals and humans: there was sensory input, processing and resulting action corrected by further input, etc. These insights led Wiener to a synthesis of the study of humans and machines that he named cybernetics. Licklider, a psychologist by training, build on Wiener's work and with Robert Taylor saw that communications over a computer network would lead to communities of common interest as opposed to common location. The people in such communities would be empowered by their numbers and mutual support to take action on their interests. Also, Licklider foresaw that humans and computers integrated together would make it possible for mental models by which humans think to be externalized and compared and improved thus increasing the power and success of human to human communication and collaboration. I brought my presentation up to date by describing the extensive use of broadband connectivity in South Korea to help elect an outsider as president in 2002, to expose scientific fraud, to encourage sports teams, and to invent new communities and ways of sharing. I wondered if there might be emerging an intimate global relation among humans and between humans and computers which might further the solution of the social and political problems that face human society. There was a fourth presentation of the value of telegraph technology for automating astronomical observation data taking in the 19th century. It was read by Andrew Butrica because its author Trudy Bell could not be present. In the discussion that followed these presentations, the participants expressed their interest in learning from the presenters' different work and seeing the connections among them. The example of Indonesia provided a demonstration of the role there of the Internet and of the computer as a communications device. The story of the international development of the Internet based on satellites and Unix and other technologies rang true and made clearer where the Internet in Indonesia had come from. Being in the postal museum, these presentations also helped raise the question of whether the postal museum should include the history and artifacts and impact of email. Staff members from the postal museum present at the session said this was an active question at the museum with there being two camps one opposed and favoring broadening the museum's coverage to include the history and practice of email. The Society for the History of Technology was started in 1957-58 to support the study of the development of technology and the cultural context of that development. SHOT holds annual meetings and publishes a quarterly journal, Technology and Culture. Today SHOT has almost 1,500 members and about 1,000 institutional subscribers to Technology and Culture. SHOT held its 50th Annual Meeting in Washington DC Oct. 19-23 with 235 presenters organized into 61 sessions with topics such as "50 years of Computing Histography" and "(Post) Cold War Imaginaries: Satellites, Cell Phones and Nanotechnology". There were also plenary meetings, the side symposium reported on above, receptions and an award banquet. Just to mention a few other examples of what happened at the SHOT Annual meeting, Ann Johnson presented about the development of AUTOCAD an engineering design computer application. The presenter emphasized that using the program changed how designers envisioned their models. She did not judge whether the old way of hand design or the new way of computer aided design was better. But she pointed out that AUTOCAD allowed designers to externalize their models, compare them and better collaborate on them, echoing what Licklider predicted. Another presenter, Lisa Parks, described and showed photos of the "Walking Phone Booths: Public Wireless Telephony in Mongolia." She described the renting of time on mobile phones carried by sellers standing at street corners or in other outdoor places in Ulaanbaatar as a local adaptation fitting with a nomad tradition. Johnson raised questions about the integration of the walking phone booths and the global wireless infrastructure and economy. She warned not to ignore varied and particular histories and the subtleties of their unique development. The past, present and possible future of SHOT was discussed at a plenary meeting with major speakers. Thomas Hughes told anecdotes from the early days of the founding of SHOT. His picture was that of Melvin Kranzberg single handedly crafting a new organization to put the study of the development of technology into its historical context. Wiebe Bijker followed Hughes agreeing that in the beginning SHOT was a motley crew of scholars but in 50 years had built a journal and a society that defines a field of study, the history of technology. His message was that SHOT was now strong enough to emerge into the outside world after 50 years of mostly internal debate and scholarship. Rebecca Herzig wondered whether SHOT should step beyond scholarly considerations to other roles. She acknowledged that there have been scholarly critiques of SHOT and thought the future of SHOT could not be foreseen. One of the high points of SHOT annual meeting is the attendance not only of academic scholars but also graduate students, museum curators, hobbyists and amateur historians. SHOT has an International Scholars Program that funds students from around the world to attend. I was especially happy to meet graduate students from S. Korea where there appears to be one or more strong programs in the history of technology. SHOT will continue the celebration of its 50th anniversary at its next annual meeting which will be in Lisbon Portugal in October 2008.