The theoretical foundations of modern computing machines were laid in the early twentieth century when mathematical philosophers in Europe and the United States, spurred by the invention of internally consistent, non-Euclidean geometries, explored problems of rationality provability and logic machines. These explorations culminated in the 1930s with the invention of idealized, hypothetical, general computing machines. The exigencies of the Second World War brought state funding to these mathematicians, and electronic calculating machines were built based on their theoretical designs. In Britain these machines were used to break German codes; in the US research was geared towards atomic-bomb production.

After the Second World War, British development of calculating machines languished, while in the US developers created private corporations and sought markets for their products. However, the secrecy of the previous research, the enormous government funding behind it and the narrow focus of their application had produced machines which were huge, complex, expensive and difficult to adapt or program. Markets for these machines were difficult to find and at first limited to government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the Census Bureau. In an attempt to create market consciousness, Remington Rand lent one of its machines, the UNIVAC, to CBS to assist in predicting the outcome of the 1952 presidential election. When it forecast the landslide results more accurately than human experts, the computer entered popular consciousness as an omniscient “electronic brain.” Its use spread to large corporations in dataintensive industries such as banking and insurance. International Business Machines (IBM), renowned as the epitome of white, male, crew-cut, button-down efficiency quickly became the dominant manufacturer of computing equipment. Payroll management became one of the earliest data-processing service industries. During this period, the instruction sets which guided the computer’s operations, and the data on which the computer operated, were stored on “punch cards.” These were pieces of cardboard, measuring about 2.5 inches by 6 inches, through which small rectangular holes were punched. The pattern of the holes represented a particular instruction or data point. They were fed into the computer by high-speed mechanical devices which frequently jammed. To prevent such jams, punch cards had to be handled carefully and were often imprinted with the phrase “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” These cards became the mediator between millions of people and the world’s largest and most powerful institutions. They became symbolic of computers themselves—vast storehouses of information—used by people who didn’t really understand them to perform calculations of a complexity far beyond human capabilities, producing inscrutable and incontestable decisions. They were the embodiment of bureaucratic oppression. Bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaimed “I am a human being. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several technological and social changes occurred which altered the popular involvement with, and perceptions of, the computer. The first of these was the development of transistors, integrated circuits and microchips which permitted miniaturization, standardization and mass production of processors. The second was a development of a play rather than work, culture around computers. This latter development proceeded, in part, from the increased availability of computers to college students on a time-share basis. As these students began to experiment with programming languages, humanmachine interfaces and multiple-user machines, they developed very simple two-person games. Hobbyists also began to buy computer kits publicized through popular magazines and to build machines, which, though rudimentary, had an adaptable design and public technical specifications. Thus computer use spread from corporate culture into the middle-class, college-educated, young male culture of the early 1970s.

In 1977 two of these men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, produced the Apple II in a suburban garage. At first marketed through hobbyist clubs, it became the first massmarket personal computer (PC). Originally useful only for word processing and game playing, it was not until the invention of business-oriented spreadsheet programs that the “PC revolution” started to take off. In 1984 Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple Macintosh, marketing it to both home and office users. Symbolically positioned against institutionalized, even totalitarian, bureaucratic power, the Macintosh was advertised as “the machine for the rest of us.” This marketing approach was fabulously successful.

Fortunes were made in computers, software and peripherals, and the new money was conspicuously young, male and west coast.

IBM, in a hurried attempt to extend their dominance from mainframe computing into the new realm of PCs, entered into non-exclusive license agreements with Intel (for microprocessors) and Microsoft (for operating-system software). IBM branding provided the assurance necessary to convince millions of users to make the substantial economic investment that a personal computer represented, and the Intel/Microsoft configuration became an industry standard, competing with Apple for the hearts and minds (and dollars) of US personal computer users. By the mid-1990s, IBM had lost its market share of PCs to other manufacturers, even though the technical standard was still referred to as “IBM-compatibility.” Despite much of the hype surrounding the “PC revolution,” the social diffusion of these machines in the early twenty-first century remains predominantly white, middle-class and male.

As PCs replaced mainframes in offices, internal networks linked individual machines to central data servers, reasserting centralized surveillance and control. Bill Gates, as the founder and principal stockholder of Microsoft, became the richest man in the US, his fortune rivaling those of Rockefeller, Carnegie and the Vanderbilts. Thus PCs, originally imagined as machines for freedom and individuality are again implicated in historically deep-seated reactions against big money and corporate power.

These tensions between centrality of power and diffusion, between freedom and domination, are exacerbated as processors are further miniaturized and incorporated into such amenities as cars and appliances, and as networking technologies and practices increasingly link these processors in various topologies of communication and control.