via friends @ DePaul …
Studio CHI will be hosting a talk later this month featuring Thomas Haigh.
Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin/Madison):
Working on ENIAC: Memory, Labor and Gender in the Early Digital
February 23, 2017; 6:00 PM
Location: Loop Campus, 14 E. Jackson, CDM Theatre, Daley Building, Room LL105
Books and shows about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, while others like operations workers have been written out of the popular history of innovation. In this talk, Thomas Haigh explains that the six women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. Other women, who actually built ENIAC, have been forgotten entirely. His concluding comments relate this historical material to the human labor and physical infrastructure today vanishing from public view into the “cloud.”
