Ceruzzi, Paul. “The Advent of Commercial Computing, 1945-1956.” A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 13-46. Print.

Summary

Ceruzzi traces the development of commercial computing by narrating its history in relation to the most influential machine birthed from that era, the UNIVAC, “Universal Automatic Computer,” completed in 1951 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The UNIVAC was designed as a system with an internal design that allowed users to manipulate it based on the problems to be solved. Its internal memory and use of tape for input/output made for a much faster machine, which helped with sorting data as an “information processing system,” fulfilling a growing need for businesses. The UNIVAC’s ability to automate functions, saved companies time and labor, helped its assent and influence on subsequent computers, such as IBM’s 701. Although Ceruzzi touches on other technology, including the drum, the purpose of this chapter is to explain how the UNIVAC’s design made it the first true electronic computer.

Quotes

Computing after 1945 is a story of people who at critical moments redefined the nature of the technology itself. In doing so they opened up computing to new markets, new applications, and a new place in the social order. (14)

The acronym came from “Universal Automatic Computer,” a name that they chose carefully. “Universal” implied that it could solve problems encountered by scientists, engineers, and businesses. “Automatic” implied that it could solve complex problems without requiring constant human intervention or judgment, as existing techniques required. (15)

No one who saw a UNIVAC failed to see how much it differed from existing calculators and punched card equipment. It used vacuum tubes – thousands of them. It stored data on tape, not cards. It was a large and expensive system, not a collection of different devices. The biggest difference was its internal design, not visible to the casual observer. The UNIVAC was a “stored program” computer, one of the first. More than anything, that made it different from the machines it was designed to replace. (20)

Many design features that alter became commonplace first appeared in the UNIVAC: among them were alphanumeric as well as numeric processing, an extensive use of extra bits for checking, magnetic tapes for bulk memory, and circuits called “buffers” that allowed high-speed transfers between the fast delay line and slow tape storage units. (29)

To the extent that its customers perceived the UNIVAC as an “electronic brain,” it was because it “knew” where to find the desired data on a tape, could wind or rewind a tape to that place, and could extract (or record) data automatically. Customers regarded the UNIVAC as an information process system, not a calculator. As such, it replaced not only existing calculating machines, but also the people who tended them. (30)

Questions

How does this chapter – and the UNIVAC specifically – factor into the focus of this week theme, “what the web was built for”? That is, what role did these computers play in the development of the web?

Ceruzzi primarily focuses on the technical innovations of commercial computing, but does indicate a few of the social and cultural effects of them, such as the effect the tape system had on labor in companies. What might be some others? How would a more complete understanding of the history of computing, or perhaps of business, help to understand this?

31 May 2007

So rather than write one long response at the end this time, I decided to type up notes as I read to see how this would be more or less helpful. Though I don’t always synthesize the texts, this format does help to remember the texts. I guess it’s weird being a students again — experimenting with different ways of response and such…

Bizzel – see Short Paper #1

Graff/Leff – “Revisionist Historiography” (2005)

• As Graff/Leff provide their meta-history of revisionist historiography, they fall into the same trap as their predecessors in comments like “…Charles Sears Baldwin established the standard pattern for twentieth-century studies of the history of rhetoric” and “[Carole Blair’s] essay ‘Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change’ represents the last major entry in the wave of revisionism…” because they never explain how they’re coming to these conclusions.

• Oddly, when discussing the new scholarship that has emerged in com/rhet since the first wave, the authors do acknowledge that they do not “have space in this chapter to review all of the different perspectives featured in the early stages of the discussion but can identify some of the basic tenets as well as characteristic assumptions and motives animating the broader revisionist projects within the field of composition-rhetoric.” Again, no real discussion here about how these “basic tenets” were generalized. To what degree, then, do historians need to be explicit about who/what they’re including/excluding and their reasons for doing so? As an outsider (someone just now learning about this discourse community), it seems that the risk in not being explicit is unchecked canonization of certain authors – more on this below.

• In outlining a chronology of first and second wave revisionists, are Graff and Leff contributing to the traditional view of history as a linear enterprise and in turn, canonizing certain historiographers and theorists (names that I now recognize as important)? We have more taxonomies (“critical historiography”). Interesting to have read this after Octlog and after last week’s readings. How would I have framed those authors if I had read Graff/Leff’s account of them first?

• What’s also suspect is Graff/Leff’s four-page interrogation of Carole Blair. Seems like she being used for a set up, though it’s difficult to tell without knowing more about revisionist approaches. I also wonder if she is attacked because of some disciplinary distortion – as the authors admit, her speech background “contrasts sharply” with comp/rhet’s.

• Argument for why we should look at pedagogy moves a bit quickly for me, though I like their suggestion to study the pedagogy of rhetoric since teaching is my most viable and rewarding reason to study histories of rhetoric (as opposed to other ways of viewing it, which so far seem more interested in its philosophical, textual, and therefore abstract consequences).

Carol Mattingly’s “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric” (2002)

• Agrees with Bizzell that more needs to be done to “explore the broad range of texts that can contribute a vibrant understanding and appreciation of women’s role in rhetoric.”

• Outlines early recovery efforts and uses the example of Cady Stanton and Anthony to argue that this early work has been guilty of canonizing certain women rhetors (admittedly, to establish ethos) at the expense of ignoring other important ones. The problem is that those canonized “become deeply imbedded in our cultural narratives,” initially chosen from rhetorical criteria “established in the masculine tradition.”

• By reading a wide range of primary sources, Mattingly discovered that more women were more publicly active as rhetors in the 19th century than scholars initially thought. A resistance to study women outside of the suffrage movement (i.e. women in the temperance movement) prevented scholars from coming to this understanding sooner and is the result of not reading locally (contextually) enough – an argument made by several of Mattingly’s contemporaries (so-called second wave revisionists) – since contemporary scholars have equated temperance with conservativism. More focused study, she argues, opens up possibilities for more interpretations. Without this additional work, she implies, she would have never discovered that Amelia Bloomer was more influential than Anthony or Cady Stanton or that the temperance movement was really a call for better conditions for women.

• In arguing for a more accurate understanding of rhetorical traditions Mattingly ultimately wants scholars to rethink the ways they measure rhetoric by redefining evidence. “Since traditional definition of rhetoric have been constructed around notions of masculine rhetoric,” she argues, “many rhetorically sophisticated women simply do not fit neatly into the rhetorical tradition. What has counted for evidence fails to recognize women’s excellence.” Mattingly’s example is women’s clothing in the 19th century played an essential role in establishing ethos, though we wouldn’t consider that if we went with the traditional measures of rhetoric.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “Consciousness-Raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice” (2002)

• Campbell’s overarching argument can be captured in her pithy quote in the intro: “as a form of discursive practice, consciousness-raising is the thread that links the recovery of texts, their recuperation through criticism, and the extraction of theoretical principles that underlie women’s ways of persuading.”

• She begins by tracing a few ways women’s histories have been recovered, even before the U.S. woman’s rights movement, from speeches in the 19th century to dissertations in the 1930s through the 1950s to the emergence of women’s studies programs to new anthologies of women’s histories. She acknowledges, however, that no matter what historians try to do, “the historical record will remain profoundly distorted, skewed toward those lucky enough to be literate, educated, and middle or upper class and whose works appeared in mainstream outlets with wider circulation.”

• In the spirit of recovery, Campbell then analyzes how women’s rhetoric and its history have been “lost” in the first place – or how certain obstacles and criticisms (“formal prohibitions,” “denial of agency,” “unsexing,” “attacks on character,” “aesthetic”) are fixed by traditional rhetoric to make it impossible to analyze justly.

• In order to overcome these obstacles – and to protest them – women spoke or wrote in ways that both met traditional expectations of the rhetor “while incorporating stylistic elements that projected femininity” such as inductive structures, narrating personal experience, dialogism, etc. According to Campbell, these alternative rhetorics can only be recuperated through critical analysis.

• Barrowing from Krista Radcliff’s efforts to theorize from analyses, Campbell argues that feminist critical analysis of the discursive practices that are recovered should be used to extract larger rhetorical theories: “the task of recovery is unending; recuperation, however, requires the analytical and interpretive work of critics.” It’s not clear to me, though, how these all link together. What would these new theories do? How might they help with current issues facing feminism? How might they help historiography of rhetoric?

Christine Mason Sutherland’s “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric” (2002)

• She starts by comparing how she learned to conduct historical research to how she learned to write – it just became second nature – which doesn’t seem to be very self-reflective. Her privileged background reinforces this for me.

• The article is feminist in that it’s autobiographical – the most personal we’ve read so far – yet sometimes I can’t help but feel she abuses the notion by not discussing evidence enough. She brings up multiple issues but tends to dismisses them and move on (postmodernism being one of the biggies).

• Agrees with Enos that more attention needs to be paid to primary texts since interpreting them makes her “feel more like a benefactor” than “taking the adversarial stance typical of so much secondary research.” This really provoked me – I never thought of this distinction and the idea that primary research could be considered a “feminist” move is powerful. I’m surprised more attention wasn’t paid to it. Instead she makes grander claims about the trouble with argumentive discourse.

• Notes that she sides with “the authority of the writer, and the importance of seeing the text in the historical context,” which, she argues, characterizes traditional scholarship. But many feminists and scholars (who’d probably be calssified as po-mo) agree that all historical scholarship needs to be localized. I thought Campbell made a more nuanced argument in this regard and that Sutherland gets confused because she tries to claim too much.

24 May 2007

Predictably enough, I approached the six readings for 5/24 in the order they were listed in the syllabus. As I was reading each piece, I kept wondering how the ordering of these texts would influence my initial understandings of rhetoric’s history — how they would add up to my initial metahistory – especially since I know next to nothing about classical rhetoric or historiography. And now that I’m done with the set, there’s no doubt that a rereading of all would shift my “horizon of expectation” (to borrow from Jauss). As I reflected on each piece, it seemed a bit strange to me that the first four readings – Kellner, Atwill, Berlin, and Schlib – seemed less accessible than Enos and White. But after finishing White, I think I’m starting to understand why.

In White’s 1978 seminal essay, he argues that histories are “verbal fictions” that use a process he calls “emplotment” to string together stories from individual facts (that I assume are less contestable or at least already subsumed into the collective consciousness of the culture to which it speaks). These stories (or “chronicles”) conform, however, to “specific kinds of plot structures,” akin to archetypes through the use of narrative tropes – metaphor, irony, metonymy, and synecdoche – in order to refamiliarize history for its readers so that they might understand traumatic events and, in turn, “make sense of [their] own life-histories.”

[If I can accurately relate this to my own experience with these readings, it would mean that since I did not have a strong history (narrative) from which to build (to refamiliarize), it would make sense why I would be frustrated by these other theorists. Without some device (call it schema, metonymy, etc.) to recall some kind of history, it’s awfully difficult to incorporate it into your own perspective. OR maybe that’s what makes the others strong – they avoid narrative through theory and therefore rewrite history through that genre? I don’t know…]

While it seems that although Enos and White are both dissatisfied with the quality of contemporary historical scholarship, they disagree on the reasons. Whereas White argues that it is not literary enough, Enos believes that it’s too literary, basing most its data on secondary texts. According to Enos scholars should be more concerned with basic/primary research – archival and field work, translations, actual digs in Greece, etc. – rather than “eliciting a reaction to secondary sources.” While Enos makes it clear that he’s not against criticism, he’s concerned about those texts working “independently from basic research and existing as ends in themselves.” At stake, he believes, is the history of rhetoric, which is dramatically captured in the last few lines of his article. Of course, the problem with the argument is one of traditional definitions – an issue indirectly called out by the texts five years earlier (I think?) in Writing Histories of Rhetorics. Specifically, what does “history” and “rhetoric” even mean? (Sigh.)

The weakness with Enos, however, is also his strength. And what I found strong (and personally relieving) about both the White and Enos texts is that they were more accessible because they offered an explicit methodology on how to approach histories. Though their ideas seemed incompatible, I at least felt that if I were to undertake a research project under their supervision, they’d tell me what I’d need to do. On the other hand, with Kellner, Atwill, Berlin, and Schlib, I felt lost in the postmodern slipperiness. Anyway, here’s a quick breakdown of those:

Kellner: raises essential questions about the difference between history and rhetoric, admitting both terms “exhibit an endlessly bewildering double nature.” He goes on to argue that the textbook in which his article is being anthologized – and the textbook for many of these texts (Writing Histories of Rhetorics) – is actually “a struggle for power over the discourse.” He then characterizes some of the authors and the editor through a parable centered on a mother’s death. In the end, however, his point is to privilege rhetoric since its tradition is the “strand of meaning” formed by the historian. As he says in the last paragraph, “you are rhetoricians first.”

Berlin seems to agree with Kellner’s view when he argues, “the formulation of rhetoric is a product of the economic, social, and political conditions of a specific historical moment” and therefore histories will change as rhetorics change. Rhetoric is never unified and that we always already have a plurality of rhetorics. Berlin then offers a vague historiographic method that challenges all totalistic, grand historical narratives that builds off of Lyotard. I had trouble figuring out how his call for self-reflection would be used.

Both Atwill and Schilb take a more taxonomic approach to the history of rhetoric. Atwill uses Lyotard and Barbara Smith to sketch what she sees as three genres of history writing: semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic. Her purpose is to generate more terms that will help explain the “signifying functions” of history that take place in the present. Schilb, on the other hand, categorizes different anxieties historians face whenever they are charged to write a history of rhetoric. Each of the five anxieties evoked – taxomania (ironically?), espistemologia, canonia, Brumairism, and heterophobia – “reduces the complexity … we should pursue” as historiographers and we should, therefore, call them out.