Broken metaphor: The master-slave analogy in technical literature

Technology and Culture

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 360-369

  Eglash, Ron ^a  

^a RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249665987     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2007.0066     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Reuters, "'Master' and 'Slave' Computer Labels Unacceptable, Officials Say," 26 November 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/ master.term.reut/index.html (accessed 15 January 2007).
2. See, for example, Gary Lee Downey and Juan Lucena, "Weeding Out and Hiring In: How Engineers Succeed," in Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, ed. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit (Santa Fe, N.M., 1997);
3. Ron Eglash, "Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters," Social Text 20 (2002): 49-64;
4. and Lois Powell, "Factors Associated with the Underrepresentation of African Americans in Mathematics and Science," Journal of Negro Education 59 (1990): 292-98.
5. The Gill report is quoted by clock inventor Frank Hope-Jones in a lecture to the British Horological Institute on 19 April 1923. Hope-Jones remarks: "Here the same idea is well expressed, but is based on a checked gaining rate instead of synchronization and the term 'slave clock' first used." I am indebted to James Nye, secretary of the Electrical Horology Group, for this information.
6. George Forbes, David Gill: Man and Astronomer (London, 1916).
7. Isohel Gill, Six Months in Ascension: An Unscientific Account of a Scientific Expedition (London, 1878).
8. Although timekeeping systems using a main clock and secondary clocks, as in a school, are now called master-slave clock systems, that is a fairly recent development. The Standard Electric Time Company of Springfield, Massachusetts, for example, lists these as "master" and "secondary" clocks in their catalogs from 1887-90 and 1909. Jeffery Wood, an expert on the history of Standard Electric, says the term "slave clock" came into informal use there after about 1945.
9. Thanks to David Read for his account of this event.
10. John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, "Dartmouth Timesharing," Science 162, no. 3850, 11 October 1968, 223-68.
11. David Noble, "Social Choice in Machine Design: The Case of Automatically Controlled Machine Tools," in Case Studies on the Labor Process, ed. Andrew Zimbalist (New York, 1979).
12. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confJumpering-c.html (accessed 15 January 2007).
13. Sally L. Hacker, Doing It the Hard Way (Boston, 1990).
14. Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New York, 2006).
15. Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others (New York, 1961), 284 (italics in original).
16. Sharon Traweek, "Uptime, Downtime, Spacetime, and Power: An Ethnography of the Particle Physics Community in Japan and the United States" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1982). In the transition between Traweek's dissertation and its publication as Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), parts of the section referenced here were cut.
17. See, for example, Ron Eglash et al., "Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom," American Anthropologist 108 (2006): 347-62.
18. Enforcement is really at the heart of this controversy, since many Islamic feminists have made solid arguments that veiling itself is not problematic as long as the decision is up to the individual. See, for example, Muslim Women's League, "An Islamic Perspective on Women's Dress" (2006), http://www.mwlusa.org/publications/positionpapers/hijab.html (accessed 11 January 2007).