On software, or the persistence of visual knowledge

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 18, 2005, Pages 27-51

  Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249083796     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/1526381043320741     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. As quoted by John Schwartz, "Privacy Fears Erode Support for a Network to Fight Crime," The New York Times, 15 March 2004, C1. Seisint is a corporation developing "the Matrix," a computer system discussed later in this article.
2. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (Brooklyn: Semiotext(e), 1988), 21-22; emphasis in original.
3. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 48.
4. Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 80.
5. Manfred Broy, "Software Engineering - From Auxiliary to Key Technology," in Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering, ed. Manfred Broy and Ernst Denert (Berlin: Springer, 2002), 11-12.
6. Friedrich Kittler, "There Is No Software," ctheory.net, 18 October 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/text-file.asp?pick=74.
7. In the 1950s the term software was used infrequently and referred to anything that complemented hardware, such as the plug configuration of cables. In the 1960s software became more narrowly understood as what we would now call systems software and more broadly as "any combination of tools, applications, and services purchased from an outside vender." Thomas Haigh, "Application Software in the 1960s as Concept, Product, and Service," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no. 1 (January-March 2002): 6.
8. For more on this see Wolfgang Hagen's "The Style of Source Codes," trans. Peter Krapp in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2005).
9. See Herman Goldstine and Adele Goldstine, "The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18 no. 1 (Spring 1996): 10-16. The two activities have been divided by Arthur Burks into "numerical programming" (implemented by the operators) and "programming proper" (designed by engineers and implemented by the master programming unit).
10. Arthur Burks, "From ENIAC to the Stored-Program Computer: Two Revolutions in Computers," in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. N. Metropolis et al., 311-344 (New York: Academic Press, Inc., and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). Numerical programming dealt with the specifics of the problem and the arithmetic units and was similar to microprogramming; programming proper dealt with the control units and the sequence of operations.
11. See Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 184.
12. See Wolfgang Hagen, "The Style of Source Codes," in New Media, Old Media, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2005).
13. Adele Mildred Koss, "Programming on the Univac 1: A Woman's Account," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 1 (January-March 2003): 56.
14. See Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, 1-23 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
15. John Backus, "Programming in America in the 1950s - Some Personal Impressions," A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. Metropolis et al., 127.
16. Jean Sammett, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 144.
17. See for instance Theodor Nelson, Computer Lib (Richmond, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987).
18. Harry Reed, "My Life with the ENIAC: A Worm's Eye View," in Fifty Years of Army Computing from ENIAC to MSRC, Army Research Laboratory, 2000, 158; accessible online at: http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/comphist/harry-reed. pdf.
19. See "Anecdotes: How Did You First Get into Computing?" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 4 (October-December 2003): 48-59.
20. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 71.
21. I.J. Good. "Pioneering Work on Computers at Bletchley," in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. Metropolis et al., 31-46.
22. See Michael S. Mahoney, "Finding a History for Software Engineering," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 27, no. 1 (January-March 2004): 8-19.
23. As argued earlier, although software produces visible effects, software itself cannot be seen. Luce Irigaray, in This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), has similarly argued that feminine sexuality is nonvisual, "her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see", emphasis in original, 26.
24. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 37.
25. Paul Edwards, "The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity," Signs 16, no. 1 (1990): 105, 125; emphasis added.
26. Vannevar Bush describes the action of a stenographer as: "A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze." Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, repr. 1994, http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/duchier/pub/ vbush/vbush.txt. Women have been largely displaced from programmers to users, while continuing to dominate the hardware production labor pool oven as these jobs have moved across the Pacific.
27. For more on the software crisis and the relationship between it and software engineering, see Camboll-Kelly and William Aspray, 196-203, Ceruzzi, 105, and Frederick P. Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition (NY: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995).
28. Edsger W. Dijkstra, "EWD 1308: What Led to 'Notes on Structure Programming,'" in Software Pioneers, ed. Broy and Denert, 342.
29. Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Go to Statement Considered Harmful," in Software Pioneers, ed. Broy and Denert, 352, 354.
30. John V. Guttag, "Abstract Data Types, Then and Now," in Software Pioneers, ed. Broy and Denert, 444.
31. David Eck, The Most Complex Machine: A Survey of Computers and Computing (Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, 2000), 329, 238.
32. Koss, "Programming on the Univac 1: A Woman's Account," 49.
33. Paul Edwards, "The Army and the Microworld," 108-9.
34. For more on the pleasure of programming see Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001);
35. and Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday 4, no. 8 (2 August 1999), http://firstmonday. org/issues/issue4-8/moglen/index.html.
36. See Edwards's discussion of John McCarthy's work in The Closed World, 258.
37. John von Neumann, Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory, ed. William Aspray and Arthur Burks (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 413.
38. Ben Schneiderman, "Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages," in The New Media Reader, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 486.
39. Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1991), xviii.
40. Lev Manovich, "Generation Flash," 2002, http://www.manovich. net/DOCS/generation-flash.doc.
41. Manovich, "Generation Flash."
42. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 51.
43. See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
44. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 109.
45. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 11-53.
46. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 81.
47. Manovich, The Language of New Media, 48.
48. See Media Player's "Licensing Agreement."
49. Microsoft is considering such actions in its Palladium initiative. See Florence Olsen, "Control Issues: Microsoft's plan to improve computer security could set off fight over use of online materials," Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 February 2003, http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i24/24a02701. htm.
50. See Kittler, "There Is No Software."
51. See Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 247-98.
52. Richard Doyle's concept of "rhetorical software," developed in his On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), epitomizes the use of software as a critical term in nonscientific scholarly discourse and reveals the extent to which software structures our ideas and thus lies as the concept that needs most interrogation.