About a month ago I was going through stacks of 1981/82 issues of Creative Computing on hand at the SBU Higinbotham Game Studies Collection. In the back of some issues I began to see ads for books, and thought these would be useful objects to add to my research collection. My most recent (and truly baffling!) addition is “Be A Computer Literate” by Marion J. Ball and Sylvia Charp, with illustrations by Jonathan Byrd. 

This 61-page, 8.5x11-sized, staple-bound book was published by Creative Computing Press in 1977, and was in its 3rd printing by 1981. On cover price is listed as $3.95. It's intended as an introductory text —its “Chapter” headings are:

1. Introduction
   
2. What Are Computers
   
3. Kinds of Computers
   
4. What Goes on Inside Computers
   
5. Communicating with the Computer
   
6. Language of the Computer
   
7. How to Write a Simple Program
   
8. How Computers Work for Us
   
   

The book is closed by a short glossary. The type is big—probably 16-20 pt., with wide breaks between sub-sections, keywords are in ALL CAPS, and the text is littered with multi-colored illustrations, and a couple spreads of b/w photos. It's hard to tell if it's a children's book—granted there are illustrations, but there's no “story” frame, and I would argue that there would be a precedent for books like this for adults. There was no strong indication in the Creative Computing ads that this was intended for children—it seemed more like a “public interest” text. 

The illustrations themselves leave me completely baffled, insofar as they are unlike anything I've yet encountered in a computer-related publication. Representations of women using computers or being used to explain the function of a computer are well over half the human representations in this book, and there's an consistent use of women of color—specifically, black/African-American women with distinctive afros (I'm also pretty sure there's one female figure wearing a stylized Puerto Rican flag on her shirt). The males all have long hair, and figures are often so androgynous that it's difficult to distinguish a conventionally understood male or female sex (the only clearly “male figures” are the occasional police officers and a principal). Every person photographed using a computer is female, with the sole exception of an faceless floating male arm using a light pen on a CRT—like some all-too-cognizant inversion of Laura Mulvey's thesis that cuts up men into anonymous body parts. It's like a drugged-out vision of the racially-diverse, queer comp-utopia I wish we'd always already lived in.

The history of the authors is as fascinating as the book itself. Marion J. Ball (married name; born Marion Jokl) was born in South Africa in 1940, where her parents fled from Nazi Germany. Her parents were both German Olympiads, and her father an expert in sports medicine. In '51, the family returned to Germany when South Africa announced its apartheid policy, but in '52 came to the US. Marion received a bachelors in math and education in 1960, and an MA in math in 1965, and later a doctorate in education. She worked as a programmer and instructor at the University of Kentucky, then went to Temple University. She held various directorships in medical computing. She's published slews of books on computer system selection and medical informatics (and an 1972 children's book “What is a Computer?”). There's a host of other accomplishments Ball earned, but briefly she became a leading force in the establishment of medical and nursing informatics—indeed the website where I plied most of this info from referred to her as the “mother of medical informatics” (people love to make “mothers” of ladies in the history of technology).

Sylvia Charp has an International Society of Technology in Education Award named after her (she passed away in a car accident in 2003). She was the founding editor of T.H.E. [Technological Horizons in Education] Journal, an educator at elementary, secondary and university levels, a technology consultant to businesses such as IBM, Bell,&  Hewlett Packard, an international consultant to UNESCO, a president of the International Society of Technology in Education, etc. Accounts say that she lived most her life around Philly, which is likely when/how she came into contact with Marion J. Ball. I've had a harder time finding biographical information on Charp, but she was certainly a big deal within the technology and education community. For those, like me, fascinated by weird valences between dining rooms, tables, women and computers, read this commentary by one of Sylvia's friends.

Jonathan Byrd, unfortunately, I have no leads on. His name is far too common to get any clear hits, even tossing in some Booleans for “illustrator” and “illustration.”

Regardless, this is a helluva little book. I look forward to continue digging up information on it. Also note—the Amazon listing doesn't note either Ball or Charp as author. It lists David Ahl, author of many other Creative Computing publications, but not this one. Be warned, my internet nancy drews.

Last week I attended the annual meeting of SHOT [Society for the History of Technology] in Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen was a blast--I smartly arrived a few days early to wander and sightsee, so by the time the conference rolled around I was tired and happy to sit all day. Highlights include befriending an amazing crew of history of science/history of tech grad students, meeting Eden Medina, author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries--a work of transnationalist computer history!--and Marie Hicks, who also works on gender and computing, and was an all around a welcoming good sport. Oh yes, and I spoke with Ruth Schwartz Cowen for a hot minute! All in all, a satisfying affair despite the horrors on coach-class international air travel.

I began to curiously roll these images over in my head alongside the new lolz-worthy fad disease I'd recently encountered, "Text-Neck", a malady so virulent it has spawned its own Institute and has actually received some semi-legit coverage in the news. The Text Neck Institute reports Text Neck as "world-wide health concern, affecting millions of all ages and from all walks of life. Widespread overuse of handheld mobile technology is resulting in a harmful and dangerous physical condition on the human body." 

I like the bookending of these neck phenomena. 100 years divide these conditions, but the latter performs a wry inversion of the former: whereas the motif at the turn of the 20th century was to "look up!", we are now all accustomed to the roving hordes of sensorially-divided pedestrians who can do little but "look down" at their multimedia universes (a daily hazard when navigating NYC on foot, bike or car).  The distinction between the two might indeed be a quality of distraction--whereas something about the sublimity of early flight makes me believe that the attention paid to an overhead plane would be rapt, complete, uninterrupted, the negotiating of texting in urban space is always one of divided attention--of eyes trained on the screen but peripheral vision "looking out!", ears cued for bike bells and car horns, and our embodied routines dispatching haptic data on how far we are to our destination. 

Indeed, it seems one could write the history of technology through a history of bodily re-figuration. Aviation and Text Neck recall to me the list of maladies Lynn Spigel cites briefly in Make Room for TV--concerns over eyestrain, cancer, and malocclusion, an abnormal arrangement of teeth from cradling the jaw in the hand when watching TV from the floor (p. 3). Closer to my heart, I'm gathering images, models and ergonomic data on the computational body--i.e. the body at the computer. From carpel tunnel syndrome to a rash of hysteria in the early 80s that computer terminals were causing miscarriages and glaucoma, part of my diss explores the ergonomics, embodiment and furniture of home computing. If I submit to SHOT for 2013 (and I surely will!) it will be to present upon and unpack these "wristories" (I know, I'm awful). 

Nine times out of ten, when I receive an email link that says "did you know about this?! It looks perfect for your dissertation!" I do indeed already "know about this". As I'm sure many academics can sympathize with, it's a familiarity that comes with the level of specialization--if a piece of documentation is out in the open enough for anyone to find it with a quick google search, chances are I already have, too. But sometimes that self-assured academic attitude gets proven wrong. And it feels amazing to be wrong. 

Case in point: a month or so ago, Raiford (my advisor) passed me a link to something he turned up while roaming Atari Age. It wasn't entirely clear to me what I was looking at--was this a newspaper clipping? an article? an essay from a book? The site sourced it to a book called Digital Deli, and like the good cyberscholar that I am, I found a $2 copy on amazon and ordered away. 

The book finally arrived and may I just say...wow, just WOW. Digital Deli was compiled by a crew called "The Lunch Group"--essentially, a group of NYC journalists and writers who started meeting in the early 1980s to share food, conversation, and computer chat. Steve Ditlea, primary editor of Digital Deli and author of the introduction, wrote: "The Lunch Group began inauspiciously enough on July 29, 1982, over a Mexican lunch on Manhattan's West 44 Street. Of the quintet of New York journalists, three had used personal computers for more than a month, two actually owned their machines, and one later confessed to having been totally intimidated by the rather simplistic conversation" (xi). But July 1982 was the cusp of the mainstreaming of home computing--it's amazing to imagine these folks gathered around a table with like minds, sharing common interests, intensely aware that "something is brewing", that the culture might shift, and yet just living life and trying to make sense of the world, as we all do.

The title Digital Deli grew from the groups own practice of organizing their meetings around food. The table of contents is offered as a menu: there are "Appetizers", "Soup and Crackers", "Word Salad", "Just Desserts" and a half dozen more bad culinary riffs. It appears that the pieces are all original--written by or commissioned by members of "The Lunch Group". Indeed, many of these were pieces specially commissioned for this collection, as the range of authors far outstrips the original group of early 1980s tech writers. Digital Deli is a verifiable trove of the 1980s Who's Who in computing, gaming and computer journalism, with articles by Steven Levy, Stephen Wozniak, J. Presper Eckert, Ted Nelson, Nolan Bushnell, Marc Blank, Bill Gates, William F. Buckley, Jr., and dozens of other names I'm not even familiar enough with the recognize the importance of. And there is a substantial showing of women authors as well.

What's most phenomenal about Digital Deli, for my purposes, is the content. While there is the obligatory "computing timeline", and other information documenting or commenting upon the mainstream research-military history of the computer, most of this book is on personal computing. And not just technical information--human interest stories, advice columns, top ten lists, humor...topics related to computing include education, music, art, romance, and more. There's an entire piece about how a family spends their day with their computer. It's full of trivia and oddities and offers a remarkable glimpse into how people were effortfully relating to, living with and working on computers. I've include pictures of just 2 of what must be over 100+ pieces here. This book is really a marvel, and a must own for anyone working on the personal computing era.