1. Stone's chapter gives a wonderful insight into the way that different subcultures, even within a different organization, can approach IT in entirely different ways. What are the main separate cultures cultures identified within Atari? How do they differ in their views of what "interactive entertainment" is supposed to be? How do they differ in their assumptions about what crucial skills are required to work on it?

2. What does the "open architecture" of modern personal computers discussed in the lecture have to do with the hacker ethic and homebrew computer club discussed in Hackers. Do you really think the modern PC industry has much in common with these early enthusiasts?

2. Levy makes an interesting claim about the spreadsheet as technology that changed business in profound ways during the 1980s. What makes it really interesting is the way he examines specific details of this specific technology and ties them to social results. What does he say changed about business (there are several key points), and how did the spreadsheet make this happen? Do you believe him (and could his idea ever be tested?)

3. a) According to Winner in Mythinformation, advocates of a computer revolution employed "the metaphor of revolution for one purpose only-to suggest a drastic upheaval, one that people ought to welcome as good news." The idea of computer technology as a revolutionary force still gets used a lot today. What do people really mean when then call computer technologies revolutionary (and how does this differ from the political meaning)? Be specific -- specify a technology and identify the allegedly "revolutionary' elements.

b) What would it mean for computer technologies to truly have caused a revolution in American society? Do you think this has happened?

c) According to Mythinformation the computer was seen by many as a great force for good. How does this tie in with the current reading from Hackers, which suggests that most computer enthusiasts were not concerned with broader social issues.

d) Winner also challenges the idea that access to more and better information will change people's lives for the better. Do you agree with the idea? Is computer technology the key to achieving this?

Links and Further Reading

• There hasn't really been a proper history of the whole late-70s "micro revolution" thing. But there is quite a good book ( F. Webster, Theories of the Information Society: Routledge, 1995) about the intellectual side of it. It became deeply entangled with the concept of a post-industrial society expressed by  Daniel Bell in his 1976 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
• For Allucquere Rosanne Stone's homepage and current projects, see www.sandystone.com. Stone is a transsexual, theorist, media-studies type person and performance artist. This is not your typical historian of computing or CS type. (For a much fuller list, see here).
• If there's one company with more nostalgia site on-line than Apple then it's Atari. By far the best general site is the Atari Historical Society. This includes coin-ops, consoles and home computers. It has videos, transcripts of advertisements, pictures of engineering prototypes and links to other sites.
  
   

Page copyright Thomas Haigh -- email thaigh@acm.org.    Home: www.tomandmaria.com/tom. Updated 08/31/2003.