One of the most rewarding parts of my professional life over the past decade has been my work with IFIP Working Group 9.7, History of Computing. I’m very pleased to share that the group has now entered a new chapter under the leadership of Kishor Chandra Satpathy.
I am especially happy about this transition because Kishor brings invaluable perspectives: the first chair with deep experience in libraries, archives, museums, and cultural preservation, as well as the first with a professional life based in Asia. These are important firsts for the group. We emphasize regional and transnational histories of computing, so it is appropriate to have leadership from beyond the usual centers of computing history. We also have an opportunity to focus on public history: the documents, artifacts, institutional memories, and local collections that make historical research possible in the first place.
During my time as chair, I helped to broaden our scope beyond familiar national centers. The workshops I organized in New York, Poznań, and Phuket were part of that effort: each one invited contributors to think about computing as something shaped by communities, institutions, regions, and differing forms of access. The Phuket meeting in 2024 was especially meaningful to me because it brought the group’s attention more fully to Asia, where I now live and work.
WG 9.7’s main activity is its series of international workshops, which bring together historians, computing professionals, archivists, museum specialists, and educators. These meetings lead to English-language, peer-reviewed proceedings volumes, but their value is also in the conversations they make possible: conversations among people who study computing, people who built and used computing systems, and people who preserve the artifacts and records that make historical work possible. These three strands — scholarship, pedagogy, and public engagement — have given the working group a distinctive role within IFIP and among computing societies worldwide.
Kishor is the fourth chair of WG 9.7, following John A. N. Lee, John Impagliazzo, Arthur Tatnall, and me. He brings to the chair’s role a professional background that speaks directly to one of WG 9.7’s central commitments: the preservation of computing history through libraries, museums, archives, and public collections. He is Chief Librarian and Head of the Library, Documentation & Information Science Division at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, where he is also in charge of the Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Memorial Museum & Archives. This combination of regional perspective and archival leadership is especially appropriate for WG 9.7. Computing has developed through many local and transnational projects. Its history includes governments, companies, universities, laboratories, schools, professional societies, and users. It also depends on the collections, artifacts, documents, and memories that museums and archives preserve before they disappear.
During my term as chair, WG 9.7 continued to develop its international and comparative emphasis. I became vice chair of the working group in 2014 and became chair in 2017. I organized three workshops:
- In 2016, “International Communities of Invention and Innovation” in New York City, co-editing the resulting proceedings volume with Arthur Tatnall.
- In 2018, “Histories of Computing in Eastern Europe” in Poznań, Poland, co-editing the proceedings volume with Martin Schmitt.
- In 2024, “Histories of Computing in Asia” in Phuket, Thailand, extending the group’s attention to a region whose computing histories have often been underrepresented in English-language scholarship. This proceedings volume has recently been published by Springer.
I also had the opportunity to contribute to broader IFIP conversations about computing:
- My chapter “On Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Computing: Finding Allies in Overrepresented Populations” appeared in Unimagined Futures: ICT Opportunities and Challenges, edited by Roger Johnson and Leon Strous as part of the IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology series.
- I also co-edited the TC 9 anthology Current Directions in ICT and Society with David Kreps, contributing the chapter “The Future of the History of Computing.”
For me, this transition feels less like an ending than a continuation of the work that has made WG 9.7 meaningful: widening the stories we tell about computing and preserving the materials that make those stories possible. I will continue my work with the group as secretary. The next activity for WG 9.7 will likely be a workshop in Kolkata.