Winner:

Morgan G. Ames, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (MIT Press, 2019).

Prize Citation:

Morgan G. Ames’s The Charisma Machine impressed the judges for both the clarity of its writing and its superlative scholarly achievement. Ames thoughtfully engages with the history of the One-Laptop-Per-Child dream, from Seymour Papert’s vision in the 1960s, through Nicholas Negroponte’s embrace of the project in the 2000s, and Walter Bender’s efforts to take the computer into the world. What may look like a traditional history of ideas about the spread of computers is in fact much deeper and broader: Morgan Ames subtly creates more space to look at the project and its actors from a critical distance and explore the hidden assumptions and the technocolonialism underlying their technocratic dreams. Rather than mechanically using the toolbox of STS to deconstruct the technocratic dreams, the author reaches beyond. The book is informed by an impressive mastery of ethnography and cultural studies, as well as science and technology studies. And the author takes the reader to places where historians seldom go. Historians of technology know that users matter, but Ames makes the OLPC users a central part of her narrative and visits different continents to better convey the users’ context and experience. In doing so, she blazes new paths for contemporary history.

Winner:

Gerardo Con Diaz, Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America (New Haven: Yale University Press 2019).

Prize Citation:

Gerardo Con Diaz's Software Rights is the definitive account of the history of software patents in the United States. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, the book is notable for its original analysis and empirical novelty. Most contemporary discussions of software patenting treat software as something purely “virtual,” but this book brings the physicality of software to the foreground and shows how that physicality has at times been instrumental to software patents. It also highlights the interpretive flexibility of software (as text, algorithm, and machine) and the ways in which these ambiguities facilitated competing arguments for and against patenting. And it tracks the changing criteria for patenting and the conflicts within the complex legal framework for intellectual property protection. Particularly refreshing was its presentation of the shifting positions of various stakeholders and the genuine disagreements within those groups. The history of software patenting is tremendously complicated, and the judges were impressed with how carefully, clearly, and insightfully Software Rights explains this history. As one judge put it, “If I were to recommend a single book on the history of software patents, this would be it.” Chapeau for this achievement!

Winner:

Colette Perold, “IBM’s World Citizens: Valentim Bouças and the Politics of IT Expansion in Authoritarian Brazil,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 42, no. 3 (July-September 2020): 38-52.

Prize Citation:

Colette Perold is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her article follows a notable figure in Brazilian history, Valentim Bouças, IBM’s first representative in Brazil, his relationship with the company from the 1910s to the 1940s, and the role IBM’s computers played in Brazil’s changing political climate in the early-twentieth century. This notably well-written and argued article pushes computer history not only into Latin America studies but into its relationship with U.S. foreign policy, and the history of globalization and colonialism. Bridging the history of technology with political and economic history, Perold demonstrates that “Brazil is a particularly fruitful site for understanding IBM’s global expansion,” but also that “As historians of computing continue to uncover these narratives outside the global North, we will find that investigating… political and economic contours… will generate new insights into the ways multinational computing companies first installed themselves in the global South, and into the factors that override democratic social relations, both between countries, and within.”