Forgotten Machines: The Need for a New Master Narrative

Abstract

History of computing seeks, amongst other things, to provide a narrative for the overwhelming success of the modern electronic digital computer. The datum for these accounts tends to be a finite set of machines identified as developmental staging posts. The reduction of the datum to a set of canonical machines crops out of the frame other machines that were part of the contemporary context but which do not feature in the prevailing narrative. This paper describes two pre-electronic systems designed and built before the general-purpose stored programme digital computer became the universal default and the de facto explanandum for modern history. Both machines belong to the era in which “analog” and “digital” emerged as defining descriptors. Neither of these machines can be definitively categorised as one or the other. The Julius Totalisator is a large online real-time multi-user system for managing dog and horse race betting; the Spotlight Golf Machine is an indoor interactive golf gaming simulator. Their descriptions here are with a view to expanding the gene pool of early devices of reference and at the same time voice historiographic concerns about the way in which master narratives influence criteria of historical significance.