Computing history: From government secrets to a failed tech utopia

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Historian Maragaret O'Mara explains why a tech utopia was, and still might be, a pipe dream.

- Elon Musk isn't the first technologist to worry about robot overlords. The early computers of the '40s and '50s were referred to as electronic brains, and people regarded them with fascination and fear.

-Until the 1960s, computing power was wielded only by corporations and the government. Then, out of the 1960s counterculture rose a generation of technologists with a techno-utopic vision: Give everyone a personal computer as a tool for empowerment and enlightenment, rather than being siloed machines of government secrets and war.

- The personal computing movement thought technology would solve inequality, racism, and war – but as we now know, it did not. History seems to suggest that humans, not tech alone, must be the agents of change.

Margaret O’Mara is the author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America" (https://amzn.to/2LZJ3pU) She is a professor of history at the University of Washington, where she writes and teaches about the history of U.S. politics, the growth of the high-tech economy, and the connections between the two.

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