Personal Computers, Microhistory, and Shared Authority: Documenting the Inventor–Early Adopter Dialectic

Abstract

Documenting the history of computers is complex because it requires not only documents but hardware, software, people, memories, and practice, together with an understanding of the information ecology that they constitute. An example from the author's own history with personal computers explores how these kinds of evidence are generated and how they might be gathered into archives for historical research.