Connecting the Periphery: The History of Computing in New Zealand 1950 - 2000

This paper will contribute to the global history of computing and the history of late twentieth century New Zealand. It will outline the history of computing in New Zealand from 1950 – 2000, charting the development of computational thinking and computers in that country and using computing history to help explain the relationship of New Zealand to post-industrial culture. The global history of computing is a mature field, with solid general histories from scholars like Ceruzzi and Campbell-Kelly et al, detailed discussions about important people and specific machines, and works describing the development of companies like IBM. Combined with work undertaken in Science and Technology Studies and sociology, alongside vibrant amateur communities, we have a solid understanding of the global history of computing, and the development of computing in the United States and United Kingdom. The situation is less positive when it comes to national histories. Our understanding of the development and diffusion of computing technologies in areas peripheral to the global narrative is limited. Eden Medina provided a useful example of what can be achieved in Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011), adding to work on Chile by Juan Alvarez, Claudio Gutierrez and Tiago Saraiva. Useful work has also been done by John Vardalas in Canada. New Zealand should provide an excellent addition to these histories. As with technologies like the telegraph and refrigerated shipping, New Zealanders eagerly latched onto computational thinking and, later, computational devices. Newspapers suggest human computers were regularly used as far back as the 1860s, and by the 1930s analog computing devices like the ‘Lightning Computer’ were common. After World War Two New Zealanders Leslie Comrie and Bill Phillips were involved in the development of significant machines in the United States and United Kingdom. By the 1960s local machines were being designed and built, and a range of commercial devices were installed in government and university facilities. During the 1970s economic policies foregrounded massive public works projects, leading to the installation of Australasia’s most powerful computer, and during the 1980s staff at Victoria University of Wellington were involved in the early development of Internet-based technologies. As with the work of Medina et al, New Zealand computing history promises to provide historians of technology with an insight into the interplay between local and global processes. New Zealanders began installing computers en mass at about the same time as American companies like IBM began to standardise their products and develop international sales channels. Initial impulses to design and manufacture their own machines, or use ones built or marketed by their traditional trading partners in Australia and the United Kingdom, were eventually over-whelmed by more practical needs for cost-effectiveness and reliability. Thus we can see the effect of the first ‘silicon valley’ boom of the 1950s and 1960s on an isolated product of the British Empire. Unlike nineteenth century technologies like the telegraph and refrigerated shipping, which connected the country back to ‘Home’ in Britain, advances in computing technology plugged the country into the developing post-industrial world.