McDonald 2009-2010 Tomash Fellow

McDonald 2009-2010 Tomash Fellow

We are pleased to announce that Princeton University’s Christopher McDonald is CBI’s new Erwin and Adelle Tomash Fellow. McDonald received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice University, and a Master of Science degree from Purdue University, both in Computer Science. He was inducted into Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the Honor Society for the Computing Sciences. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the History of Science program at Princeton. Prior to enrolling at Princeton, he worked in the computer industry for four years, first as a software consultant at Trilogy Software, then as a programmer for IBM’s AIX operating system. Last fall, he was a teaching assistant for a course in the history of modern science and presented a paper on the history of the car radio at the Society for the History of Technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

McDonald’s dissertation project concentrates on the history of the computer utility (widespread remote access/networked computing). Computer services enterprises (University Computing Corporation, Informatics, General Electric’s GEISCO) in the 1960s increasingly took advantage and built upon research and development conducted on time-sharing and remote computing at MIT, RAND/SDC, and other research institutions in the 1950s to broaden opportunities and efficiencies with utilizing expensive computer resources by providing remote access. McDonald’s research focuses not only on these technological and industry developments, but also on the broader political and societal implications of a computer utility—a model different, but holding certain similarities to access to electrical grids, or the electrical utility. He intends to explore the meaning of the computer utility model as a possibility for unleashing the power of computing to the masses—computer democracy (both broad access and increasing equality of opportunity for political participation). Generally, the notion of the computer as a potential democratic tool is associated only with the personal computer era beginning in the mid-1970s. McDonald’s study of the computer utility will explore the different perspectives and visions (within industry, the academic world, and among journalists) for broad based computing a decade earlier.

The Tomash Fellowship is awarded each year to a doctoral student researching and writing a dissertation on the history of computing. CBI is grateful for the generous support of CBI founders Erwin and Adelle Tomash for making this fellowship possible.

Jeffrey R. Yost