Y2K: Millennial reflections on computers as infrastructure

Abstract

Computers have become the control, information storage, and information processing technology of choice in many other, pre‐existing infrastructures. This essay argues that historians of computers and information technology should expand their agenda to include the origins and impacts of this phenomenon. Studying computer‐based infrastructures could lead to a new historiographical approach focussing on ‘internetworks’. These are very large, integrated, extremely heterogeneous metasystems, made possible in part by ‘digital convergence’ or the ability to record, store, process, and distribute information in all media using computers and computer networks. Key actors include the developers of protocols for information exchange among heterogeneous networks.