THE HARD WORK OF SOFTWARE HISTORY

Abstract

A few years ago, the literary and media historian Friedrich Kittler opened an essay called “There Is No Software” with, in his own words, a “rather sad statement.” In his view, “the bulk of written texts—including this text—do not exist anymore in perceivable time and space but in a computer memory’s transistor cells.” From a scholar who, until then, had situated the cultural meaning of literary texts in discourse networks dependent on technologies of inscription (writing, gramophone, typewriter, computer) and the materiality of communication, this remark captures the essence of a significant cultural shift. At the end of the twentieth . . .