This paper looks at the innovative use of the AMIGA computer by Australian musicians in the 1990s, highlighting its role as a cost-effective tool for music production, experimentation, and collaboration. By examining how these artists harnessed the power of this technology to share files and rapidly materialize creative concepts, we uncover a fascinating chapter in the evolution of electronic music in Australia.

Computing as a topic is one that has moved historically and methodologically through a variety of disciplines and fields. What does this entail for its history? The aim of this talk is to provoke a discussion on the future of the history of computing. In particular, I use a notion of so-called /nomadic/ history. This is in essence the idea to identify and overcome ones own disciplinary and epistemological obstacles by moving across a variety of and sometimes conflicting methods and fields. I apply the method to the case of the history of the computer-as-a-machine which is presented as a history of hide-and-seek. I argue that the dominant historical narrative in which the machine got steadily hidden away behind layers of abstraction needs countering both historically as well as epistemologically. It is based on a collaboratively written chapter for the forthcoming book "What is a computer program?".

This paper presents a history of the ‘Systems Development Network’ (SDN), the first internet network in Asia established in 1982, developed in South Korea during the authoritarian presidency of Park Chung-Hee (1962-1979). I examine scientists and engineers who were repatriated under Park’s Economic Reform and National Reconstruction Plan to reverse South Korea’s ‘brain-drain’, re-employed under government sponsored research institutions, and leveraged to modernize state industrial manufacturing.

Pioneered by computer scientist Kilnam Chon, often lauded as ‘the father of East Asia’s internet’, a transnationally trained group of experts at the Korea Institute of Electronics Technology (KIET) developed the nation’s internet infrastructure, despite repeated government pushback and insistence on rather establishing a domestic computer manufacturing industry. Drawing on the Presidential Archive and National Archives of Korea, I describe how the SDN manifested through a lineage of reverse-engineering discarded Cheonggyecheon black market U.S. Military Base computer parts, prototyping international terminal and gateway connections, and “extending the instructional manual” of multiple microprocessors.

The reconfiguration of computer instructional sets are one of many cases of unorthodox, imaginative, and off-center methods practiced in Korea to measure up and compete with Western computing. Although repatriated scientists were given specific research objectives and goals, their projects fundamentally materialized through a series of experimental and heuristic processes. This paper will illuminate South Korea’s computing history, which until now has not been the subject of any history, and also allow a broader reflection on the transformation of East Asia during the Cold War––highlighting political change through the development of computing.