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.

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.

As both object and concept, the electronic digital computer featured prominently in discussions of societal change within the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. In an era of “rights revolution,” discourse on transformative technology paralleled anxiety about American society in upheaval. Ever in motion, shifting popular conceptualizations of the capabilities of computing drew comparisons to the revolutionary language of youth protest and the aspirations of advocacy groups seeking full political, economic, and social enfranchisement. The computer itself – as concept, as promise, as installed machine – became a contested “site of technopolitics” where political actors appropriated the language of systems analysis and extrapolated consequences of data processing for American social change. Computers might accelerate, or impede, social change.

This paper examines three paradigms of the computer as "a machine for change” that emerged from this period: 1) One group of political observers focused on data centralization, warning of “closed worlds” of institutional computing that might subject diverse populations to autocratic controls or stifle social mobility; 2) In contrast, a network of social activists and radicals (many affiliated with West Coast counterculture and Black Power movements) resisted top-down paradigms of data centralization and insisted community groups could seize levers of change by embracing their own forms of computing. 3) Finally, a third group of well-meaning liberals embraced the potential of systems analysis as a socially-transformative feedback loop – utilizing the very act of data processing itself to bridge state institutions and local people, sidestepping ideological, generational, or identity-based conflict.