Historian Michael S. Mahoney argued computing has no single history — only irreducibly plural 'histories' — and warned against whiggish narratives of its origins

Michael Sean Mahoney, a Princeton historian of science and technology (1939–2008), is the figure who explicitly carried the Whig-history critique (claim-butterfield-1931-coined-whig-history-as-present-referenced-past) into the history of computing specifically, rather than history of science generally. His essay "The Histories of Computing(s)" (2005) argues, per its own plural title, that computing does not have a history — it has multiple, disciplinarily distinct histories (in mathematics, engineering, business, communications) that get flattened when later writers impose a single retrospective narrative or read modern standards back onto early work.

This is the note that closes the distance between Butterfield's general critique and the vault's home domain: Mahoney is a named historian of computing, not merely of science, making him a natural next link for the vault's AI-history myth-ledger (myth-werbos-invented-backpropagation, myth-amari-first-sgd-mlp, claim-werbos-1974-no-credit-assignment-language) to eventually connect to the wider historiography-of-computing literature. See moc-backpropagation-origins.