Historian Michael S. Mahoney argued computing has no single history — only irreducibly plural 'histories' of the 'communities of computing' that shaped it

whig-historyhistoriography-of-aihistory-of-computingmahoneypresentism

Michael Sean Mahoney, a Princeton historian of science and technology (1939–2008), argued in his essay "The Histories of Computing(s)" (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30(2), 2005) that computing does not have a history — it has plural, disciplinarily distinct histories belonging to the "communities of computing" that shaped it: scientists and engineers, data processing, management science, industrial automation, communications, the military, human–computer interaction, and computer science. His own words: "The computer thus has little or no history of its own. Rather, it has histories derived from the histories of the groups of practitioners who saw in it... the potential to realise their agendas and aspirations."

His critique of machine-centred, inevitability-narrative history overlaps closely in substance with Butterfield's Whig-history critique — both attack reading a later outcome back onto a contingent past — but a direct read of the essay found he does not invoke Butterfield or the term "Whig" to make the case; see claim-mahoney-2005-essay-omits-whig-and-butterfield, claim-mahoney-machine-centred-history-hides-hype-as-inevitability, and claim-mahoney-impact-theory-critique-restores-agency-to-communities-of-computing for what his own critique argues in his own terms. Mahoney remains the figure who carries this family of critique into the history of computing specifically, making him a natural 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) toward the wider historiography-of-computing literature. See moc-backpropagation-origins.