Communities of computing

Michael Mahoney's organizing term, from his 2005 essay "The Histories of Computing(s)," for the disciplinarily distinct groups of practitioners — scientists and engineers, data processing, management science, industrial automation, communications, the military, human–computer interaction, computer science — each of which built the version of the computer its own agendas needed, and each of which therefore has its own history rather than sharing one machine-centred history. The title's parenthetical "(s)" names the plural directly: not computing, but computings. Central to Mahoney's rejection of inevitability-narrative, machine-centred history; watching for recurrence elsewhere in the vault's history-of-computing thread before promotion to a full hub.

References

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