Informatics as Cultural Development Case Studies from the Social History of Information Technology

In October 1996 the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (SSSS) organized a joint international conference "Signatures of Knowledge Societies" in Bielefeld. At this conference four talks were given by members of the interdisciplinary research project on the "Social History of Informatics". In this volume slightly revised versions of these talks are collected. A fundamental question running through all these papers is: How did the actors in the emergence of computing and information technology assign meaning to the technical products and theoretical concepts, and how was the further development of technology and science in this field shaped by this process? Heike Stach was the chairwoman of the Session "Epistemological Images and Institutional Structures", and there gave the talk "The Image of Man as a Self-Steering Device as Constituent for the Concept of the Strored-Program Computer" (p. 3). She points out that the concept of the first stored-program computer, described by von Neumann in 1945, was constructed as a counterpart of man seen as a kind of self-steering input-output mechanism. This image of man was virulant in other different scientific discourses, e.g. behaviourism and neurophysiology. On the background of the Second World War it gained even more imaginational power. Peter Eulenhöfer made a contribution to the session titled "The Enculturation of Mathematical and Logical Practice". In his paper "The Enculturation of Mathematical and Logical Practice in the Age of Computing Technology" (p. 10) he looks into the creation of automatic