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This book explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer. ENIAC was created and tested at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946, then used at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland until 1955. Unlike most discussion of early computers, this book focuses on ways in which ENIAC was used, and the relationship of its design to computational practice, particularly its use between 1948 and 1950 to conduct the first computerized Monte Caro simulations for Los Alamos. ENIAC’s first team of operators were all women, and the book probes their contribution to the machine’s achievements and the development of computer programming practice. ENIAC’s users changed its hardware and transformed its configuration over time, so that it eventually became the first computer to execute a modern program, defined by the authors as one following the “modern code paradigm” introduced in John von Neumann’s seminal 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” They draw on new archival evidence to document the development of this idea and its relationship to work on ENIAC. They also use ENIAC to probe the construction of historical memory, looking at ways in which a bitter succession of legal battles around patent rights shaped later perceptions.

Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary contexts. My book describes, largely through original archival research, ruptures in present and past media environments that expose how certain literary engagements with screen- and print-based technologies transform reading/writing practices. My book, then, is a crucial contribution to the fields of media studies/digital humanities and poetry/poetics in its development of a media poetics which frames literary production as ineluctably involved in a critical engagement with the limits and possibilities of writing media. Throughout, I demonstrate how a certain thread of experimental poetry has always been engaged with questioning the media by which it is made and through which it is consumed. At each point in this non-linear history, I describe how this lineage of poetry undermines the prevailing philosophies of particular media ecology and so reveals to us, in our present moment, the creative limits and possibilities built into our contemporary technologies. By the time I return once again to the present moment in the post-script via the foregoing four techno-literary ruptures, I have made visible a longstanding conflict between those who would deny us access to fundamental tools of creative production and those who work to undermine these foreclosures on creativity. In many ways, then, my book reveals the strong political engagement driving a tradition of experimental poetry and argues for poetry’s importance in the digital age.