Kalyani Tupkary

Cultures observing both linear and cyclic concepts of time see the past as something we have put behind us and the future as something that lies before us.

The widespread adoption of the ‘desktop’ metaphor underscored that early personal computers would become workplace technologies.

While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.*

The Computer Pays Its Debt  tells the missing stories of women’s creative contributions to early computing while scrutinizing how corporations leveraged metaphors of craftwork and domesticity for commercial gain.

I n eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world.  Extinct  is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future t