U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX
Curtis Marez · 2013
I begin with two fragments cut from history, around about the 1960s. This essay will pursue the lines of connection between these two moments and argue that insisting on their entanglement is integral to any meaningful understanding of either of the terms this volume’s title brings together: the internet and race. Additionally, I am interested in what we might learn from these historical examples about the very terrains of knowledge production in the post-World War II United States. The legacies of mid-century shifts in both our cultural understandings of race and in digital computation are still very much with us today, powerful operating systems that deeply influence how we know self, other and society.