Tinn publishes "Island Tinkerers"
CBI Affiliated Historian and HSTM Asst. Professor Honghong Tinn most recent book on Taiwan's Computing Industry will be released January 2025.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (01/21/2025) — As a historian of information technology, Honghong Tinn has paid particular interest to researching the areas of the history of electronic digital computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. In her forthcoming, single-authored publication, Island Tinkerers, Tinn demonstrates her research of this era and its affects on East Asia countries by telling the reader the history of the contribution to innovations by tinkerers in Taiwan.
Through her thorough analysis of the mutual constructive relationship between computer technology and the Cold War in East Asia, Tinn argues that the imitation and replication of an imported technology constitutes a significant part of technology users and engineers’ exploratory activities and thus central to their technological and social cultures. Island Tinkerers chronicles that Taiwanese engineers, scientists, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs engaged in technology transfer projects during the Cold War in which acts of imitation, emulation, experimentation, and innovation overlapped with one another. These technologists opened black-boxed imported technology and tweaked it, exploring strategies to ensure the technology could be rooted in new soil, and experimented with manufacturing their own versions. Their improvised attempts in university labs, electronics assembly factories, and start-up offices were critical to their subsequent innovations in manufacturing computing technologies and semiconductors, and eventually a purely Taiwanese computer industry.
By weaving into the story the voices of important historical actors who were understated by historians of innovations: mainframe computer technicians, pioneering mainframe computer users, minicomputer-building graduate students, electronics assembly factory women workers and maintenance engineers, and personal computer hobbyists, Island Tinkerers challenges the myth that the West innovates and the East imitates.*
Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry, published by the MIT Press, became available on January 7, 2025.
*Text drawn from Honghong Tinn's research statement.