Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
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6-161 Kenneth H. Keller Hall
200 Union Street Se
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Honghong Tinn is a historian of information technology and received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of the history of electronic digital computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her work on these topics has appeared in Technology and Culture, Osiris, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
Her forthcoming book, Island Tinkerers: Emulation, Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press), tells a critical history of how Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing. From computer maker to the world’s leading chip manufacturer, Taiwan boasts the likes of Acer, Foxconn, Asus, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Island Tinkerers argues that local technologists—a group of technology-savvy professionals, technocrats, technology users, and engineers-turned- entrepreneurs—led the transformation of Taiwan from a former Japanese colony and defeated Chinese Nationalist’s last fortress to a country that calls itself the Silicon Island.
Taiwanese technologists and their computers defy the dichotomy of the West innovates and the East imitates. This false dichotomy has long concealed Taiwanese technologists’ efforts over a half century to ensure that they could own, explore, tinker with, master, and manufacture computers. Island Tinkerers chronicles Taiwanese technologist aspirations to manufacture domestic computers since the early 1960s, when embracing international technical assistance to enhance science and engineering education. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Taiwanese engineers and factory workers became employed by international corporations that offshored transistor and integrated circuit assembly overseas. An island abundant in calculator and computer components prompted the rise of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs in the 1970s, including Acer’s founder Stan Shih. He and his fellow entrepreneurs developed a nascent Taiwanese computer industry in the early 1980s that triggered unexpected tensions between emerging Taiwanese computer manufacturers and their American counterparts after the 1980s. The book concludes with a chapter analyzing the recent rise of TSMC in relation to geopolitics in East Asia.
She was on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (2017-2019), chaired the Society's Internationalization Committee (2013-2014) and the International Small Grants Committee (2017-2019), and is an elected member of the nominating committee (2023-2025). She is currently an advisory editor for Engineering Studies and on the editorial board of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
“East Asia and Ethics in Technoscience,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 54, no. 1 (2024), 114-116.
“Between ‘Magnificent Machine’ and ‘Elusive Device’: Wassily Leontief’s Interindustry Input-output Analysis and its International Applicability,” Osiris 38 (2023), 129–146. (A special issue titled “Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present.”)
“Chapter 13 Globalization,” Computer: A History of the Information Machine. Routledge, 4th edition, 2023, 301-318.
Review of Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2018), Technology and Culture, Forthcoming.
“Making Community Legible, 2012-2018” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 13, no. 1 (2019): 5-6.
“Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Taiwan, 1959-1968,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 4 (October, supplement issue, 2018): 66-99.
“Charting the Cartography of a Global Community of EASTS Scholars,” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 10, no. 4 (2016): 341-342.
“From DIY Computers to Illegal Copies: The Controversy Over Tinkering with Microcomputers in Taiwan, 1980-1984,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 2 (2011): 75-88.
“Cold War Politics: Taiwanese Computing in the 1950s and 1960s,” Think Piece column, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 1 (2010): 92-95.