—————————————————————————————————————————————————— BOAST: Computing Futures 1 Computing Futures: Visions of the Past Dr. Robin Boast Boast, R. (2002) Computing Futures: A Vision of the Past. In B. Cunliffe, W. Davies and C. Renfrew (eds.), Archaeology: the widening debate. London, British Academy, pp. 567-592. There is no doubt that computers, or digital equipment, has had an impact on archaeological work. Compared to when I started in archaeology, in the late 1970s, computers are certainly pervasive today. Then computing was a mainframe activity, where, if we used computers at all, we worked on punched cards and delegated the processing to technicians, never seeing the computer, only the reams of paper output. The development of the Personal Computer and the incorporation of digital technology into a variety of equipment used on site, from the EDM to the tea kettle—the use of computers for everything from project accounting to planning to GIS, and the complete domination of the word processor—certainly seems to have justified the early claims that ‘computers are going to take over.’ This prophetic claim of digital domination has been with us since the earliest electronic computers. We are constantly bombarded with endless presentations and illustrations of the digital as dominant. The Internet is soon, always soon, to be the saviour of the information society; we will soon, again soon, be performing all recording on site electronically; we will in the not too distant future, how distant is the future?, be wearing our computers. The prospect of digital field clothing is ‘just on the horizon.’ But just how real is this picture of our digital future? It all seems to plausible, so possible. Aren’t there prototypes available now? Haven’t we seen digital technology explode in power and shrink in size? Aren’t computers and digital equipment all around us, just as they said it would be, just as it was predicted? Well yes and no. One thing we can be sure of is that history is always written in light of the present. I can also be fairly sure that crystal-ball gazing is one of the most tenuous and myopic pursuits that one can engage in. I am reminded of a scene from the Simpsons 1 where Professor Frink, the Jerry Lewis style socially-challenged scientist, is demonstrating his first computer sometime in the late 1960s. He confidently predicts for the audience of bell-bottomed students that in fifty years computers will be twice as fast, one-hundred times as large and will be the masters of mankind. Though this is ‘just a joke’, it is far more accurately reminiscent of the claims I have heard over the past thirty years than the neat digital hagiographies we read today. Computer domination has been a constituent of digital discourse since the 1940s and the advent of the first electronic computers. However, the tradition of mechanical domination, which is genealogically related to digital domination, is much older. The extensive output of H.G. Wells (Wells 1895; 1927a; 1927b) and the plethora of films that start with Metropolis 1 Simpsons™ cartoon show (The Fox Network)