Lecture: Ivan Tchalakov: Studying Engineering Science between East and West during the Cold War in Action: the Heterogeneous Networks of Holographic Computer Memory Project

The lecture presents the results of ethnographic study of Bulgarian Central Laboratory of Optical Storage and Processing of Information (CLOSPI), established in the mid 1970s with the aim of designing holographic computer memory for Bulgarian electronic industry. At the time the establishment of Bulgarian lab was part of a large, world-wide research efforts that had begun in the mid 1960s by applying the newly discovered laser technology to overcome the limitations in the existing main-frame computer technology, and to radically improve the capacities for information storage and processing. The Soviet researches were one of the leading in the field, together with US, Japanese, German, and French companies. Yet by the end of the 1970s none of the research teams managed to build a sufficiently advanced prototype, which eventually to be integrated into workable devices for the exiting computer technology.

In search for relevant understanding of the events that took place at that period the key problem was to overcome the asymmetry between past events, which can always be explained by some cognitive, technical, social, economic, etc. ‘factors’, and the present situation, which is always enigmatic to a certain extent. More than twenty years ago the new sociology of innovation emerged precisely by posing the questions: How to understand innovations in their ‘proper present’, before history has judged with its standard schemes of reasoning? How to analyze and trace innovations before they became efficient, profitable, and indispensable? To this we need a methodology that helps us to distance from our privileged position of observers that already know the outcome, and to try to revive the ‘open end’ situations in which the past actors - in my case the scientists and engineers in holographic memory research - strove to achieve their goals and to realize their strategies. As a number of studies have shown, it is not possible to judge between several competitive projects, on the basis of our knowledge about states of technology, type of economies and markets, or laws of physics – the states of technology are changing, markets are created, physics is constructed (or revolutionized). Hence, in their emerging and polemic state, the new innovative products and services are ‘under-defined’, vague and unclear (Hughes 1983). Yet it is at this ‘under-defined’ stage that the most important decisions about the destiny of the innovation are to be made – where is the money to be taken from, what is to be researched and developed, what marketing strategy is to be elaborated, etc.

I am inviting you come and to trace together how Bulgarian, German, Russian and US scientists and engineers I observed and interviews coped with these uncertainties managing to build some remarkable pieces of equipment, and thus laying the ground of contemporary optical computing.