Selling Computer Literacy

How does a new technology become known, popularized…even sexy??

In addition to wrapping up some “orphan projects” related to my last book Making Art Work, I am also doing research for a new book project which is under contract with The MIT Press. Without giving too much away, it is a book about books about computing. In short, I’m planning to use books to talk about how a new technology becomes known, popularized and even sexy.

 In the course of doing some (very) preliminary research, I was fascinated to learn about the Computer Literacy Bookshops (CLB). This was a chain of specialty bookstores, first established in March 1983 in Sunnyvale, California by Dan Doernberg and Rachel Unkefer (pictured above). Eventually, the one store expanded until there were two more in the Silicon Valley area with another on the east coast in Tysons Corner.

 In 1984, InfoWorld featured CLB on the cover of its October 8, 1984 issue. Here, we see shelves and shelves, filled with thousands of books, manuals, guides, all about computers and computing.

The thing that has fascinated me the past few weeks as I have been reading about and researching CLB (including some great conversations with Doernberg and Unkefer) is how it functioned as a special kind of social space for the region’s techies. Engineers and programmers could come to the bookstores, browse the latest in technical books, and chat with one another. The Computer Literacy Bookshop hosted regular talks featuring people like Donald Knuth and Ted Nelson. CLB put out a regular newsletter that went to some 100,000 people. CLB operated a small publishing wing that put out its own works. And - long before Amazon existed - you could contact CLB via email and place an order.

Computer Literacy Bookshops remained in business until 1997 when it was bought out; the new owners took it public and ran it until the enterprise died in the dot.com crash.

But, in the 1980s, CLB was an important node in the technology ecosystem based around Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. Before the World Wide Web and other on-line tools for disseminating information existed, the history of CLB reminds us of the critical role that books (and bookstores) played in the circulation of knowledge.