Fire in the valley: The making of the personal computer [Book Review]
ment of the PC (August Tepper) and text processing (Jeanette Hoffmann). The last follows the cycles of changing Leitbilder in the development of networking (Ralf Klischewski) and the shift from time-sharing (computer utility) to the “interactive on-line community” (Hellige). Generally, guiding visions do not perform well on the test bed of history. As Hellige points out in his informative introduction, what we take to be a Leitbild depends on our commitments on a range of theoretical and ideological issues. That is reflected by the difficulties we can face in trying to distinguish a Leitbild from a metaphor, model, paradigm, or style. Tepper observes that we can only approach the notion only through case studies, but that the case we choose and the manner in which we interpret it run the risk of making the Leitbild a selffulfilling prophecy. As if to bear him out, Klotz unwittingly shows how the history of objectoriented programming can be tailored to fit a Leitbild, instead of being guided by it. Eulenhöfer finds that the theory of programming languages was developed by negotiation among various approaches, rather than by any single vision shared by practitioners. Indeed, by documenting how the guiding vision shifts during the process of development, Klischewski and Hellige question whether the vision follows the project, rather than leading it. These brief remarks do not do justice to the issues raised when history is used to put sociological and policy models to the test. Indeed, beyond the immediate subject, the articles themselves and the literature they point to offer a glimpse of the wealth and variety of projects in the history, sociology, and philosophy of computing that have been going on in Germany, and especially Berlin, over the past decade. Unfortunately, little of the resulting literature has made its way into English or, as frequent checks of RLIN showed, has crossed the Atlantic even in its original form. That is regrettable, for it is work worth knowing about. Michael S. Mahoney mike@Princeton.edu