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Today, a book on one machine is something one would look at Argus-eyed. Indeed, contemporary historiography has a tendency to move away from machine-centered narratives and focus instead on the human side of computing. As a consequence, the history of computing is often less about the technical artifacts than it is about sociological, political, and industrial developments. This, however, need not imply a neglect of the actual practices around a machine. Indeed, in the past years researchers have re-engaged with the technical histories underpinning computational practices in order to integrate different approaches.
ENIAC in Action is an important product from that perspective, and it adopts a pluralistic method. It explores the formal and engineering practices around ENIAC, which are reconstructed from a rich collection of archival sources, but also engages, for instance, with literature on gender and on military procurement. In that way, the authors carefully unravel ENIAC's history against some popular narratives and so provide a more complete image of the machine's role in history and historiography. Several persistent images or "myths" of ENIAC are deconstructed. For example, the book shows that conditional branching was not an afterthought but part of the original design. In their attack on this "myth," the authors disclose important material...