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In 1999 the United States Congress passed the Y2K Act, a major-but temporaryeffort at reshaping American tort law. The Act strictly limited the scope and applicability of lawsuits related to liability for the Year 2000 Problem. This paper excavates the process that led to the Act, including its unlikely signature by President Clinton. The history presented here is based on a reconsideration of the Y2K crisis as a major episode in the history of computing. The Act, and the Y2K crisis more broadly, expose the complex interconnections of software, code, and law at the end of the 20 th century, and, taken seriously, argue for the appreciation of the role of liability in the history of technology.

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This article offers a perceptual history of American color television through a study of the making of the National Television Systems Committee’s 1953 color standard. Rather than seeking out an ideal representation of color, the NTSC standard asked what the minimally acceptable level of color transmission might be for home audiences. While exploiting psychophysical research that suggested that normal eyes tended to have a lower acuity for blue, the NTSC also set their aesthetic standards according to rough measures of everyday life. The NTSC thus mobilized a conception of vision essential for modern commercial culture. The authors consider the perceptual engineering of color TV as a path into a neglected but crucial dimension of 20th-century visuality: compression. The history of color TV shows the centrality of compression to the look of many 20th-century visual media – analog and digital – and to the cultures of looking in which they circulated.

This paper argues that scholars of computing, networks, and infrastructures must reckon with the inseparability of “viral” discourses in the 1990s. This co-assembled history documents the reliance on viral analogies and explanations honed in the HIV/AIDS crisis and its massive loss of life, widespread institutional neglect, and comprehensive technological failures. As the 1990s marked a period of intense domestication of computing technologies in the global North, we document how public figures, computer experts, activists, academics, and artists used the intertwined discourses surrounding HIV and new computer technologies to explicate the risks of vulnerability in complex, networked systems. The efficacy of HIV as an analogy is visible in the circulation of viral concepts, fears surrounding interdependence, and emergent descriptions of precarity in the face of a widespread “infrastructure crisis.” Through an analysis of this decade, we show how HIV/AIDS discourses indelibly marked the domestication of computing, computer networks, and nested, digitized infrastructures.