Introducing the Early Digital

This introductory chapter outlines the objectives of the book, explaining how adopting “early digital” as a frame can encourage new perspectives on established topics within the history of computing and productively integrate concerns from related fields such as media theory and communications history. Haigh encourages historians to take digitality seriously as an analytical category, probes the differences between analog and digital computing, and argues that the ability of a machine to follow a program is fundamentally digital. He also introduces the contributions of the individual chapters in the book, situating each within this broader analysis of digitality and its historical materiality.