Introduction

The introduction surveys the extant historical narrative of newsroom computerization during the latter Cold War, as well as its current status as an implied, but not yet fully interrogated, media-history project. It briefly explores the existing theoretical and secondary-text literature on the topic, and positions this short history as a necessary intervention, and initial foray, into a complex subgenre of both hardware and software history. Finally, it explores how this history is important, as it represents the lived experiences of news workers with technology on the day-to-day, and task-to-task, level, at a moment when artificial intelligence and other technologies are changing the nature of work.