Silicon Insider: PCs for Tyrants?

March 25 -- It may be time once again to ask the question: Would you pitch your PCs to Hitler?

There are so few great pieces of journalism in the history of high tech — as opposed to the mountains of bad writing and suspect reporting — that it is a shame when one of them is forgotten.

The article I have in mind appeared in February 1977 as the cover story of a young and struggling minicomputer trade magazine called Computer Decisions. It was bylined by the editor, Hesh Weiner, and a reporter, Laurie Nadel. The cover featured a grainy image of a pair of Nazi SS stormtroopers and the headline: “Would You Sell a Computer to Hitler?”

The story answered its own question: "No, no, of course not," say U.S. computer companies, "We would never do such a thing." And yet, Weiner and Nadel continued, these same computer companies were selling their mainframe and minicomputers to dictatorships and tyrannies, notably in South America, that used them to track dissidents and the soon-to-be “disappeared.”

Business Is Business

The article set off a firestorm. I remember sitting in my cubicle in Hewlett-Packard’s PR department, the junior member of the staff, listening as my elders muttered and fumed about how this was the most irresponsible kind of yellow journalism, that companies could not be expected to track the use of every single computer they sold. And, they added darkly, for a young man trying to build a successful magazine Hesh had made a deadly mistake ticking off his biggest advertisers.

They were right. Before long Computer Decisions was gone, and Hesh was on the street (though I’m pleased to note that a Google search found him still writing for some computer industry e-zines.) The computer industry had dealt with the problem in the way corporations always deal with the unspeakable: they changed the subject and walked away.