Cold War Politics: Taiwanese Computing in the 1950s and 1960s

This article illustrates how research of computing in Taiwan contribute to the field of the history of Cold War computing. This brief account of early electronic computing in Taiwan shows that the acquisition and uses of the punch-card equipment and mainframe computers were financed by international-aid programs and used for acquiring better knowledge of the country\´s economy. That economic knowledge was to be used for "development," which was a prevailing catchword, working in tandem with the idea of "containment," during the Cold War. The Cold War, as a historical context of the emergence of electronic computing, had its specific facets in specific places. The majority of the contemporary research on the history of computing during the Cold War has concentrated on the US. The Cold War, however, was an international phenomenon; if electronic computing was intertwined with political discourse and societal changes in the US and the Soviet Union.