Introductory Note to 'Seeking High IMP Reliability in Maintenance of the 1970s ARPAnet'

One popular way of viewing technological change is to see each technology as going through a lifecycle, which would include stages such as invention, innovation, maturity, operations and maintenance, decline, and, eventually, obsolescence. For some time, historians, including Svante Lindqvist, John Staudenmaier, and David Edgerton, have pointed out that the lionâs share of the history of technology has focused on the early stages of this lifecycle. Indeed, the history of technology is in many ways a literature of invention and innovation. This reality is as muchâand perhaps even moreâtrue for the history of computing as it is for other subfields in the history of technology. The history of computing has primarily focused on how new things came to be. copy 1992-2011 IEEE.