Moving up the learning curve: The digital electronic revolution in Canada, 1945-1970.

Abstract

In the decades immediately following World War II, a new constellation of technologies and industries emerged as powerful engines of global economic development. A nation's capacity to innovate on the frontiers of digital electronic technology became a crucial measure of its techno-economic development. During the formative years 1945-1970 the major industrialized nations of the world scrambled to assert a domestic design and manufacturing competence within the digital electronic paradigm. The scramblers included Canada. Through a series of six case studies, this thesis presents the first fine-grained view of Canada's efforts to jump on the nascent, global, digital electronic wave. At the heart of the narrative is the historical process that created Canada's first "community" of digital technologists. The salient features of Canada's ascent of the learning curve associated with digital technologies are the unprecedented role of military enterprise in the creation of a peacetime pool of scientific and technical skills in industry and in government defence laboratories; the smaller, sometimes erratic, but nevertheless important role of civilian public enterprise in nurturing industrial learning after the military's retreat; the surprising contribution of branch plants to fostering indigenous technical knowledge accumulation and skill acquisition at the very frontiers of technical change; and the ability of this newly created pool of expertise, in its design decisions, to refract the global, digital innovation wave through the Canadian context.