David Gugerli
David Gugerli was born in 1961. Since 1997, he is professor for history of technology at ETH Zurich. Following studies in history and literature he received his PhD in history in 1987. In 1995, he obtained a venia legendi (Habilitation) at the University of Zurich for modern history and in 1997 was appointed assistant professor at ETH Zurich. He has served as guest researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris (1988 and 1991), visiting fellow at Stanford University (1992), visiting scientist at the Colegio de México (1989-1993), fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1993/94), fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna (1994) and professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1996). In 2006 he was a guest of the rector at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in 2008/2009 a senior fellow at the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. 2014/15 he was a senior fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.David Gugerli is the recipient of the Rudolf Kellermann Prize for the History of Technology (1994), the prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1998) and the Zukunftskolleg Award of the University of Konstanz. His research spans a broad field covering the history of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of electrification, the cartographic mastery of national space, the visualization of the human body and the development of the technical universities. The recent focus of his work has been the history of computer-supported search procedures and databases as well as the knowledge-based economics of reinsurance.He is a founding member of the Center for History of Knowledge, which is supported by ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. He served as chair of the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS) and as a member of the ETH Zurich Research Committee. From 2009 to 2016, he lead the Strategy Committee at ETH Zurich. He is a Member of the Turing Centre and a long-term part-time Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum.David Gugerli is currently studying the emergence of digital societies and the question of how we have put the world into the computers.
Address: History of Technology ETH Zurich
Clausiusstrasse 59
CH-8092 Zurich
Address: History of Technology ETH Zurich
Clausiusstrasse 59
CH-8092 Zurich
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Books by David Gugerli
MONIKA BURRI, ANDREA WESTERMANN, DAVID GUGERLI, KRISTINA ISACSON, PATRICK KUPPER, DANIEL SPEICH, DANIELA ZETTI
HIER UND JETZT 2005, 275 SEITEN, ISBN 978-3-0391-9016-4
Die hier zusammengestellten Versuche zeigen, wie sich starke Verbindungen wieder auflösen können, warum sogar höchst prominente Technologien plötzlich obsolet werden, während andere erst nach langer Wartezeit in einem überfüllten Museumskeller als kurioses Ausstellungsobjekt entdeckt werden.
David Gugerli and Ricky Wichum explore the development of supercomputing in Stuttgart since 1970, and the surprising twists, operational crises, and new technologies it entailed. For example, who would have expected that expansion of Stuttgart’s computing center in the 1970s would be capped off with the installation of an outdated supercomputer? Or that the spectacular acquisition of the world’s fastest computer in the 1980s would be followed by a years-long quest for users and suitable forms of operation? When, in the 1990s, the Internet made global connectivity possible, Stuttgart was at the forefront, flaunting its dominance in a display of transatlantic experiments. Yet the practical question of what to do with supercomputing was ultimately decided at home, in Germany. The proper management of “users” and extending services to Europe occupied much of the 2000s. By then, previously unanticipated limits to growth had become apparent in the hardware.
Told from a history of technology perspective, this study shows that productive supercomputing requires the constant reconfiguring of computers, science, industry, and policy.
Moving the world into the computer meant rethinking many things. Bank transactions, spa guests, and terrorists, to name but a few, had to be “formatted” so that they could be dealt with in the machine. In doing so, managers, programmers, and users created a digital world that offered new ways of classifying things and organizing complex relations. Some people even linked machines, combined data, and shared programs. And computers designed to sort personnel unexpectedly became personal computers. This elegant essay explores how and why.
So landete der Ausbau des Rechenzentrums in den 1970er-Jahren bei der Installation eines veralteten Supercomputers, und die spektakuläre Anschaffung des schnellsten Rechners der Welt in den 1980er-Jahren erzeugte über viele Jahre hinweg eine aufregende Suche nach Nutzern und geeigneten Betriebsformen. Als Internetze in den 1990er-Jahren globale Verbindungen möglich machten, war Stuttgart ganz vorne dabei und musste nach transatlantischen Experimenten feststellen, dass die Frage nach dem Supercomputing im eigenen Land entschieden wird. Sorgfältig betreute «User» und ein kooperatives deutsches Angebot für Europa standen in den 2000er-Jahren im Vordergrund. Inzwischen zeichnen sich bei der Hardware Wachstumsgrenzen ab, mit denen bisher niemand gerechnet hatte. Aus technikhistorischer Perspektive gilt weiterhin: Supercomputing geht nur dann, wenn Rechner, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Politik immer wieder neu konfiguriert werden.
- Based largely on primary sources which so far have not been used for research purposes
- Distinguished team of expert authors
- Dedicated chapters on the historical context in which Swiss Re developed
Provides a professional angle on current topics such as risk, disasters, and financial crises
Reinsurance is an invisible service industry which enables insurance companies to insure more risks and to make better use of their resources. Until recently, reinsurers were only known to a small minority outside the insurance community. Major disasters, especially those caused by natural catastrophes, have increasingly brought the industry into the spotlight. Yet what is perceived today by a wider public still only represents a fraction of the industry, and the mechanisms of reinsurance to deal with global risk exposure are virtually unknown. The Value of Risk provides an overview of how today's reinsurance industry developed. It investigates for the first time the role of reinsurers in a changing risk, economic, and market environment.
Harold James explains the fundamental principles of insuring and outlines the evolution of the industry in his introductory essay. In Part I, Peter Borscheid describes in detail the global spread of modern insurance, which emerged in the late eighteenth century amidst ideas of rationalism which attempted to quantify risk in monetary terms, the setbacks it encountered, and how the market environment changed over time. Professional reinsurance emerged with the rise in insured risks in the industrialising mid-nineteenth century. By the time the San Francisco Earthquake happened in 1906 the reinsurance industry had become well established and showed a remarkable ability to deal collectively with the catastrophe. David Gugerli describes in Part II how the industry as a whole dealt with such challenges but also the numerous exposures to a changing risk landscape. Against this background, in Part III Tobias Straumann examines the history of the Swiss Reinsurance Company, founded in 1863, providing a fascinating example of how professional risk taking was developed over the last 150 years."