[Recorded November 4, 2025]
How did Taiwan ascend to such great heights in high-tech manufacturing? Honghong Tinn, author of Island Tinkerers, shares the fascinating history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan helped transform the country through innovative and creative computer use.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
-Why the stereotype that “the West innovates, and the East imitates" is false!
-The central role of National Chiao-Tung University in creating Taiwan’s computer industry.
-How Taiwanese engineers tinkering with “black-boxed” computers provided through international aid in the 1960s led to a dream of making computers of their own.
-How these inventive efforts laid the foundation for Taiwanese global tech giants like Acer, Asus, Quanta, and TSMC.
Speaker:
Honghong Tinn, Assistant Professor, Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Honghong Tinn is the author of Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025). She is a 2025–2027 McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research interests include the history of computing, the Cold War, and the semiconductor industry.
Moderator:
Hansen Hsu, Curator, Software History Center at the Computer History Museum
Hansen Hsu is a historian and sociologist of technology, and curator of the CHM Software History Center. He works at the intersection of the histories of personal computing, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, and software engineering.
Catalog Number: 300000225
Acquisition Number: 2025.0186
About The Author
