Michael Milken's Spreadsheets: Computation and Charisma in Finance in the Go-Go ’80s
Name
DERINGER Milkens Spreadsheets IEEE Annals vInitialSubmission 11152019.pdf
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451.88 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5266c478ae5544db5bceec7d900c56ed
Author(s)
Deringer, William P
Date Issued
March 2020
Journal
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Deringer, William. "Michael Milken's Spreadsheets: Computation and Charisma in Finance in the Go-Go ’80s." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 42, 3 (July-September 2020): 53 - 69 © 2020 IEEE
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Wall Street lore holds that “junk bond” king Michael Milken once blamed the tumultuous changes that roiled American finance in the 1980s on VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet software. This article takes Milken's quip as a prompt to explore the practical and cultural place of computing in 1980s finance. It reveals that PCs, especially spreadsheets, augmented the capacities of 1980s financiers in three ways—surveillance, valuation, and imagination—each crucial to Milken's “machine.” Yet this article also exposes another side to Milken's success, grounded not in computation but charisma. Milken's power lay both in innovative command over novel technicalities and a simultaneous sense that he possessed a suprarational vision transcending the technical. Milken's spreadsheets help us to reconsider a central debate in the social studies of finance about the “ghost in the financial machine” and to examine the co-construction of “killer apps” and “killer applicants” in the early history of personal computing.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2020.2982650
