ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Project Memocall and the Politics of Computer Import and Localization in Cold War South Korea

• In Event: Cold War Science in Asia

English Abstract

During the early 1970s, a select group of scientists and engineers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) embarked on a classified operation, codename “Project Memocall”, under the direct orders from South Korea’s Presidential administration to develop an encrypted and defense-oriented telecommunications system for President Park Chung Hee. In their task to fulfill this operative, KIST’s Electronic Switching Systems Team produced the nation’s first domestically manufactured digital computer. This paper examines the history of Project Memocall and its alleged final computer product, “Sejong-1”, taking into account the Cold War geopolitics of the nation in which scientific and technological research took place. My paper interrogates what “computing” was, materially and ideologically, for postwar South Korea with emphasis on the Park Administration. As a case study, Project Memocall speaks to how President Park entrusted national defense to scientists and engineers, who in turn believed that using a computer was the irrefutable solution to safeguarding communication. I argue that developing a “guksan”––a domestic, local, and indigenous––telecommunications system capable of encryption through digital computing was not simply a matter of security and information containment but a critical means by which clandestine state-backed technoscientific endeavors shaped political strategy and legitimacy. Adding a new dimension to the history of science and technology on the place of Korean computing in the Cold War, this case study both illuminates the experimental and transnational processes that built South Korea’s first guksan digital computer, and underscores the entangled relationship between nation-building, science, and their global context.

Author

• Jina Ji Youn Hyun, University of Pennsylvania