Dr. Paul E. Ceruzzi is Curator Emeritus of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where he spent nearly three decades researching, writing, curating exhibitions, and collecting artifacts related to the history of computing, microelectronics, and the guidance, navigation, and control systems that underlie modern flight and spaceflight. Trained in American Studies at Yale and the University of Kansas, with a Fulbright year in Hamburg, Germany, Ceruzzi built a career recovering the institutional and military history of computing that popular, Silicon-Valley-centered accounts tend to leave out.
He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including A History of Modern Computing — long a standard text in the field — Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, on the overlooked Washington-area tech corridor; Computing: A Concise History; Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, a companion volume to the Smithsonian exhibition he co-curated; and, most recently, A New History of Modern Computing, co-written with Thomas Haigh. He also curated or co-curated major NASM exhibitions, including Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age and Time and Navigation.
This episode centers on his 2018 book GPS — a sharp history of how a satellite system born from a genuine rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force, tested in secret, and deliberately degraded for military security, became something a billion people depend on without a second thought. We trace that transformation from Cold War submarine tracking to the phone in your pocket, and use it as a case study for a larger question: what does the history of one piece of invisible infrastructure tell us about the digital infrastructure — AI included — being built today, under strikingly similar institutional conditions.
