By Jonas Kromer Yela

What comes to mind when you think of the history of computing? Turing Machines? The ILLIAC? Microsoft? What about astrology? The newly processed Michael Erlewine Papers document the role of astrology in the history of home computing and software development. Michael Erlewine was an astrologer, computer programmer, entrepreneur, and musician. His papers were donated to the Social Science, Health, and Education Library’s (SSHEL) Mandeville Collection of occult sciences, of which astrology is a strength, and are now housed in the University Archives. Read ahead to learn more about Erlewine’s fascinating life and work.

Erlewine grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived a somewhat bohemian life in early adulthood, playing folk music, hitchhiking with Bob Dylan, and playing in the Prime Movers Blues Band with his brother, luthier Dan Erlewine, and a young Iggy Pop on drums. In the early 1960s, Erlewine began studying astrology, and eventually became the house astrologer at Circle Books, his brother Stephen’s “metaphysical bookstore” in Ann Arbor.[1]

For the first several years of his astrological career, Erlewine produced charts by hand, manually consulting ephemerides (tables of the positions of celestial bodies) and log tables. [2] In the 1960s, computers were large mainframe machines that took up entire rooms and were only owned by universities and large corporations. The technically savvy user, like the astrologer Gary Duncan, whose papers are also housed in the Archives, could access these machines using a technology called “time sharing” that allowed multiple users to remotely access computing resources, but this was better suited to projects involving large amounts of data.

Astrologers like Erlewine would have to wait until the advent of microcomputers and programmable calculators in the early 1970s. Several astrologers, like Rex Shudde (a.k.a. James Neely) and Robert Hand, began programming on these machines as soon as they hit the market, making astrologers among the first groups of people to make use of personal computers. Erlewine first got into programming using a Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator. He got his first personal computer, a Commodore PET, in 1977, and founded Matrix Software the same year.[3] The PET was featured on the cover of the 1979 Circle Books calendar, which also included a guide on astrology calculations for programmable calculators, marking a significant shift in the way astrologers performed their work.[4]

The rise of personal computers also created a consumer market for astrology software. When Matrix began, Erlewine was producing programs for professional astrologers to use in their work and distributing these for free on tape cassettes.  But as personal home computers became cheaper through the 1980s and machines from Apple, Commodore, IBM, and Radio Shack found their way into people’s homes, Matrix began producing programs for the consumer market. The Matrix catalogs in the Erlewine papers show the company branching out from the professional software market (“Make money with your home computer!” exclaims the 1985 catalog) to making astrology software for amateurs to explore what the stars held in store for them (“Computer-assisted astrology has never been easier, or more fun!” promises their 1987 catalog[5]). Products like Friends and Lovers, Lucky Lotto!, and Biowriter could tell you of your fortunes in romance, the best time to gamble, or the cycles of your body’s own energy, respectively. A similar shift took place in the first decade of the 21^st century: as the expansion of the World Wide Web turned the computer into a fixture in many American homes, Matrix further expanded its catalog of consumer software and increased its consumer marketing efforts.

Erlewine was a central figure in the astrology world beyond his work in software. He and his wife Margaret founded the Heart Center in 1972 as a “communion center,” a place for astrologers and people of various spiritual persuasions to gather, share ideas, meditate, and study. The Center operated out of their home and eventually moved into a house next door in Big Rapids. Here, the Center began building an exhaustive collection of texts and other media on astrology (this collection was also donated to SSHEL and can be searched in the library catalog). With the knowledgebase of the Heart Center Library, the Center became a nexus for astrological study and spiritual life, hosting a number of famous astrologers and Buddhist teachers over the years.[6]

In 1991, Erlewine founded the All-Music Guide, an ambitious project that sought to provide an online database of all recorded music. Initially housed under the Matrix umbrella, AMG branched into movies, books, and video games before being acquired by Alliance Media Group in 1996.[7] Erlewine left AMG shortly thereafter, and around the same time took a hiatus from Matrix. He returned in 2008, and a few years later, the company merged with Cosmic Patterns Software and continues to operate to this day.[8]

This post only scratches the surface of this broad and fascinating collection. The Erlewine Papers consist mostly of the records of Matrix Software and Erlewine’s other business ventures, including correspondence, research papers, project notes, newsletters, software packages and manuals, and much more. If you are interested in learning more about computers and astrology, or how Matrix and the Heart Center became significant vehicles for a broad range of astrological research, you can request these materials from the Archives and come to see them in our reading room.

 

Images curated by Chloe Attrell and Jonas Kromer Yela.

[1] Tenzin Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine,” Matrix Software, December 23, 2008. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/community/interviews/michael_erlewine.html

[2] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[3] Nyima, “Interview with Astrologer Michael Erlewine.”

[4] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 7, Box 11, Folder 2: Circle Books Calendars, 1979-1990.

[5] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 27: Matrix Catalog, 1988; Series 1, Sub-series 3, Box 8, Folder 28: Matrix Catalogs – “AstroTalk”, ca. 1987-1992

[6] Michael Erlewine, “The Heart Center – A Mandala (23 Photos),” Spirit Grooves Archive, July 11, 2010. https://michaelerlewine.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=2715&sid=9a2b1e21a0cbd95b9ce2765e21748248

[7] The Michael Erlewine Papers, record series 35/3/419, Series 1, Sub-series 1, Box 6, Folder 7: Alliance Group Matrix Purchase Terms, 1996

[8] “A Brief History of Matrix Software,” Matrix Software. https://www.astrologysoftware.com/about/about.html

Note: This post was originally written in 2018, when the Women in Computing project was conducted.  With the transfer of the project interviews to the Archives’ new Voices of Illinois oral history portal in 2024, this post is being reproduced here as the legacy platform it was originally written on has reached the end of its technical lifespan.  It has been slightly modified to remove references to one interviewee.  For more information, see the note at the bottom.

Guest Post by Bethany Anderson, Archival Operations and Reference Specialist at the University of Illinois Archives, and Alicia Hopkins, graduate student in the University of Illinois School of Information Science

Documenting women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) has been challenging given the historically fewer numbers of women in STEM fields. Likewise, women in STEM have not been well documented by archival repositories. And similarly, archival sources about women in computing are underrepresented.

Oral history is an effective tool for filling and remediating gaps in archival holdings. Though it is sometimes viewed as a complement to paper and born-digital records, oral history is itself a unique form of archival evidence. Oral history can also be an effective form of archival evidence for underrepresented and marginalized communities and individuals, especially for women in a profession like computing, where archival documentation can be difficult to locate.

The project From Margin to Center: Reframing the History of Women in Computing and Information Technology through Oral Histories was conceptualized as a way to begin remediating information about women in the University of Illinois Archives’ own holdings for the Department of Computer Science (CS). Generously funded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) History Committee, this oral history project enabled archivist Bethany Anderson to conduct interviews with women faculty and alumnae from CS and IT professionals at the U of I.

Between May 2017 and April 2018, Anderson interviewed six women at different points in their career trajectories.* The result is two interviews with faculty members (Klara Nahrstedt and Tandy Warnow), two staff members (Ramona Borders and Debbie Fligor), and one graduate of CS (Ambika Dubey). The interviews reveal insight into gender dynamics in the history of computing on campus and what the computing enterprise looks like from the unique vantage points of the interviewees.

Through Ramona Borders’ interview, we learn about what it was like to be the first woman operator for ILLIAC and computer supervisor in the Digital Computer Laboratory in the 1950s. Borders’ interview also enabled us to identify a previously unnamed woman operator with ILLIAC in one of the Archives’ photos (see image – it turned out to be her!). Through Debbie Fligor’s interview, we learn about the evolution of Tech Services and networking on campus from the 1990s through the present, and the representation of women in this area. Through Klara Nahrstedt’s interview, we learn about what it was like to be a woman computer scientist and student in Germany during the Cold War and later a student and faculty member in the United States, and the potential she saw for interdisciplinary research in computing early in her career. Through Ambika Dubey’s interview, we learn about undergraduate life in CS and the opportunities for community and support undergraduate women CS majors have through organizations like the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Through Tandy Warnow’s interview, we learn about her path from mathematics to computational phylogenetics and historical linguistics and her foundational experience as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Listen to the Women in Computing oral histories here to learn more.

With the help of graduate assistant Alicia Hopkins, the interviews were transcribed and have been made accessible in the University of Illinois Archives’ new oral history portal Voice of Illinois. If you have a suggestion for an interview to add to the Women in Computing collection, contact Bethany Anderson, or if you want to learn more about contributing your story and oral history resources, see Tell Your Story.

*One interviewee has since requested that her interview be removed from the portal.