Brazil’s Computer Market Reserve:

Democracy, Authoritarianism,
and Ruptures
Ivan da Costa Marques
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Since its demise in 1990, the technological-industrial policy for

manufacturing computers in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s has
generally been regarded as a capital sin. This article provides a new
perspective that runs against the widespread opinion that simplistically
binds the roots of the market reserve policy to the country’s
authoritarian military regime, allowing for a more complex explanation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brazil had a special
industrial and technological policy for com-
puter manufacturing. Officially named the
National Computer Policy (Polıtica Nacional
de Informa tica), also known as the market
reserve policy. Today, more than 20 years past
its demise in 1990, the market reserve policy
is still considered a capital sin. Popular opin-
ion argues that absolutely no good came
from of the policy’s approach of regulating a
market by means of restricting the origin of
technology.
In the context in the 1970s, the general
worldwide conditions of computer technol-
ogy, and the specific political conditions in
Brazil, the market reserve policy emanated
from an interaction among academic research-
ers, public officials, publically employed engi-
neers, and military personnel. At its inception,
the market reserve police focused on minicom-
puters and stipulated that only locally designed
minicomputers could be legally manufactured
and sold in Brazil.1
Early on, the market reserve policy had a
considerable degree of success in attaining
its goal. In the early 1980s, Brazil was one of
the few countries that had its own minicom-
puter industry selling locally designed prod-
ucts carrying Brazilian brand names.2 Teams
of Brazilian engineers and technicians had
absorbed foreign technologies initially licensed
in the late 1970s and independently conceived
and designed new hardware and software for
minicomputers and other computer artifacts
successfully marketed by Brazilian firms.
Comparisons between minicomputer systems
marketed in the international market and
those marketed by Brazilian firms provide evi-
dence of how close the Brazilian teams came
to those working in the developed world.3 A
few years before the policy’s condemnation,
Brazil became one of the few countries with a
significant part of its domestic minicomputer
market supplied with locally designed prod-
ucts and native trademarks.
The situation rapidly changed in the late
1980s, however. The appearance of the micro-
computer deconstructed and restructured the
computer industry worldwide. Brazilian mini-
computer manufacturers were not able to
hold their position. Most, if not all, aban-
doned the policy’s initial goals and the initial
success turned to failure. Right after its demise
in 1990, the general opinion in Brazil was that
the computer industry policy was the main
cause of most of the Brazilian industry’s handi-
caps, such as the technological gap between
Brazilian and foreign made products. Even
today, politicians and journalists cite the mar-
ket reserve policy as an example of a “crime”
to be abhorred. Unfortunately, easy explana-
tions such as “it filled the computer market
with technically obsolete and high priced
products” or “there was American pressure
against the market reserve police” justifying
today’s continuing intense rejection of the

2 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/15/$31.00 c 2015 IEEE
market reserve practiced in Brazil in the 1970s
and 1980s preclude attempts to better under-
stand the policy as a historical experiment.
These arguments are sometimes followed by
even more generic references to the final
defeat of the very concept of a planned indus-
trial policy, eventually overcome by a coali-
tion of forces articulated in the neoliberal
wave of the 1980s. They occasionally take
note of what would be a striking alliance nur-
tured in the “repugnant archaism” of the
military dictatorship between parts of the left,
deceitful entrepreneurs, and the nationalist
right.4 Generalized conceptual explanations
do not lack importance, but given their ubiq-
uity, they lose almost all specificity and hence
obstruct opportunities to learn from a more
detailed explanation of what happened.
This article offers a new narrative that takes
a closer look at the success and failure of
the market reserve policy.5 In doing so, we
explore three specific sociotechnical develop-
ments: the special character of the commun-
ity of Brazilian computer professionals, the
intervention of the political police of the mili-
tary dictatorship, and the appearance of the
microcomputer. Looking at these three proc-
esses, amid technical and political changes
within and outside Brazil throughout the
1970s and 1980s, leads to a new perspective
that runs against widespread opinion that
simplistically binds the roots of the market
reserve to the authoritarian character of the
military regime, allowing for a more complex
explanation.
A Brazilian Community for Informatics
in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the military
that ruled Brazil and its technical and intel-
lectual bureaucracy envisioned a “Brazilian
economic miracle” that positioned the coun-
try on the head of a runway ready to take off
for the sort of long range flights ventured by
world powers. Some among them claimed
that the Brazilian military’s dream to become
a world power could not possibly come true
without the articulation of a minimum
autonomous technological capacity. On the
one hand, the Brazilian military despised and
repressed the collective of university profes-
sors when they criticized authoritarianism
and social injustices. On the other hand, the
Brazilian dictatorship would bet its chips on
technological development. Given the by
then already clear importance of computers
and the absence of Brazilian-controlled com-
puter manufacturers, the creation of a local
infrastructure of postgraduate education and
research in engineering seemed an adequate
starting point. The military dictatorship pro-
vided funds for the universities to create and
expand postgraduate schools of engineering.
The National Development Bank (BNDE) cre-
ated a special agency to support this expan-
sion, FINEP (Financiadora de Projetos), by
detaching a specific amount of capital to
finance Brazil’s new attempt to become an
active player in the game of constructing sci-
entific and technological knowledge.
Several universities, including the Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RJ), Federal
University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and
University of Sa~o Paulo (USP), established lab-
oratories and courses on digital techniques
and computer programming, paying atten-
tion to the emerging sector of informatics.
FINEP and BNDE sponsored applied research
projects at those and other universities, where
professors and students tried to discover the
workings of the black boxes of the imported
computers. Other government agencies, among
them the Ministry of Finance’s Bureau of Data
Processing (SERPRO) and Navy’s Research Insti-
tute (IPqM), also started research projects aimed
at discovering and trying to reproduce locally
imported computer products and systems that
Brazilian engineers hitherto did not know how
to make.
It is noteworthy that in the 1960s and
1970s a technologically differentiated percep-
tion of the computer sector was not just hap-
pening in Brazil. Computers were extremely
expensive machines, unknown to the general
public. With the exception of the US, the
number of people directly interested in com-
puters was diminutive: hundreds to a few
thousand in the majority of the countries.
Nonetheless, mastering computer techniques
was the object of numerous studies, discus-
sions, and actions in several countries. Mas-
tering computer technology was regarded
worldwide as necessary, unless a nation were
to remain dependent on foreign knowledge.
Those were the days of the short-lived IBI
(International Bureau of Informatics), created
within the United Nations. It was a time
when many developing, and a few developed
countries, especially France, tried to deal
multilaterally with computer technology
that was then already perceived as an emerg-
ing phenomenon that would bring about
new and highly differentiated forms of pro-
duction and consumption. Charles de Gaulle
October–December 2015 3
 ordered the famous Nora-Minc Report to sub-
stantiate the discussion and implementation
of a program for the development of infor-
matics in France, which led to the Plan Calcul
and the Minitel system. The success of 16
years of an intricate network of protection of
and incentives to Japanese computer firms
had become visible. Those were times of effer-
vescent political ideas and actions in the
computer field. Among peripheral countries,
South Korea and India also made efforts to
carry out computer industry policies.6
Given this international environment, it is
perhaps not surprising that, notwithstanding
the authoritarianism imbued in the military
regime, Brazil witnessed the appearance of a
critically minded community of computer pro-
fessionals as a result and cause of the invest-
ments on research infrastructure. The sui
generis character of this community did not
take for granted the result of the usual
“depuration of phenomena,” which estab-
lishes an a priori separation between the
political and technical realms.7 Its members
assumed to be in charge of two realms simulta-
neously: (politically) debating what should
constitute legitimate objects of research and
(technically) developing a limited, but signifi-
cant local capacity to conceive, design, and
integrate computer products. In the laborato-
ries, professors, graduate students, and resea-
rchers designed diverse computer products
such as modems, video terminals, intelligent
terminals (precursors of microcomputers), spe-
cial-purpose processors, compilers, and com-
munication protocols. Of course, Brazilian
professionals did not invent these products.
Nevertheless, they reverse engineered some of
the newest pieces of computer machinery
available for sale in the international market.
The empirical research at universities and labo-
ratories consisted of learning how to make
these mysterious products, with the goal of
acquiring the capacity to design computers by
teams of Brazilian professionals. According to
this conception of research, which one might
today say “situates” knowledge in a territory,
Brazilian researchers “discovered” how to con-
ceive of and design products.8
This empirical and conceptual seeking of a
limited, but significant technical capacity to
conceive of and design computer products
cannot be separated from a sort of friendly
political activism facing the military dictator-
ship. Both technical and political action
shaped a special character for that Brazilian
community of informatics—that is, a charac-
ter based on explicit cognitive debates on
4 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
what kind of goals were legitimate for tech-
nological research in the computer field in
Brazil. The dominant idea was that Brazilians
should make a strategic investment to over-
come technological dependence. If Brazil
became more and more dependent on com-
puters and Brazilians did not know how to
make them, then the country would find
itself paying for computers, whatever the
price exacted by those few who knew how to
make them.
In the mid 1970s, the military dictatorship
minted and circulated the term “relative
democracy.” The idea was to try to harness
democratic forms rather than simply elimi-
nate them. Relative democracy meant that
people could talk, write, and act on an
expanded set of subjects, but they were not
granted the broader rights of free speech or
free assembly.
The Brazilian community for informatics
was in a good position to take advantage of
this idea of a relative democracy. The military
did not mingle much with the researchers and
managers at universities and other public
institutions (state-owned data processing cen-
ters), and the community of computer profes-
sionals acquired and possessed the means to
make their voices heard, even if not very loud.
These means were a common specialized press
such as Datanews and the journal DADOS e
Ideias, in addition to joint conferences and
seminars such as SECOMU and SECOP.
Through their interactions, academic
engineers, managers, and probably to a lesser
extent, the military realized that, notwith-
standing profound differences, their percep-
tions and analyses of technological problems
in Brazil coincided on many points. The three
groups shared the idea that computer tech-
nology was a strategic issue for Brazil, and
each group was able to translate “mastering
computer technology is a national goal” into
its own more specific interests. Professors at
the then recently established postgraduate
schools of engineering were concerned about
creating a local labor market for their
students. Their claims for more money to
enhance labs and infrastructure would remain
legitimate only to the extent that a market
demand for professionals able to conceive of
and design computers would materialize in
Brazil. In a similar vein, engineers and manag-
ers at state-owned data processing centers
showed that viable solutions to their specific
problems would span much more broadly if
they could count on local capacity to design
even small pieces of computer hardware and
basic software. Emanuel Adler beautifully cap-
tures the ideological ingredients present in this
community,9 whose members Peter Evans
refers to as “barbudinhos” and “frustrated
nationalist technicians.”10 During this time,
the Brazilian Navy had acquired from England
a new generation of frigates loaded with
onboard computers, so it was easy to point to
evidence of technological dependence on for-
eign technicians. The military understood that
“mastering computer technology is a national
goal” would make Brazilian computer profes-
sionals able to open the electronic black boxes
installed on their weapons.
A near consensus existed in published
articles and seminars regarding the idea that
taking local specificities into account led to
more appropriate and economical solutions.
For instance, this was the case for the float-
ing-point processor (PPF, processador de ponto
flutuante) developed in 1973 and 1974 at
NCE/UFRJ (see Figures 1 and 2).11 The PPF
was plugged into IBM 1130 computers to
enhance their capacity to process arithmetic
operations with fractional numbers. More
than half of the roughly 100 IBM 1130 com-
puters then installed in Brazil were at univer-
sities, and they spent most of their time
crunching fractional numbers in numerical
calculus applications. Extending the useful
life of these machines meant saving precious
dollars by postponing the importation of
new machines to substitute for them.
The keyboard concentrator developed at
Ministry of Finance’s SERPRO is another such
example. It handled 32 keyboards with no
visual display. For the specific purpose of
inputting handwritten income tax reports,
the keyboard concentrator achieved the same
throughput as 32 fancy data entry terminals
at a fraction of the cost.
The effort to design a minicomputer CPU
in Brazil, the G-10 project, not only tied
together the interests of the Navy and two
universities (PUC/Rio and USP/SP), but it also
brought about several other local initiatives
for the conception and design of computer
artifacts. Beginning in the mid-1970s, an
increasing number of computer professionals
among university professors, the military,
and managers of state-owned companies con-
cluded that the efforts of local development
of computer technology could not be carried
any further without a computer industry to
put local conception and design into effec-
tive use to reach the market.
The reasoning behind this approach was
the following: First, the complete lifecycle of
Figure 1. The prototype of floating-point unit (PPF, processador de ponto
flutuante) developed at the NCE/UFRJ. Ivan Marques, Eber Schmitz, and
Newton Faller explain the workings of the PPF (on the left side) to the
reporter.11
a technological product includes production,
sale, and maintenance. If Brazil could not
meet the requirements for the entire lifecycle,
then one could not be sure about its techno-
logical capacity. Moreover, universities and
research laboratories clearly were in no con-
dition to pursue the production, sales, and
maintenance of the computer artifacts they
conceived and designed. Second, there were
no Brazilian computer manufacturers, and
foreign manufacturers (IBM, Burroughs, and
Olivetti) had only assembly facilities in Brazil.
They had no local facilities for products con-
ception and design, and they were not will-
ing to establish local research centers because
corporate planning determined the produc-
tion of computer models previously designed
in the developed world. Third, there was a
strictly economic reason to require the foun-
dation of firms with their own local technical
capacity. The Brazilian state could not possi-
bly increase funds for research (financial
applications without direct return) in the
proportion needed to keep the pace of
growth of the teams of professionals if a pro-
gram for local development of technology
was not taken seriously. Financial resources
for product conception and design would
have to come directly from the market, and
business firms were the consecrated form of
organization for this kind of job. Finally, if on
the one hand foreign capital was not inter-
ested in investing the development of
minicomputer systems in Brazil, and on the
other hand Brazilian private capital was not
interested in investing in minicomputer
manufacturing in Brazil, it was a priori under-
stood that, under a regime of “free compet-
ition,” the game was lost to foreign
technology.12
There were no Brazilian computer indus-
try businessmen at that time. For the
October–December 2015 5
 Figure 2. Front and back of the commercial specification of PPF. This industrialized version of the PPF
was made by the Brazilian firm Microlab.
“Brazilian community for informatics,” the
current state of affairs led to a social-technical-
political-economic proposal, to introducing
an expedient in the market that made invest-
ment in local minicomputer system develop-
ment in Brazil more attractive. An ade-
quate expedient would be a market reserve
for firms that would perform product R&D in
Brazil. Civil servants at the Commission for
Improving Data Processing Activities (CAPRE),
the government agency in charge of the task
of “rationalizing the use of computers in the
federal government,” had been accompany-
ing and regularly nurturing discussions in the
community of informatics since the early
1970s. With the support of the community of
informatics, CAPRE implemented the mini-
computer market reserve by issuing an inter-
national competition in 1977 to select firms to
manufacture and sell minicomputer systems
in Brazil. One important condition was secur-
ing a commitment from the winners to per-
form local product R&D. In the end, the
selected minicomputer manufacturers were
the Brazilian firms Edisa, Labo, Sid, and Sisco.
Using legal import controls, CAPRE had the
means to effectively keep other firms out of
the minicomputer market. (This is a somewhat
crude linearization of a much richer narrative.
Vera Dantas provides a detailed story with
many back and forth movements, including
6 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
skirmishes involving civil servants, univer-
sities, IBM, and the Brazilian government.13)
The market reserve policy for the develop-
ment of the minicomputer technology in
Brazil was conceived in this sui generis com-
munity,9,10,13 which gathered in the 1970s a
broad spectrum of specialized professionals
from universities, state-owned data processing
centers, and the military. Specialized journal-
ists, politicians, debutante entrepreneurs, and
labor union leaders joined them by taking
advantage of the relative democracy. This more
ample social community never acquired a uni-
fied formal structure, but it effectively existed
and performed coordinated political action as
its members attended seminars and conferen-
ces, read the same specialized journals, estab-
lished common goals, and mobilized to
support their goals (see Figure 3). During the
1970s, the character and the dynamics of the
market reserve minicomputer industry policy
in Brazil depended on a kind of activism of this
more or less heterogeneous broad community
of the 1970s that I refer to as the Brazilian com-
munity for informatics.
First Rupture: The Political Police
Intervene
A turning point in the computer industry
policy occurred in 1979. In the late 1970s,
the political democratization of the country
was far from assured, although the result of
the back-and-forth forces of the political
process pointed in that direction. During the
dictatorship, all government agencies were
required to submit people’s names to the
political police of the dictatorship, officially
called National Information Service (SNI,
Serviço Nacional de Informaç~oes), before giving
them jobs. The political police was staffed by
military personnel and civilians who called
themselves an “information community.”
They intended to monitor and punish all
those who possibly did not repudiate what
they considered “leftist ideologies.” Because
the political police’s decisions were based on
confidential reports—that is, common citi-
zens had no access to their own records—it
comes as no surprise that the SNI enforce-
ment was arbitrary and authoritarian. In the
case of the computer industry policy, the first
rupture in the associative network of the
computer market reserve occurred in 1979
when General Jo~ao Baptista Figueiredo, who
had hitherto been the chief of the political Figure 3. Magazine advertisement for a Brazilian
police (SNI), took military command of the locally designed minicomputer. The ad in Revista
dictatorship. Veja (vol. 641, 17 Dec. 1980) claimed that
Assembled university professors, public “Computers are like oil: It is dangerous to
servants, and some military personnel discus- depend on others.”
sing technologic and economic policy, making
suggestions, following up their implementa- raising,”15 shows a radical change of authors
tion, and moreover being occasionally, if and concerns. From 1980 on, the publication
“relatively,” critical of the dictatorial govern- was restricted to so-called “purely technical
ment, looked suspicious to the SNI. The matters,” meaning features and prices of
“information community” had been worried products with comments on firms’ economic
about such gatherings in the computer sector. performances. The next round of seminars
As soon as their former chief took office, the and conferences SECOMU and SECOP also
SNI colonels formed the Cotrim Commission showed that the conditions that had made
to investigate the computer sector. Ambassa- and kept alive the discussions on how a differ-
dor Paulo Cotrim, who gave the commission entiated policy for a computer industry in
its name, headed the commission, which con- Brazil should be constructed had disappeared
sisted of colonels and informers who orbited after the Cotrim Commission. SNI could act
around SNI supplying confidential reports.14 on its own, above any kind of civil rights war-
The Cotrim Commission’s main focus was the ranty, and the community of computer pro-
relations between the computer professionals fessionals had never depicted itself as defiant
gathered around the market reserve policy and of the military dictatorship. Thus, we can see
CAPRE, but it also investigated civilian and how easy it was for the SNI colonels, by means
military personnel at other government agen- of sheer intimidation, to demobilize the Bra-
cies, such as SERPRO, Digibras, and EMFA. zilian community for informatics. From that
The Cotrim Commission adopted the point forward, the computer professionals
methods and practices of the political police. lost their capacity for collective action.
For several months, they used telephone tap- Moreover, the Cotrim Commission pre-
ing and interrogated dozens of university sented its conclusion to General Figueiredo
professors, managers of state-owned data in a secret report. The findings came as a sur-
processing centers, and even some military prise to the already demobilized community.
personnel, treating them as suspects of politi- The commission concluded that Brazil “had
cal crimes. A survey of DADOS e Ideias, which no computer industry policy, so timid it was
in the late 1970s had “become a valuable […] leaving aside the issues of software and
source of ideas, criticism, and consciousness microelectronics, the heart of computers.”

October–December 2015 7
 Some activists were able to see in that conclu-
sion a recommendation for increasing the
local production of computer technology—a
victory for the ideas for which the Brazilian
community for informatics had fought until
the start of the commission. They nurtured
mixed feelings about those who might possi-
bly represent new powerful alliances within
the dictatorship’s repressive apparatus. The
Cotrim Commission proposed the extinction
of the small CAPRE and substituted it with a
new agency on the highest possible level of
government bureaucracy. The proposed new
agency, Special Secretary for Informatics
(SEI, Secretaria Especial de Informa tica) was
promptly created as a part of the office of the
president of the republic with ministerial sta-
tus. SEI’s posts were immediately occupied by
the commission’s colonels themselves and
their close collaborators.16 By means of a ser-
ies of successive substitutions, the colonels of
the Cotrim Commission remained in direct
or indirect command of the computer indus-
try policy from SEI’s creation in 1980 until
SEI’s much applauded abolishment in 1990.
Historians Emanuel Adler, Franz Stefano
Erber, Peter Evans, Hubert Schmitz, and Jose
Cassiolato all take notice of the SNI interven-
tion, but in their analyses, they construct
frameworks or narratives not of rupture but
of continuity. For instance, Evans argues,
“More surprising than the political demise of
the old tecnicos was the fact that their
agenda proved politically robust. CAPRE’s
ideological legacy lived on two quite distinct
but politically complementary forms.”17
They failed to see that the substitution of SEI
for CAPRE represented an inflection point,
literally a rupture in the derivative function,
in the ethos of the minicomputer industry
policy. The Cotrim Commission received
detailed handbook-level instructions on how
to forge ahead the implementation of a
minicomputer (not microcomputer) market
reserve. They confiscated market surveys, def-
initions of priority for local design, drafts of
calls for international competitions for prod-
ucts for which there was a demand that could
not be supplied with local design, drafts of
contracts and legal commitments of the
winners to invest, and local designs for the
following generation of products. Ironically,
as I shall argue, SEI did use them.
However, while CAPRE nurtured the Brazil-
ian community for informatics by investing
in its relations with computer professionals,
SEI treated the community of computer pro-
fessionals initially with symbolic violence and
8 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
later on with undisguised distaste. CAPRE’s
journals were open to the community and
aware of the opportunities of the relative
democracy, whereas behind a surface-level
technical focus, SEI’s journals sought to hide
an authoritarian mistrust of a community
that had shown a capacity for collective tech-
nical and political action. One can say that in
the early 1980s the market reserve policy dis-
mantled its ties with its diverse and demo-
cratic origins in civil society and part of the
military, abandoning a Brazilian universe of
possibilities and lodged itself in the closed
world of anachronistic authoritarianism.
Second Rupture: The Appearance of
the Microcomputer
The second rupture came with the micro-
computer and in particular the dissemination
of the standardized platform for the personal
microcomputer: the IBM PC. The microcom-
puter’s effects on the Brazilian computer
industry were not pronounced until a few
years after its launch in the US in 1981. With
it the computer left behind the esoteric limits
of its creation as an “electronic brain” that
only large organizations might consider
using. Large mainframes were a specialized
segment of the capital goods market, involv-
ing relatively few people—in Brazil only a few
thousand people, possibly only a few hun-
dred. For the great majority of people, large
mainframe computers were esoteric
machines kept in refrigerated aquariums.
At this point, it is crucial to note that,
although the minicomputer systems that
appeared in the 1970s were much smaller in
size and price than the large computer main-
frames, their market had the same characteris-
tics as their larger siblings. Of course, mini-
computers greatly enhanced the diversity of
products, suppliers, buyers, and applica-
tions. Nevertheless, considering how deci-
sions about buying and selling were made
and how procedures about use and mainte-
nance conditions were established, we can
see a marketing continuity. Table 1 shows
the results of a survey published by CAPRE
in 1979 on all computers installed in Brazil
listed by their size (there were no microcom-
puters).18 Although minicomputer systems’
sizes and population differed substantially
from those of the mainframe computers,
their price, delivery times, and maintenance
conditions were still negotiated between
specialized buyers and sellers for use in
firms. Economically, this characterizes mini-
computers systems as typical capital goods.

Table 1. Total market revenue by size
of computer systems in 1976.18
System size Market (%)
Very large 37.4
Blocked time 6.1
Large 9.0
Medium 17.6
Small 18.6
Mini 11.3
Microcomputers left behind the formal
decision environment (the data processing
centers of the 1960s and 1970s) so character-
istic of how acquisitions or rentals of com-
puter systems were handled in large and
medium sized organizations. The microcom-
puter thus caused a rupture of the limits on
the computer as a typical capital good,
acquiring characteristics close to those of a
durable consumer good, such as a home
appliance or telephone, objects accessible to
a layperson. The rupture is marked specially
by the IBM PC and the microcomputer stand-
ard architecture and software created with
IBM’s tolerance of its clones. The miniaturiza-
tion techniques allowed for desktop com-
puters with data processing capacities that
merely a decade earlier could not have been
contained in machines that occupied a whole
room. The exponential increases in speed and
memory capacity, accompanied by steep
decreases in price, opened up computer appli-
cations and dissemination to hitherto fictional
realms. The possibility of individuals having
computers as extensions of their bodies,
entailed a radical change that cannot be com-
pared with the smooth evolutionary expan-
sion of the computer market that the mini-
computers had brought about in the 1970s.
The microcomputer broke down the strict
limits of a specialized capital goods market. A
rapid change took place in the sector’s entire
economy with respect to infrastructure and
the industrial, commercial, and financial
qualifications of manufacturers, suppliers,
and buyers. From the minicomputer to the
microcomputer, costs and prices went down
by one order of magnitude and capacities and
scale went up by several orders of magnitude.
As a result, a microcomputer became the
ambition of every consumer. In the early
1980s, the computer left a closed world of
thousands of professionals and moved toward
an open universe of millions of interested and
involved consumers.
Of course, Adler, Erber, Evans, Schmitz,
and Cassiolato took notice of the microcom-
puter revolution, but they do not render SEI’s
lack of distinction between microcomputers
and minicomputers as problematic and in
their analyses chose frameworks of continu-
ity rather than rupture. They were not
puzzled by SEI having kept the same proce-
dures and mechanisms for such a distinctly
new economic, technical, industrial, cultural,
and social object. They were not surprised by
the fact that SEI did not draw new scenarios
for the computer industry policy in the midst
of such a radical transformation.
Losing the Conditions for Success
During the 1970s, the character and dynam-
ics of the computer industry policy in Brazil
depended on two types of activism in the
Brazilian community for informatics. Both
types of activisms stopped in 1980 when the
political police became involved. First, the
Brazilian community for informatics lent
legitimacy to the idea of the minicomputer
market reserve by arguing for and propagat-
ing it to society in general. The research proj-
ects proposed and carried out at universities,
state-owned data centers, and military organ-
izations articulated and bundled together
ideas and concepts that the general public
might have taken as disjointed, such as an
assumed strong connection between techno-
logical dependence and the relative absence
of demand for highly qualified technical
labor in the Brazilian industry. The proposal
to diminish dependence on foreign technol-
ogy was a call for technological autonomy
that was translated in general as “increased
opportunities of more valuable work” that, in
turn, according to the interest of each one,
could be further translated as “to generate
more qualified job opportunities to Brazil-
ians,” “to open up the black boxes of foreign
weapons,” or “to spend fewer dollars to
quickly process the income tax reports.”
As I have argued here, according to an
ideological (and somewhat mechanistic)
sequential reasoning, the Brazilian commun-
ity for informatics claimed that a long-term
process to bring the benefits of greater tech-
nological autonomy to the realm of Brazilian
economic development could not start with-
out a market reserve for products conceived
and designed by teams of Brazilian professio-
nals. In this way, the Brazilian community for
informatics was a source of broad political
support for the minicomputer market reserve
coming from the lay public and constantly
October–December 2015 9
 renewed through live discussions. They
claimed that the Brazilian government should
resort to the minicomputer market reserve to
decrease the technological dependence of
Brazil.
Second, among professionals, the Brazil-
ian community for informatics consubstan-
tiated a kind of decentralized collective intel-
ligence that followed up and discussed the
implementation of the minicomputer market
reserve, constantly estimating government’s
and firm’s behaviors vis-a-vis their fit to the
objectives that, according to discussions in
the community, made the minicomputer
market reserve legitimate. In other words, the
community was also a source of a more speci-
alized, technical, or professional critique of
the minicomputer market reserve policy. The
community disseminated discussions that
created two poles, where support for what
was considered right decisions and opposi-
tion to what was considered wrong decisions
and behaviors led to a more or less consen-
sual goal of diminishing technological
dependence on the conception, design, and
fabrication of minicomputer systems. Thus,
in the context of Brazil’s relative democracy
and high-tech industry constructs, the com-
munity for informatics acquired, although
insecurely, the character of a technical-politi-
cal collective actor.
Table 1 shows that in 1976 the market
reserve practiced by CAPRE affected only 11.3
percent of the computer market. At its incep-
tion, the computer market reserve issued spe-
cial rules for exploring a small, although
increasing part of the market. The lion’s share
was that of larger machines, lying above the
reserved segment, a point well stressed in
articles and discussions during the 1970s. This
point did not escape those who have studied
the market reserve policy: “minicomputers’
technology was more accessible, investments
were not as large as for the big computers, and
there were no minicomputer manufacturers
in the Brazilian domestic market.”19 The
microcomputer market, however, came up
from below the reserved segment. Microcom-
puters were complete computer systems that
were smaller and more integrated than mini-
computers, and their market started to grow
at high rates. The first strong sign of market
discontinuities came with the 8-bit machines
using the CP/M operating system. After the
IBM PC, it was clear that the market reserve
would soon be sandwiched between the mar-
ket for larger machines and the fast growing
new market. In other words, the emergence
10 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
of the microcomputer in the early 1980s
required a renegotiation of the policy pro-
posed by the Brazilian community for infor-
matics and adopted/adapted by CAPRE.
By 1980 the five selected Brazilian compa-
nies (Cobra, Edisa, Labo, Sid, and Sisco) had
successfully established themselves in the
reserved minicomputer market. Since 1977
they had honored their commitments to
invest in local technological capacity to con-
ceive of and design products. They had
successfully launched enhancements and
upgrades of the originally licensed models
and new models entirely developed by Brazil-
ian teams. After five years, they had become
independent of the original foreign sources
of their technology. The policy worked just
fine for the minicomputer market, as envi-
sioned in the 1970s.
However, the market changed, and the
emerging microcomputer market had a very
different structure. Microcomputers required
industrial and commercial organizations dif-
ferent from those of minicomputers, more
appropriate to a much more standardized and
highly scaled technology, where issues of hard-
ware manufacturing costs, software standard-
ization, and prices differentials became much
more important and would have to be
approached in new ways. Microcomputer
technology required a revision of a series of
previous decisions that had proved effective
for minicomputers, such as whether to make
different subassemblies, parts, and compo-
nents in Brazil or buy them from abroad.
First off, should there be a market reserve
for microcomputers, and what should be the
general architecture of a market reserve for
microcomputers? What was the cost and gain
of a microcomputer market reserve? What
kind of technological commitment was it
appropriate for the government to require
from firms in exchange for a license to
explore the Brazilian microcomputer market?
Because it was created in 1980, SEI was born
facing the strategic problem of deciding what
kind of reformulation should be made to the
minicomputer market reserve policy, given
the radical changes already visible on the
horizon with the emergence of the micro-
computer market.
So what did the colonels of SNI do? They
did not reformulate the policy, one they con-
sidered so “timid” as to be nonexistent. CAPRE
and Digibras were a source of handbook-level
instructions on how to implement and man-
age a minicomputer market reserve that
seemed to be working very well. It appears that
SEI simply continued with many, although
not all, the procedures that had been adopted
by CAPRE. One may only speculate whether
accusing CAPRE of conducting a too timid pol-
icy had any other purpose than to legitimize
the idea of creating a new larger government
agency. CAPRE’s procedures, however, were
conceived at a time before microcomputers.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that
CAPRE’s procedures were obviously not
designed to implement a microcomputer mar-
ket reserve. Nevertheless, in the following
years SEI simply extended to the emerging
microcomputer market the same rules and
procedures CAPRE had successfully adopted to
give incentives to local conception, design and
manufacturing of minicomputers. Moreover,
while the minicomputer market reserve had
been preceded by years of discussion and
intensive interaction among professionals, the
microcomputer market reserve was adopted
without discussion.
The procedures that had been successful
for implementing the minicomputer market
reserve were doomed when SEI applied them
without previous discussions to the new
microcomputer, which was associated with a
new set of manufacturers, a new industrial
structure, and a new open universe of mil-
lions of potential nonprofessional buyers. It
is inappropriate to lump the 1970s and 1980s
together into a single market reserve. I argue
that, starting from this point in history, we
can better understand the microcomputer
market reserve imposed and practiced by SEI
in the 1980s.
The authoritarian ethos of the SNI colonels
led them to make the crass error of cutting off
the Brazilian community for informatics. We
can only speculate whether such an infor-
mally formatted community of Brazilian
computer professionals would have been
sufficiently heterogeneous to successfully
accompany and carry on well-informed dis-
cussions on such broad issues as how to han-
dle the emergence of the microcomputer
market from technological, industrial, and
commercial standpoints. In their arrogance,
however, the SNI colonels destroyed a pre-
cious instrument, perhaps the sole instru-
ment capable of providing guidance for an
industrial policy in a complex technological
landscape, a heterogeneous community of
professionals that had acquired the character
of a technical and political collective agent.
For some radical followers of the “free mar-
ket ideology,” the question of a technological
industrial policy does not make any sense
because they believe a country’s interactions
in the modern world can be best conducted
in a regime of unconstrained individual tech-
nological choices by firms. Yet, before the
intervention of the colonels, the Brazilian
community for informatics argued that, in
Brazil, unconstrained technological choices
by firms meant the simple and prompt adop-
tion of readymade foreign technology. In the
1970s, the community of computer professio-
nals was engaged in a knowledge battle, using
metaphors to help the layperson to ponder
the effort to acquire local technological
capacity. In their discussions and articles,
they opened the black boxed argument sup-
porting the apparently lower cost and simpler
adoption of foreign readymade technology.
They made the unconstrained adoption of
foreign technology problematic by unveiling
its negative effects on qualified work opportu-
nities, the adequacy of the solutions, the costs
on the balance of payments, the creation of
Brazilian trademarks, and export ambitions.
If the colonels intended to continue a
computer industry policy aimed at increasing
the Brazilian technological autonomy, then
they would soon be in need of the Brazilian
community for informatics, an at least rela-
tively democratic and minimally diverse and
heterogeneous technical and political collec-
tive actor. It is not plausible to suppose that in
a peripheral country a centralized and author-
itarian intelligence could maintain the course
of a technological computer industry policy
amid processes so complex as that of the
emergence of the microcomputer in the
1980s. Without a collective disseminated
body to mediate between a market interven-
tion and the laypersons’ conventional expect-
ations about product quality and price, SEI
and Brazilian manufacturers isolated them-
selves from Brazilian society. They gradually
became receptors of privileges and incentives
who offered nothing in return. At this point,
SEI and the manufacturers, with no commun-
ity to provide checkpoints, abandoned their
serious commitments to develop local tech-
nology. In 1990 the microcomputer market
reserve was a castle of cards ready to collapse.
Final Remarks
Like Galileo, numbers have a “revealing and
concealing” genius. Table 2 shows the evolu-
tion of revenues of the computer industry in
Brazil.20 However, tables of aggregate economic
data, indispensable as they are, may blind com-
petent analysts. Analyses centered on these
numerical indicators lose their descriptive and
October–December 2015 11
 Table 2. Revenue growth of the Brazilian computer industry.*

Brazilian controlled firms Foreign controlled firms

Revenue Revenue Total ($US

Year ($US billions) Percent of total ($US billions) Percent of total billions)
1979 0.2 23 0.6 77 0.8
1980 0.3 33 0.6 67 0.9
1981 0.4 36 0.7 64 1.1
1982 0.6 40 0.9 60 1.5
1983 0.7 47 0.8 53 1.5
1984 0.9 50 0.9 50 1.8
1985 1.4 52 1.3 48 2.7
1986 2.1 62 1.3 38 3.4
1987 2.4 60 1.6 40 4.0
1988 2.9 / 2.8 67 / 54 1.5 / 2.4 33 /46 4.4 / 5.2
1989 – / 4.2 – / 59 – / 2.9 – / 41 – / 7.1
1990 – / 3.8 – / 60 – / 2.5 – / 40 – / 6.3
*
eries Estatısticas,” and from 1988 on, the second figure is from “SCT/DEPIN.”20
For 1979 to 1987, the data source is “S

explanatory capacity because they ignore or
deny the importance of local sociotechnical
(political) specifics. Of course, changes in those
specifics are changes in the entities that those
numerical indicators try to represent or meas-
ure. The strict economics behind those indica-
tors, however, frequently fail to take into
account these kinds of changes. In the case of
the Brazilian computer sector, analytical frame-
works based on aggregate sectorial data such as
sales, number of employees, and international
price comparisons have reinforced the impres-
sion of continuity obtained when SEI adopted
for microcomputers the same procedures that
CAPRE had created and adopted for minicom-
puters. As a result, competent Brazilian and for-
eign analysts have ignored evident ruptures
and attributed to the market reserve policy in
the 1970s and 1980s a unity and a continuity
that does not exist. The intervention of the
political police is especially ignored, which is
all the more surprising because Vera Dantas
has a whole chapter of anecdotes covering the
works of the Cotrim Commission.13 The omis-
sion seriously jeopardizes economists’ under-
standing the Brazilian experience in computer
industry policy.21
The crucial point is that the analysis
offered here highlights that the Brazilian
experience of a computer market reserve,
contrary to popular opinion in Brazil, was a
positive interaction between the democratic
principles and a project of technological
development until 1979. The Brazilian com-
munity for informatics had become a hetero-
geneous technical and political collective
taking advantage of the first opportunities in
the process of political opening that the mili-
tary dictatorship was in the end unable to
shun. It was only after the SNI’s intervention
that the Brazilian computer market reserve
policy diverged from the political opening of
the country, isolating itself from the rest of
society. Thus, while its democratic period is
clearly associated to its success, its authoritar-
ian closure inexorably led it to its now
emblematic failure.
References and Notes
1. Resolution 1 of the Plenary Council of CAPRE
(the agency at the time in charge of
“rationalizing the use of computers in the fed-
eral government of Brazil”), published in the
Official Diary of the Union (D.O.U.) on the 15
July 1976. See DADOS e Id e ias, vol. 2, no. 1,
Aug./Sept. 1976, p. 39.
2. P.B. Tigre, Computadores brasileiros : indu stria,
tecnologia e depend^e ncia [Brazilian Computers:
Industry, Technology, and Dependence], Editora
Campus, 1984.
3. Technical comparisons were based on processing
speed (in millions of instructions per second),
memory capacity (in RAM), ROM and disks (in kil-
obytes or megabytes), and maximum number of
terminals. Among the many accounts acknowl-
edging this successful phase, see E. Adler, The
Power of Ideology: The Quest for Technological
Autonomy in Argentina and Brazil, Univ. of Califor-
nia Press, 1987; V. Dantas, Guerrilha tecnolo gica :
ria da polıtica nacional de
a verdadeira histo
informatica [Technological Guerrillas: The True

12 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

 Story of the National Information Technology Pol-
icy], Livros Tecnicos e Cientıficos, 1988; F.S. Erber,
“The Political Economy of Technology Develop-
ment: The Case of the Brazilian Informatics Poli-
cy,” Politics of Technology in Latin America, M.I.
Bastos and C. Cooper, eds., Routledge, 1995, pp.
196–224; P.B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States
and Industrial Transformation, Princeton Univ.
Press, 1995; J. Meyer-Stamer, From Import Substi-
tution to International Competitiveness: Brazil’s
Informatics Industry at the Crossroads, German
Development Inst., 1990; H. Schmitz and J.E. Cas-
siolato, Hi-Tech for Industrial Development: Lessons
from the Brazilian Experience in Electronics and
Automation, Routledge, 1992; S. Schoonmaker,
High-Tech Trade Wars: U.S.-Brazilian Conflicts in the
Global Economy, Pitt Latin Am. series, Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press, 2002; and P.B. Tigre, Indu stria
brasileira de computadores : perspectivas ate os
anos 90 [Brazilian Computer Industry: Perspec-
tives on the 1990s], Editora Campus, 1987.
4. Even today, Brazilian economists, journalists,
commentators, and politicians periodically
repeat these justifications in the pages of Brazil-
ian daily newspapers (such as O Globo, Estada ~o,
and Folha de Sa ~o Paulo) and magazines (such as
Veja and Exame).
5. M.R.B. da Silva, “For What Should One Do His-
tories of Informatics?” Semin  ria da
ario de Histo
Indform atica na Ame rica Latina e Caribe (2012
XXXVIII Conferencia Latinoamericana en Infor-
matica, CLEI), 2012; doi:.
6. See Evans, Embedded Autonomy.
7. For a thorough treatment of this “depuration of
phenomena” so characteristic of modern disci-
plines, see S. Shapin, Never Pure : Historical
Studies of Science As If It Was Produced by Peo-
ple with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Cul-
ture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility
and Authority, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010,
and B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,
Harvard Univ. Press, 1993.
8. According to the IEEE-USA’s Intellectual Property
Committee, “[t]he term ‘reverse engineering’
means the discovery by engineering techniques
of the underlying ideas and principles that gov-
ern how a machine, computer program or other
technological device works. Engineers use this
information for many purposes, including mak-
ing other products interoperate with the target
product that is the subject of the reverse engi-
neering. Engineers also use this information for
the purpose of designing competing products
that are not substantially similar in expression,
as well as to discover patentable subject matter
and ideas not otherwise disclosed in the litera-
ture provided with the product by the origina-
tor. We further believe that lawful reading,
analysis, or disassembly of machine language is
a reverse engineering technique by which an
engineer can reconstruct the ideas of a com-
puter program.” See www.ieeeusa.org/commu-
nications/releases/2003/060403pr.html.
9. Adler, The Power of Ideology.
10. Evans, Embedded Autonomy.
11. The image in Figure 1 originally appeared in
SUCESU – Revista Brasileira de Processamento de
Dados, vol. 3, no. 28, 1974, pp. 6–7.
12. See especially the collection of the journal
DADOS e Ide ias and the newspaper Datanews
(owned by Computerworld in Brazil) between
1975 and 1979.
13. Dantas, Guerrilha tecnolo  gica.
14. T. Vigevani, O contenciso Brasil X Estados Unidos
da Informa tica - Uma ana lise sobre formulaç a
~o da
polıtica exterior [Brazil vs. USA Computer Litiga-
tion: An Analysis of the Formulation of Foreign
Policy], EDUSP, 1995.
15. Adler, The Power of Ideology, p. 262.
16. S.H.V. Rodrigues, Rastro de Cobra [Trail of
Cobra], Caio Domingues & Associados Publici-
dade, 1984, and Dantas, Guerrilha tecnolo gica.
17. Evans, Embedded Autonomy, p. 118.
18. The source for the Table 1 data is “Boletim
Tecnico da CAPRE,” Jan.–Mar. 1979, p. 38.
19. Evans, Embedded Autonomy, p. 245.
20. The sources for the Table 2 data are
“1979–1988: SEI - Se ries Estatısticas,” Agosto,
vol. 2, no. 1, 1989, p. 12, and “1988–1990:
SCT/DEPIN Panorama do Setor de Inform atica,”
Mazzeo, 1999, p. 134.
21. I have actively followed the Brazilian computer
market reserve policy for almost 20 years, first as
an academic research engineer at UFRJ
(1973–1977), and after that, as policy maker
(member of CAPRE’s staff and Digibr as technical
director, 1977–1980), private business man
(CEO of Embracomp-EBC, a small computer
manufacturer, 1980–1986), and state-owned
computer manufacturer manager (CEO of
Cobra, 1986–1990).
Ivan da Costa Marques is
an associate professor in the
Graduate Program of History
of Sciences and Techniques,
and Epistemology at the Fed-
eral University of Rio de
Janeiro. His research interests
include computer industry
policy and science and technology studies in
Latin America. Da Costa Marques has a PhD in
electric engineering and computer science from
the University of California, Berkeley. Contact
him at imarques@nce.ufrj.br.
October–December 2015 13