Abstract A history of writing the history of computing is presented in its relationship to the history of mathematics. As with many historiographies, the initial history of computing was very much an internalistic history. In the late 1970s, the field became more serious and started looking at the histories of mathematics and technology for (methodological) inspiration. Whereas the history of mathematics was initially quite influential, it is the history of technology (in its U.S. form) that has become the dominant framework for doing history of computing since the 1990s.