Developed at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, ALOHAnet influenced modern wireless communication and Ethernet. Its name, university affiliation, and promotional imagery featuring an East Asian-looking woman collectively evoke multiplex signals of Hawai’ian resonance. Yet, most of the project’s leaders were recent migrants from the mainland U.S., raising questions about whether ALOHAnet represents a uniquely Hawai‘ian achievement or a reflection of mainland dominance.
This paper situates ALOHAnet within the broader history of electrical engineering in Hawai‘i, with radio engineering as its subfield, tracing connections to three earlier milestones: King Kalākaua’s introduction of electric lighting to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i (1886–1888), the SCR-270 radar’s detection of Japanese aircraft prior to the Pearl Harbor attack (1941), and the TPC-1 transpacific telephone cable connecting Japan, Hawai‘i, and California (1964). By comparing ALOHAnet with these earlier projects, this study explores the ways Hawai‘i transitioned from a politically charged and contested space between kingdoms and empires, to a region that let tensions arises yet in a manageable way within a more stable framework.
Ultimately, it argues that ALOHAnet represents a key moment in Hawai‘ian transformation under American and Asian settler inter-colonial dynamics ossified (Azuma 2019), with Native Hawai‘ians marginalized in the technological and economic order.