1950 to 1959: Starting the Ascent of Digital Computers and Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 85

Cultural Perceptions of Computers
During the 1950s, computers began to be featured in Hollywood
films and in thriller novels. For example, shots of the actual SAGE
computers were used in the films Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes . When Hollywood took
computers to heart, that also bolstered the attractiveness of pro-
gramming as an occupation.
In 1951, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, published
a collection of short stories titled Sentinel of Eternity . One of these
stories would later be expanded in 1968 into both a film by Stan-
ley Kubrick and a novel by Clarke called 2001: A Space Odyssey ,
which featured the HAL computer as the chief villain. It is prob-
ably not a coincidence that the letters “HAL” are all one letter be-
low “IBM.”
By the end of the 1950s, computers had become so powerful
that it would not seem unbelievable for HAL to converse with hu-
man astronauts.
Innovators of the 1950s
At the start of the 1950s, mathematically trained human “computers” were em-
ployed by the thousands to perform both sophisticated scientific mathematical cal-
culations and also to do mundane accounting math for billing, salaries, taxes, and
the like.
By the end of the decade, the term “computer” had morphed into meaning a di-
gital computer, and the occupation of computer programmer was starting to occur
in significant numbers, while the older occupation of human mathematical “com-
puters” was in rapid decline and would soon disappear.
In the 1950s, universities with strong engineering and science departments
began to teach courses on computers and software. For example, UCLA's initial
courses in 1950 were taught by Douglas Pfister and Willis Ware. The Institute for
Numerical Analysis was formed at UCLA to work with RAND and military organ-
izations on the use of computers. Other universities, such as Princeton, Harvard,
and MIT, also began to incorporate computer-related courses into engineering cur-
ricula.