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handling medical records shifted into being computer data entry personnel. Clerks
handling medical billing began to use computers to track bills. Rather than vanish-
ing, clerical jobs absorbed the use of computers and software.
There were some reductions in clerical employees during the 1960s, but there
was also a simultaneous increase in computer and software personnel. In fact,
large data centers and programming teams changed banking and insurance opera-
tions from being purely manual to almost fully automated.
As an example of the remarkable growth of software during this decade, con-
sider the city of Hartford, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns. For various
reasons (including favorable taxes), the Hartford metropolitan area was the home
of a number of major insurance companies, including Aetna Insurance, Cigna In-
surance, Hartford Insurance, Mass Mutual Insurance, Phoenix Insurance, Travel-
ers Insurance, and others.
At the start of the 1960s, most of these corporations in a major industry were
just starting to use computers and software. Yet fairly soon, all of these insur-
ance companies would have data centers and software organizations that averaged
about 1,000 personnel each, and Hartford would have more than 50,000 software
personnel.
Hartford is perhaps unique because of the high concentration of insurance com-
panies, but all major companies that depended on clerical work were experiencing
rapid growth in software and data processing.
Every major bank in America, every insurance company, and every stock
brokerage built data centers and recruited software personnel. The largest of these
companies would end up employing more than 3,000 software and computer per-
sonnel, and even the smaller companies would each employ perhaps 250.
The growth of the computer and software industries in this decade was remark-
able. The automobile industry, the oil industry, the telecommunications industry,
and the aircraft industry also grew rapidly. However, these other fast-growing in-
dustries needed computers and software personnel, so their rapid growth also ad-
ded to the growth of the software industry.
Eventually, every automobile manufacturer, large oil company, telecommunic-
ations company, and aircraft manufacturer would each employ at least 1,000 and
sometimes as many as 10,000 software and computer personnel.
Companies such as AT&T, ITT, GTE, and Motorola in the United States and
Siemens, Nippon Telephone, and Nokia abroad would end up not only using com-
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