Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
curriculum would allow manufacturers and employers to off-load the
work of training and certifying programmers on the universities. Just
what this training would look like, and how it would balance theory
with practice, would become a subject of much contention, but the need
for some form of academic discipline devoted to computing must have
seemed evident to almost everyone in the industry.
In retrospect, the emergence of an academic discipline devoted to
computer science seems almost overdetermined. How could the defi ning
technology of our modern information age, the device most widely asso-
ciated in the popular mind with progress in contemporary science and
technology, not have attracted the attention of a wide variety of aca-
demic scientists and engineers? One would imagine that any number of
disciplines would be clamoring for control over the science of computing
and information technology. And indeed, by all of the traditional mea-
sures of academic accomplishment, including papers published, students
graduated, and funding controlled, computer science has proven itself a
resounding success. Within a few years of the founding of the fi rst com-
puter science programs in the United States, thousands of computer sci-
entists were being graduated nationwide. For almost two decades
afterward, the number of degrees granted in computer science would
grow on average more than 20 percent annually. At the height of its
popularity, more than 5 percent of all U.S. male college undergraduates
would graduate with a degree in the computer and information sci-
ences.
13
The remarkable rise to dominance of computer science as an
autonomous discipline represents one of the great success stories of aca-
demic entrepreneurship of the late twentieth century.
But the development of a new technology, no matter how powerful
or infl uential, did not necessarily justify the creation of a new academic
discipline. There are many examples of scientifi c or technological accom-
plishments that were interesting, useful, and productive, but that did not
require or deserve the development of their own disciplines or depart-
ments. “The creation of computer science departments is analogous to
creating new departments for the railroad, automobile, radio, airplane
or television technologies,” argued one letter to the editors of the
Communications of the ACM
.
14
“These industrial developments were all
tremendous innovations embodied in machinery, as is the development
of computers, but this is not enough for a discipline or a major academic
fi eld.”
15
According to this line of reasoning, no matter how powerful or
even revolutionary, in the end the electronic computer was simply another
tool or instrument, similar to the microscope or telephone. No one
