Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
denied that such tools and instruments were essential to the practice of
modern science and technology, but neither did they call for the creation
of departments of microscopy or telephony.
There were, in fact, many objections raised against the establishment
of an independent discipline of computer science. In his “Presidential
Letter to the ACM Membership” in 1966, Anthony Oettinger outlined
what he called these “numerous misconceptions” about computer
science:
The computer is just a tool, and not [a] proper intellectual discipline. . . . It is
not the business of universities to train computer center managers or systems
experts. . . . The training of faculty and students in computer usage can better
be done by people in the various disciplines who have acquired computer experi-
ence, rather than by a separate cadre of computer scientists. . . . The [future
potential] of computers has been overrated, and when the current fad subsides,
many universities will have . . . badly overextended themselves with respect to
both equipment and teaching/research commitments in computer science per
se. . . . Computer science is not a coherent intellectual discipline but rather a
heterogeneous collection of bits and pieces from other disciplines.
16
Some of these objections must have seemed absurd even to contem-
poraries; the suggestion that the electronic computer was simply a passing
“fad” was unreasonable even in the early 1960s. But other critiques,
such as the characterization of computer science as a grab bag of theories
and techniques drawn from other disciplines, were much more salient.
Judging from the reaction that Oettinger's list provoked from the ACM
membership, there was a real fear within the nascent computer science
community that its discipline was not being taken seriously, that it was
considered by many little more than a “momentary aberration in the
fi elds of mathematics and electrical engineering.”
17
Oettinger himself
later confessed to having doubts about whether or not computing, with
its mix of the “purest mathematics” and the “dirtiest of engineering,”
would ever truly be considered a science.
18
In order to demonstrate that computer science was a real, respectable
intellectual activity, computer scientists needed to clearly defi ne the body
of theory that was at the center of their discipline. But what exactly was
computer science the science of? Computers were, after all, human-made
objects. Could there be such a thing, as Herbert Simon would later come
to argue, as a “science of the artifi cial?”
19
Or was the computer ulti-
mately incidental to computer science, which would turn out to be
the study of some more basic entity, such as information or algorithms?
Even among those who called themselves computer scientists, there were
disagreements about what the science should look like or where it would
