The Rise of Computer Science - The Computer Boys Take Over - page 118

resource for practitioners in their struggle for professional legitimacy,
but they also represented a battleground in which various groups com-
peted for control over occupational and intellectual territory.
Comptologist, Turingeer, or Applied Epistomologist?
The fi rst rigorous description of the discipline that would eventually
become known as computer science appeared in a September 1959 article
in the newly founded Communications of the ACM journal. This new
discipline, claimed its author, the physicist Louis Fein, would consolidate
the many computing activities that were currently dispersed across the
university in departments of mathematics, business and economics,
library science, physics, and electrical engineering. It would serve as the
conduit for basic research in computing, the link between computing and
the larger scientifi c community, and the training ground for students and
industrial programmers. It would rationalize the currently haphazard
and dispersed efforts of industry, academia, and government. And by
establishing a truly scientifi c approach to computing, it would unleash
the “enormous potential” of the electronic computer to revolutionize
society. 23 Fein proposed several possible names for this new discipline,
including “information science,” “intellitronics,” “synnoetics” (the term
that he himself would later come to prefer), and “computer science.” 24
Others would add “datalogy,” “hypology” (derived from the Greek
root hypologi , meaning “to compute”), “applied epistemology,” and
“Turingineering” to this list. 25 Computer science was the name that
stuck.
The idea that the various fi elds associated with computing deserved
their own unifying discipline was not entirely original to Fein—a year
earlier, a researcher at IBM's Applied Programming Division had sug-
gested the umbrella term “comptology”—but Fein was the fi rst to back
up his proposal with specifi c recommendations for curriculum, depart-
ments, and research agendas. 26 Fein had been commissioned by Stanford
University in 1957 to study computing education, and had emerged as
an outspoken advocate of the formation of autonomous departments of
computer science independent of existing programs in mathematics
and electrical engineering. 27 In 1960 he was appointed the chair of the
ACM Education Committee, and a year later published a fi ctionalized
description (written from the perspective of a 1975 observer) of the
program he had developed for Stanford. Interestingly enough, the name
of his idealized department was synnoetics (from the Greek for the