Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
computing scientists learned their trade in the centralized computing
facilities that provided computational services to other researchers.
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Akera compares such centers to the “trading zones” examined by the
historian of physics Peter Galison in his work on bubble chambers. Like
the bubble chamber, the electronic computer created around it an inter-
disciplinary space in which researchers from a variety of backgrounds
could productively interact. In such trading zones, researchers did not
have to agree on the universal meaning or signifi cance of the instrument
but only on local protocols and practices. And so a physicist using the
computer to perform Monte Carlo simulations could regard the com-
puter as a simply another experimental apparatus, while the computer
programmer that he or she was working with might imagine it as an
object of study in and of itself.
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In the computer that the theorists con-
sidered only in terms of its logical architecture, the electrical engineers
saw circuits and wiring diagrams. Both could be interested in the same
machine for different reasons, and still have interactions in the trading
zone that were productive and signifi cant.
The trading zone did have its limits. For those who saw the computer
as a tool of more universal interest and applicability, the confi nes of the
computing centers could be limiting. The isolation of computing in com-
puting centers was at once physical, professional, and intellectual. Early
computers were large, power hungry, and because of the extensive
cooling required to dissipate the heat they produced, noisy. They required
constant maintenance. They generally never left the engineering labs in
which they were constructed, reinforcing their status as experimental and
highly specialized instruments. Each machine was unique, and the tech-
nology was changing so rapidly that every new machine was essentially
a prototype. It is hardly surprising that computing appeared to be a
subset of electrical engineering.
Compared to the massive machinery of the computer engineers, the
contributions of the computer theorists seemed intangible and insignifi -
cant. This was a particular problem for programmers, whose work
lacked even the subdued glamour of mathematical equations or the claim
to fundamental scientifi c knowledge. Demonstrating a new machine to
visitors was “orders of magnitude more spectacular” than showing them
a few handwritten sheets of code.
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The image of the blinking “giant
electronic brain” captured both the public and scientifi c imagination in
a way that mere concepts or procedures never could.
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And of course at
this point the word software, or even the concept it would come to
embody, simply did not exist. Where the hardware engineers were able
