Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In order to gain real academic respectability, computer scientists had
to convince others not only that having such a discipline was desirable
and necessary but also that it addressed some fundamental scientifi c
objective.
On this fi rst point computer scientists were greatly assisted by the
contemporary boom in commercial electronic computing. As has been
discussed previously, this was more than just a function of the increasing
availability of fast, reliable, and (relatively) low-cost computing power.
The growing realization that software could be used to transform the
general-purpose electronic computer into a broad range of information-
and decision-related devices greatly expanded the range of applications
to which this computing power could be productively applied. By the
early 1960s, the electronic computer had become a signifi cant presence
not only in the research laboratory and the military but in the corporate
and government sectors as well. It was no great rhetorical leap to argue,
as did the computer scientist Peter Wegner in a 1966 essay, that society
was on the verge “of a computer revolution that will be as profound in
its effects as the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.”
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Similar assertions were being made by numerous business
leaders and government offi cials in this period. The real question was
not whether or not, as Wegner went on to contend, there was “a growing
organized body of knowledge and theory relating to computers,” but
whether “this body of knowledge and theory is called computer
science.”
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The general excitement generated by the rapid expansion of the com-
mercial computer industry lent support to the claims of computer scien-
tists that their discipline was of central economic and social signifi cance.
The burgeoning personnel crisis in the computing fi elds described in
previous chapters was just one sign of a larger interest in computer-
related training and education. But although computer scientists clearly
benefi ted from the growing demand for practical training in computer
programming, their relationship with commercial computing was from
the beginning ambivalent. On the one hand, the practical and commer-
cial potential of the electronic computer is what attracted attention and
funding from industry as well as the government. On the other hand, in
order to differentiate themselves from mathematics or electrical engineer-
ing, and establish computing as more than just a service industry, they
had to distance themselves from the more technical activities associated
with computing.
