Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
more tenuous and abstract. For them, the computer is not the primary
object of interest but simply a tool with which to build other tools. In
other words, the computer people are mainly concerned with the applica-
tion of computers (and computer applications), not the computer itself.
To the degree that the history of modern computing has been domi-
nated by the history of the computer as a machine, physical artifact, and
tangible “thing,” the work of the average computer specialist can indeed
be regarded as merely marginal. But from the broader perspective of the
history of computerization—of the rise to dominance of the electronic
computer as the defi ning technology of the modern era, our chosen tool
for approaching almost every problem, social, economic, and political,
and the fundamental metaphor through which we understand ourselves
and our environment—then the computer people are those individuals
most directly responsible for bringing about what is arguably the most
profound social and technological development of our times. They did
so not as inventors from the traditional mold but rather as the developers
of the software (broadly defi ned to include programs, procedures, and
practices) that integrated the novel technology of electronic computing
into existing social, political, and technological networks.
In many respects, it is the history of computer software and not of
the computer itself that is at the heart of the larger story of the great
computer revolution of the mid- to late twentieth century. What makes
the modern electronic digital computer so unique in all the history of
technology—so powerful, fl exible, and capable of being applied to such
an extraordinarily diverse range of purposes—is its ability to be recon-
fi gured, via software, into a seemingly infi nite number of devices. In fact,
it is this ability to be programmed via software that has come to encap-
sulate the essence of modern computing: for a contemporary computer
scientist, a computer is simply a device that can run a certain kind of
software program. Whether that computer is electronic, digital, or even
material is irrelevant. What matters is that it is programmable.
From a certain modern perspective, the signifi cance of software seems
obvious. Software is what makes a computer useful. Software transforms
the latent power of the theoretically general-purpose machine into a
specifi c tool for solving real-world problems. A computer without soft-
ware is irrelevant, like an automobile without gasoline or a television set
without a broadcast signal.
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Software is also how most of us experience the computer. Although
we might speak casually about “using the computer,” as if the computer
was a specifi c, singular type of machine, most of us interact with the
