Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.1
Datamation
cartoon, 1963.
second-class citizens. They were essentially just an overhead cost, like
heat or electricity.
But despite this latent, low-level corporate resentment of computer
specialists, there were few overt expressions of outright hostility. The
general consensus through the mid-1960s seemed to be that computer
programming was somehow an “exceptional” activity, unconstrained by
the standard organizational hierarchy and controls. “Generating soft-
ware is 'brain business,' often an agonizingly diffi cult intellectual effort,”
argued one article in
Fortune
magazine in 1967. “It is not yet a science,
but an art that lacks standards, defi nitions, agreement on theories and
approaches.”
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The anecdotal evidence seemed to indicate that “the past
management techniques so successful in other disciplines do not work in
programming development. . . . Nothing works except a fl ying-by-the-
