Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
about what form these professional structures should take. Observers
noted a deepening “programming schism” developing within the indus-
try, a “growing breach between the scientifi c and engineering computa-
tion boys who talk ALGOL and FORTRAN . . . and the business data
processing boys who talk English and write programs in COBOL.”
104
Individuals who believed that the key to professional status was the
development of formal theories of computer science resisted subprofes-
sional certifi cation programs and tended to join the ACM; business data
processors who were skeptical of “cute mathematical tricks,” either sup-
ported the DPMA or ignored the professional societies altogether.
It is obvious that the turf battles that raged between the ACM and
the DPMA during the 1950s and 1960s helped undermine popular
support for both organizations. In response to extensive
Datamation
coverage of a RAND symposium in 1959 on “the perennial professional
society question,” one reader commented that he “hadn't laughed so
hard in a decade. Are these guys kidding? You won't solve this problem
by self-interested conversation about it, nor is it solved by founding
another organization.”
105
In a retrospective in 1985 on the troubled
history of AFIPS, Harry Tropp suggested that “the question of turf seems
to have been there from the beginning. It shows up in the [1950s'] Rand
Symposium. . . . There were the hardware and software types and then
there were the users. We had the east coast/west coast turf problems.
What I am hearing today is a whole new evolution of different turfs as
this information processing society explodes.”
106
The fact that the DPMA
refused affi liation with AFIPS until the mid-1970s—largely because of
the perception that the latter organization was dominated by the ACM—
was a major factor in its perpetual ineffectiveness and eventual dissolu-
tion (in 1987, just two years after it celebrated its twenty-fi fth anniversary).
Herbert Grosch in particular was dismayed by the pettiness of the ACM-
DPMA debates, which he believed detracted from the overall goal of
establishing a legitimate professional identity:
I couldn't care less who publishes some abstract scientifi c paper! What I want
to know is how do we pull together a hundred thousand warm bodies that are
working on the outskirts of the computer business, give them a high-priced
executive director, lots of advertising, a whole series of technical journals; in
other words, organize a real rip-snorting profession? Whenever somebody starts
worrying about which journal what paper should be published in, we get bogged
down in an academic cross-fi re we've been in for ten years.”
107
As damaging as these interassociation rivalries were to the infl uence
and reputation of the ACM and the DPMA, what really hurt them was
