Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and authority conveyed by the electronic computer. Systems analysts,
operations researchers, management consultants, and data processing
specialists, among others, were all associated with the emergence of the
nascent technology. In many respects, the term computer boys came to
refer more generally not simply to actual computer specialists but rather
to the whole host of smart, ambitious, and technologically inclined
experts that emerged in the immediate postwar period. But computer
programmers were the original and exemplary computer boys, and the
term programmer was applied by contemporaries to the entire range of
specialists involved with computing in this period. As much as the
various computer specialists themselves worked to differentiate them-
selves from each other—systems analysts usually saw themselves as being
distinct from programmers, and many academic computer scientists had
no time at all for occupational programmers—they were generally all
lumped together by outsiders as programmers.
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A Brief History of Programming
The story of the computer boys begins, intriguingly enough, with a group
of women. These women, generally referred to by contemporaries as the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) “girls”—were
female “human computers” recruited by the male ENIAC engineers/
managers to “setup” the general-purpose ENIAC machine to perform
specifi c “plans of computation.” The ENIAC, which was the most widely
publicized of the wartime experiments in electronic computing, con-
tained many (but not all) of the architectural elements of the modern
computer: it was digital, electronic, and programmable. And so although
the idea of the computer program had not yet been developed, the
women of ENIAC are nevertheless widely celebrated as the world's
earliest computer programmers.
It is no coincidence that the fi rst software workers were women. The
use of the word software in this context is, of course, anachronistic—the
word itself would not be introduced until 1958—but the hierarchical
distinctions and gender connotations it embodies—between “hard” tech-
nical mastery, and the “softer,” more social (and implicitly, of secondary
importance) aspects of computer work—are applicable even in the earli-
est of electronic computing development projects.
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In the status hierar-
chy of the ENIAC project, it was clearly the male computer engineers
who were signifi cant. The ENIAC women, the computer programmers,
as they would later be known, were expected to simply adapt the plans
