Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Wilkes recalls of his experience programming the EDSAC (Electronic
Delay Storage Automatic Calculator—arguably the world's fi rst elec-
tronic, digital stored-program computer). “And it was with somewhat
of a shock that I realized that for the rest of my life I was going to spend
a good deal of my time fi nding mistakes that I had made in my
programs.”
33
Wilkes might have been one of the fi rst to recognize the inherent dif-
fi culties of computer programming, but he was hardly the last. Particularly
in the pioneering electronic computing projects of the late 1940s and
early 1950s, involving as they did custom-built prototype machines that
were highly idiosyncratic and unreliable, programmers were required to
be at the same time scientists and tinkerers. Many of these early program-
mers were in fact migrants from scientifi c and engineering disciplines.
They acquired a reputation as being both geniuses and mavericks; as
John Backus, the inventor of the FORTRAN programming language
later described this period, programming in the 1950s was “a black art,
a private arcane matter . . . in which the success of a program depended
primarily on the programmer's private techniques and inventions.”
34
This reputation would later come back to haunt the industry: the need
to transform the black art of programming into the “science” of software
engineering became a major theme of the software crisis rhetoric of the
next several decades.
In the meantime, the computer itself was gradually being reinvented
as a business technology. The focus of electronic computing shifted from
scientifi c and military agendas (which emphasized mathematics and
highly optimized code) to electronic data processing (EDP) and informa-
tion management (in which more commercial considerations of cost,
reliability, generality, and the availability of peripherals dominated). As
general-purpose electronic computers became less expensive, more reli-
able, and better integrated into existing business processes and informa-
tion technology systems, they were adopted by a larger and more diverse
range of companies. Most of these companies did not possess large engi-
neering or even data processing departments, making the availability of
high-quality applications programs and systems tools even more essential
(and conversely, their defi ciencies even more noticeable). At the same
time, the scale and scope of computerization projects increased dramati-
cally. Whereas the fi rst generation of commercial computers were gener-
ally used to replicate existing data processing applications, by the 1950s
computers were being used for less familiar and more ambitious pur-
poses, such as management planning and control.
