Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
The Black Art of Programming
When a programmer is good, he is very, very good. But when he is bad, he is
horrid.
—IBM study on programmer performance, 1968
An Unexpected Revolution
One of the great myths of the computer revolution is that nobody saw
it coming—particularly not the so-called computer experts. In one widely
repeated but apocryphal anecdote, Thomas Watson, the legendary
founder and longtime chair of the IBM Corporation, is said to
have predicted as late as 1943 a total world market for “maybe fi ve
computers.” The story of this wildly inaccurate forecast, alternatively
attributed to Watson, the Harvard professor and computing pioneer
Howard Aiken, or the Cambridge professor of computer science Douglas
Hartree, among others, is generally mobilized as a kind of modern moral-
ity play, a cautionary tale about the dangers of underestimating the
power and rapidity of technological progress.
1
Similar tales (similarly
apocryphal) are told about a series of unimaginative computer industry
executives—from Digital Equipment Corporation's Ken Olsen to
Microsoft's Bill Gates—whose alleged lack of imagination prevented
them from fully appreciating the transformative potential of computer
technology. Such stories are a staple of popular histories of the electronic
computer, which generally privilege dramatic change—sudden, unantici-
pated, and inexorable—over continuity.
In reality, many of the predictions made by contemporaries about the
revolutionary potential of the electronic computer were, if anything,
wildly optimistic. Almost before there were any computers—functional,
modern, electronic digital stored-program computers—enthusiasts
for the new technology were confi dently anticipating its infl uence on
