Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
contemporary society. As early as 1948 the cybernetician Norbert Wiener
was predicting a “second industrial revolution” enabled by the electronic
computer.
2
A year later, the computer consultant Edmund Berkeley, in
his popular topic
Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think
, described a
near future in which computers radically transform a broad range of
human cognitive and occupational activities, including business, law,
education, and medicine.
3
Despite the fact that electronic computers were
in this period little more than glorifi ed calculating machines, the provoca-
tive image of the computer as a “giant” or “mechanical brain” quickly
became established in the popular imagination. Within just a few years
of the introduction of the fi rst commercial electronic computers, even
mass-market publications like
Time
and
Newsweek
were predicting the
use of computers in wide variety of commercial and scientifi c applica-
tions. Indeed, as Stephen Schnaars and Sergio Carvalho have recently
suggested, far from underestimating its potential, during the 1950s the
press in the United States “fell in love” with computer technology.
4
In the business literature in particular, the coming computer revolu-
tion was declared boldly, widely, and repeatedly.
5
The expectation was
that electronic computers would soon become an integral part of the
already large and thriving business machines industry. As
Fortune
maga-
zine confi dently predicted in a 1952 survey of the computer industry,
“offi ce robots” were poised to “eliminate the human element” in many
clerical operations, enabling massive gains in productivity.
6
While these
wild predictions might have been unsettling to U.S. offi ce workers, they
did suggest a rapidly growing market for computer technology. At the
very least, the computer manufacturers were convinced that computers
were the wave of the future; in the early 1950s, dozens of fi rms—among
them such major players as IBM, GE, Burroughs, RCA, and NCR—
invested heavily in this potential new growth market.
And grow the market did. In 1950 there were only 2 electronic com-
puters in use in the United States. By 1955 there were 240. Five years
later, there were 5,400. By 1965, the grand total had grown to almost
25,000, and by 1970, 75,000.
7
By the end of the 1960s, electronic com-
puters and their associated peripherals formed the basis of a $20 billion
industry—an industry growing at an average rate of more than 27
percent annually. Within two decades of the development of the fi rst
electronic digital computer, the computer industry in the United States
had emerged from nothing to become one of the largest and fastest-
growing sectors of the U.S. economy—a position that it would hold for
the next several decades.
8
