Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
included both high school dropouts and ex-PhD physicists. Even to this
day, their occupational expertise remains diffi cult to clearly defi ne or
delineate. For example, the term programmer, which was widely used as
a generic catchall description of a computing specialist in the 1960s,
encompasses such a wide range of occupational categories—from the
narrow and highly technical coder to the elite and infl uential “systems
man”—that it is more useful as a rhetorical device than as an analytic
category.
The questions of what programming was—as an intellectual and
occupational activity—and where it fi t into traditional social, academic,
and professional hierarchies, were actively negotiated during the decades
of the 1950s and 1960s. Programmers were well aware of their tenuous
professional position, and they struggled to prove that they possessed
a unique set of skills and training that allowed them to lay claim to
professional autonomy. This chapter traces the history of computer
programming from its origins as low-status clerical work (often per-
formed by women) into one of the highest-paid technical occupations of
the late 1950s and early 1960s. The focus is on the emergence of the
computer programmer as a highly valued, well-compensated, and largely
autonomous technical expert.
The Origins of Computer Programming
In the eyes of a computer scientist, all computers are created equal. That
is to say, any true computing machine can, by defi nition, compute any-
thing that is computable. Or to state the case a little more clearly, any
device worthy of the name computer can be programmed to perform
any task that can be performed by any other computer. This means that
in theory at least, all computers are functionally equivalent: any given
computer is but a specifi c implementation of a more general abstraction
known as a Universal Turing Machine.
It is the Platonic ideal of the Universal Turing Machine, and not the
messy reality of actual physical computers, that is the true subject of
modern theoretical computer science; it is only by treating the computer
as an abstraction, a mathematical construct, that theoretical computer
scientists lay claim to their fi eld being a legitimate
scientifi c
, rather than
merely a technical or engineering, discipline. The story of this remarkable
self-construction and its consequences is the subject of chapter 5.
The idealized Universal Turing Machine is, of course, only a concep-
tual device, a convenient fi ction concocted by the mathematician Alan
