Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3
Chess Players, Music Lovers, and
Mathematicians
In one inquiry it was found that a successful team of computer specialists
included an ex-farmer, a former tabulating machine operator, an ex-key punch
operator, a girl who had done secretarial work, a musician and a graduate in
mathematics. The last was considered the least competent.
—Hans Albert Rhee,
Offi ce Automation in a Social Perspective
, 1968
In Search of “Clever Fellows”
The “Talk of the Town” column in the
New Yorker
magazine is not
generally known for its coverage of science and technology. But in
January 1957, the highbrow gossip column provided for its readers an
unusual but remarkably prescient glimpse into the future of electronic
computing. Already there were more than fi fteen hundred of the elec-
tronic “giants” scattered around the United States, noted the column
editors, with many more expected to be installed in the near future. Each
of these computers required between thirty and fi fty programmers, the
“clever fellows” whose job it was to “fi gure out the proper form for
stating whatever problem a machine is expected to solve.” And as there
were currently only fi fteen thousand professional computer programmers
available worldwide, many more would have to be trained or recruited
immediately. After expressing “modest astonishment” over the size of
this strange new “profession we'd never heard of,” the “Talk of the
Town” went on, in its inimitable breezy style, to accurately describe a
problem that industry observers were only just beginning to recognize:
namely, that the looming shortage of computer programmers threatened
to strangle in its cradle the nascent commercial computer industry.
1
The impetus for the “Talk of the Town” vignette was a series of
advertisements that the IBM Corporation had recently placed in the
New York Times
. At fi rst glance the ads read as rather conventional
