Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
programming in the 1950s—particularly in the early 1950s—was an
inchoate discipline, a jumble of skills and techniques drawn from electri-
cal engineering, mathematics, and symbolic logic. It was also intrinsically
local and idiosyncratic: each individual computer installation had its own
unique software, practices, tools, and standards. There were no program-
ming languages, no operating systems, no best-practice guidelines, and
no textbooks. The problem with the so-called electronic brains, as
Truman Hunter of IBM noted, is that they were anything but: computers
might be powerful tools, yet they were “completely dependent slaves”
to the human mind. The development of these machines was resulting
in “even greater recognition of, and paying a greater premium for,” the
skilled programmers who transformed their latent potential into real-
world applications.
20
It was one thing to identify, as Truman Hunter did, the increasing
need for “men [programmers] . . . who were above average in training
and ability” to accomplish this transformation, but what kind of train-
ing, and what kind of abilities?
21
Although government laboratories and
engineering fi rms remained the primary consumers of computer technol-
ogy through the early 1950s, a growing number were being sold to
insurance companies, accounting fi rms, and other, even less technically
oriented customers. Not only were these users less technically profi cient
and less likely to have their own in-house technical specialists but they
also used their computers for different and in many ways more compli-
cated types of applications. The Burroughs study, for example, suggested
an interesting shift in the way in which computers were being used in
this period, and by whom. While the majority of computers (95 percent)
currently in service were being used for engineering or scientifi c purposes,
the data on anticipated future purchases indicated a shift toward business
applications.
22
The next generation of computers, the survey suggested,
would be used increasingly (16 percent) for business data processing
rather than scientifi c computation.
23
These new business users saw the electronic computer as more than
mere number crunchers; they saw them as payroll processing devices,
data processing machines, and management information systems. This
broader vision of an integrated “information machine” demanded of the
computer new features and capabilities, many of them software rather
than hardware oriented.
24
As the computer became more of a tool for business than a scientifi c
instrument, the nature of its use—and its primary user, the computer
programmer—changed dramatically. The projects that these business
