A brief excerpt from The Computer Boys Take Over has been published on Womens e-News.

A young scholar whose work I have been keeping an eye on for many years has just finished her dissertation on the history of programming.  The scholar in question is named  Joline Zepcevski, and the dissertation is entitled “Complexity & Verification: The History of Programming as Problem Solving.”  For those of you with access to the Proquest Dissertation database, do check it out. Joline did her PhD at the University of Minneapolis, and her advisor was the renowned historian of computing Arthur Norberg.

This clip of Grace Hopper’s 1986 appearance on the David Letterman show has been making the rounds of the Internet. She talks about working on the Harvard Mark I, and Letterman refers to her as the “Queen of Software.”   At this point, Hopper was 80 years old.  As always, a remarkable presence…

There are a number of decent documentaries on various aspects of the history of the computer, but not many on computer programmers.   Among other things, programming as an activity is difficult to represent in ways that are visually interesting.

Nevertheless, I came across a work in progress on the origins of APL that looks intriguing.  The producer/director Catherine Lathwell is the daughter of Richard Lathwell, one of the original APL developers.  There is also Top Secret Rosies, which I was involved with, as well as To Dream Tomorrow, an excellent film about Ada Lovelace.  There are also a host of related films that are not histories of programming per se, but which are nevertheless relevant.

The world still awaits its great film about the programmer heroes of the computer revolution, however!

In the recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum, Ada Brunstein has an interesting piece on the significance of job titles in which she uses Google Ngram Viewer to explore changing trends in the language used to describe computer programmers.   She references my research from The Computer Boys and talks about some of the now-forgotten alternatives that were proposed during the 1960s, which included “flow-charts‑man, comptologist, and even turingineer. More serious options included informatician or datolotist.”¹

My own particular favorite was “applied epistemologist.”

The Kindle Edition of The Computer Boys Take Over is now available from Amazon!

In preparing a recent talk, I came across this image from a 1962 article in Life Magazine on IBM. It captures nicely the stylish enthusiasm and modernist appeal of the computer professions that are too often lost in the focus on eccentric and scruffy hacker-types. Computing in the 1960s was the place to be.

Here is another of my favorites, this from 1961, featuring an computer room full of female computer operators:

The Life Magazine archive in Google images is an excellent source for images of computer people.

In The Mythical Man-Month, his classic post-mortem account of the software development fiasco that was the IBM System/360 operating system, Frederick Brooks lamented the lack of “conceptual unity” in most software architecture.  The very best software architecture, Brooks argued, was the work not of a team but an individual, the reflection of the vision of a single master designer .  Like the great medieval cathedral at Reims, software should designed for coherence, unity, and beauty. Like Steve Jobs would famously declare decades later, in computing as in all of life, Brooks believed that “Great designs come from great designers.”

At the core of The Mythical Man-Month was the idea of the “chief programming team,” in which a single master software architect would direct the work of a support staff of programmers, code librarians, and other technical staff.  Like a surgeon in an operating theater, the chief programmer was master of his domain, responsible for overseeing the entire process from start to finish.  Brooks used several names for the chief programmer: the one that was most often borrowed by actual software developers was “the super-programmer.”

In the above ad for National Computer Analysts, Inc., of Princeton, NJ, the idea of the super-programmer is taken much more literally.

“A book, then, or a computer, or a program comes into existence first as an ideal construct, built outside time and space, but complete in the mind of the author. It is realized in time and space, by pen, ink, and paper, or by wire, silicon, and ferrite. The creation is complete when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.”¹

A couple new reviews, including a few that are short but sweet:

In The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, Nathan Ensmenger offers an in-depth and well- researched analysis of the difficulties faced in the early decades of digital computer programming… The Computer Boys Take Over offers a detailed account of the rise of computer programming, the history of software, and how these histories have come to play such a central role in the so-called ‘‘ease’’ with which we compute today.

Contemporary Sociology

I highly recommend this book.

Technology & Culture

Overall, Ensmenger’s book is an eloquent and very interesting read. His methodic approach is convincing. Thanks to his broad sources and his entertaining style he often invites those who know the field to a humorous self- reflection. He consequently uses general language and aims at reaching out to readers from different fields. The book deserves such a broad reader audience.

The Information Society

Read The Computer Boys Take Over, by Nathan Ensmenger, a lively history of the computer scientists and software engineers who have changed our world.

Newsweek

The nerd news website ArsTechnica recently published an article by Mathew Lasar on the history of the UNIVAC I computer.  It’s a nice little piece that draws heavily on Kurt Beyer’s excellent recent biography of Grace Hopper and Paul Ceruzzi’s classic History of Modern Computing (one of the earliest of the books published as part of MIT Press’ History of Computing series, of which The Computer Boys Take Over is the latest entry).

Lasar highlights a issue relevant to the history of computer programming that I had previously not encountered (or at least noticed).  In discussing the female programmers that Grace Hopper had cultivated at the Eckert Mauchly Computer Company, he notes that after the sale of EMCC to Remington Rand, many of these women left to pursue other opportunities, largely because of the lack of respect they felt in their new big-corporation environment:

“On top of that, new management did not sympathize with EMCC’s female programmers, among them Grace Hopper, who by 1952 had written the UNIVAC’s first software compiler. ‘There were not the same opportunities for women in larger corporations like Remington Rand,’ she later reflected. ‘They were older companies, and the jobs had been stereotyped.’”

During the labor crisis in programming that emerged in the 1950s, these women had plenty of other opportunities, Lasar argues, and many departed for other, more enlightened employers.  Read the whole article.  A nice piece, and it is good to see this history get rediscovered for a contemporary audience (particularly in a venue as popular as ArsTechnica).