Category Archives: Extras

Are programmers paranoid?

The notion that computer programmer is not just an occupation but a personality type has a long history.  In 1968 the systems consultant Dick Brandon gave a talk at the ACM National Conference on the “Problem in Perspective” (the problem here being the problem of programming labor, one of the more significant “software crises” of the 1950s and 1960s) in which he described the “Programmer Pysche”:

Although computer programming has not been around long enough for biological inbreeding to be considered a problem, the personality traits of the average programmer almost universally reflect certain negative characteristics.
The average programmer is excessively independent — sometimes to the point of mild paranoia. He is often egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia. The incidence of beards, sandals, and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity are notably greater among this demographic group. Stories about programmers and their attitudes and peculiarities are legion, and do not bear repeating here.1  Dick Brandon, “The Problem in Perspective”, Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM National Conference (1968).

Although Brandon’s characterizations are at least somewhat tongue in cheek, they were close enough to the reality of common perception to prompt a follow-up study by Dr. Theodore Willoughby of Pennsylvania State University.   Willoughby concluded that programmers taken as a group were not, in fact, either paranoid, schizophrenic, or otherwise psychologically deviant.   Instead, he suggested that such characterizations were a reflection of the “generation gap” (or perhaps “professional identity gap”) between managers and programmers (or what I refer to in The Computer Boys as “organizational territory disputes”).  In any case, it is good to know that, statistically speaker, although your IT Guy might be odd, he is probably not paranoid…

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      Dick Brandon, “The Problem in Perspective”, Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM National Conference (1968).

RIP Daniel McCracken

The pioneering computer scientists Daniel McCracken passed away yesterday.  Among other things, McCracken wrote one of the first books on computer programming.  McCracken also wrote extensively on computer programming throughout the 1960s.  I know him best through his 1962 Datamation article on “The Software Turmoil,” which was one of the first articulations of the general sense of dissatisfaction with software development that would emerge in the late 1960s as the “Software Crisis.”1.

Throughout his career, McCracken argued that the solution to the burgeoning crisis on software development was in part the pursuit of professionalism within programming.   The following is from another 1961 essay on “The Human Side of Computing”:2.

 

The training of hordes of newcomers isn’t the whole story, of course.  There are problems in the professional development for those already in the field.  To take one instance, a lot of the present coders will have to become systems analysts in the next few years.  The problem is, how are they supposed to go about learning the new skills required?[p.9]

 

The difficulty seems to be that systems work is not so much a body of factual knowledge, as an approach to problem solving – and no one knows how to teach the problem solving approach.  All that we seem to be able to do it let the coder work with an experienced systems man, and hope that some of the skills get transferred by osmosis.[p.9-10]

 

This observer would like to suggest that the attainment of truly professional status for computer people as computer people is only partly a matter of demonstrating mastery of subject matter.  It is also a matter of demonstrating a sense of responsibility and thereby gaining a certain dignity and stature in the public eye.

 

The historian of computing Arthur Norberg interviewed McCracken for an oral history for the ACM History Committee.

  1.   Daniel McCracken, “The Software Turmoil: Nine Predictions for ’62”, Datamation 8:1 (1962)
  2.   Daniel McCracken, “The Human Side of Computing”, Datamation 7:1 (1961)

The Computer Girls?

In a recent talk that I gave at Stanford University, I discussed the changing role of women in the computing industry.   The focus of the talk was a 1967 article in Cosmopolitan Magazine called “The Computer Girls”.  An unusual source for a historian of computing, but one of my favorite and most useful.   My particular favorite: a quote from the celebrated computer pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper comparing computer programming to following a recipe: “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”

[Update: I published a chapter that discusses this material. See “Making Programming Masculine.”1Ensmenger, Nathan. 2010. “Making Programming Masculine.” In Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing. . Also, for a discussion of the ways in which my research on the Cosmo Girls has acquired a life of its own, see the post WHO STOLE THE COMPUTER GIRLS?

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    Ensmenger, Nathan. 2010. “Making Programming Masculine.” In Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing.

Help Wanted!

One of the most significant developments in the computer industry during the 1960s was the perceived shortage of skilled “computer people”:

In 1945 there were no computer programmers, professional or otherwise; by 1967 industry observers were warning that although there were at least a hundred thousand programmers working in the United States, there was an immediate need for at least fifty thousand more. “Competition for programmers,” declared a contemporary article in Fortune magazine, “has driven salaries up so fast that programming has become probably the country’s highest paid technological occupation . . . Even so, some companies can’t find experienced programmers at any price.”1Gene Bylinsky, “Help Wanted: 50,000 Programmers,” Fortune 75, no. 3 (1967): 445–556.

The image is from an article in Popular Science from two years earlier. The programmer personnel crisis is the first of the many “software crises” that were proclaimed over the next several decades. The first published use of the phrase “software crisis” appears in a 1966 Business Week article on the “shortage of programmers.”2“Software Gap: A Growing Crisis for Computers,” Business Week, November 5, 1966, 127.

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    Gene Bylinsky, “Help Wanted: 50,000 Programmers,” Fortune 75, no. 3 (1967): 445–556.
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    “Software Gap: A Growing Crisis for Computers,” Business Week, November 5, 1966, 127.

The Unknown Programmer

One of the big goals of The Computer Boys book was to help shift the focus of center of gravity of the history of computing from hardware to software, from machines to people — and not just the usual people, the “great man” inventors that dominate most popular histories of computing, but the thousands of largely anonymous men and women who worked to construct the computerized systems that form the basic infrastructure of our modern, information-centric society.

It has been a source of great embarrassment to me, therefore, to have people ask me about the man pictured on the cover of my book and not to have any real information about who he was or what he did. I did not even know exactly which computer he was standing in front of. [For those of you not familiar with the publishing business, my ignorance is somewhat excusable: in most cases, authors have no input into the book design process, and I never communicated directly with the graphic designers who did the (excellent) cover design.]

Thanks to Richard Gillespie, the head of the History & Technology department at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, I now know exactly who this person was. His name was Trevor Pearcey, and the machine he is standing in front of is the CSIR Mark 1, the fourth stored program computer ever constructed. Pearcey was trained as a physicist and mathematician who in 1945 left England for Australia to work at the Radiophysics Division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The CSIR Mark 1, which he helped design, ran its first program in 1949 and was operational by 1951. The Museum Victoria has an excellent exhibit on this early and important computer.

Trevor Pearcey went on to become one of the great figures in Australian computing. The Pearcey Foundation and the Pearcey National Award were established in honor of his accomplishments. He was born in 1919, and died in 1998.