What percentage of programmers were women?

February 28, 2023 nathanen Leave a comment

One question I get quite often about my work is “how many programmers were there in [year X]?” As I have written about briefly on this site, and more extensively in the book, this is actually a very complicated question. We had electronic digital computers years before we had a well-established vocabulary to describe them, and now commonplace words like “software” and “programmer” had to be invented. Even then, what exactly counted as “programming” and therefore who counts as a “programmer” were never well settled, and to this day continue to be disputed (see, for example, Miriam Posner’s Javascript is for Girls article). The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not start tracking computer work until 1972, and have adjusted their categories several times since then.

A version of this question that has been coming up more frequently is “how many programmers were women?” This is an even more complicated question, because as little as we have solid data on programmer labor as a whole, even less of this data is broken down by gender.

That being said, in The Computer Boys Take Over I do state the following:

Contemporary estimates suggest that throughout the 1960s at least thirty percent of working computer programmers were women. One study puts the figure closer to fifty percent.¹

A close reading of the sentence in question suggest that it is a highly qualified statement about contemporary perceptions, and not an absolute claim about percentages. But it since these percentages were so outside of the (at that time) contemporary wisdom about women in computing, it is worth breaking down the evidence I used to justify this sentence.

My immediate source in The Computer Boys for this claim was a 1974 report by the industry analyst Richard Canning. For more than a decade Canning published the influential EDP Analyzer newsletter, and often wrote about the growing labor market for computer programmers. In his 1974 discussion of “Issues in Programming Management,” Canning references Joel Aron, the General Manager of IBM Programming Systems Development, and says the following: “Aron says that about one-half of the programmers are women, and that the number of women managers is rising rapidly.”² Canning, one of the most informed industry observer of the era, repeats this claim without comment or skepticism.

Canning’s source for the Aron quote is actually another contemporary report from the industry journal Infotech. A year previously, Infotech had published a massive 526 page report on “Computing Manpower” that included presentations and invited papers from eighteen industry leaders. The 50% estimate actually appears in this volume three times. The first is in the report from Joel Aron quoted by Canning, of which the relevant sentences are:

Of the programmers, about half are female; and the number of female managers is rising rapidly. At one time, when I had a line management division in the organization, two of the five key managers were women and, under them, about a third of the managers were women. Our experience, which I imagine is fairly typical, is that there is absolutely no difference in the performance of men and women in similar jobs.³

While it is perhaps not necessary to defend the knowledge and experience of an IBM Vice President who had been with the company since 1954 and who was, in addition to having been the manager of several large software development groups at IBM, also the head of the IBM FSC Programming Laboratory and the editor-in-chief IBM sponsored Systems Programming Series (published by Addison-Wesley through at least the early 1980s), there is an earlier reference to the 50% figure. In a 1964 article in the NY Times entitled “Computers Are Getting Ideas From Women: I.B.M. the Leader in Employing Girls as Programers,” Vartanig Vartan suggests that 1200 out of IBM’s 2500 computer programmers were women. 1200/2500 is not quite 50%, but as Joel Aron might argue, close enough for Federal Systems work…

The second reference to a 50% figure in the Infotech report comes from a report by Suzette Harold on “The Role of Women in Computing.” The specific quote is from page 199 of the report, and reads:

Many installations now have more than 50% of women in their programming teams and indeed, commercial programming is in danger of becoming another “women’s job.” I say “in danger” because employers in the past have seen in women a source of cheap labor and once women are segregated into what thereafter becomes known as women’s jobs, equal pay and conditions are inhibited.⁴

Like Joel Aron, Suzette Harold was well-situated to comment on the role of women in computing. Harold served on the Council of Software Houses Association, a U.K.-based software industry organization. She had previously worked on software development at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, and the Atlas Computer Laboratory. She was on the scientific staff at the Science Research Council. Like Aron, she had broad experience in the industry.

At the time she presented her findings on women in computing in the 1973 Infotech report, Harold was an executive at F International, which was a software services consulting firm that eventually would become a multi-million dollar firm with hundreds of clients spanning both the U.K. and the European continent. F International employed almost exclusively female programmers.

F International was not the only early software development company to take advantage of the large number of women working in computing in this period. It was itself a subsidiary of Freelance Programmers, a company founded in 1962 by Stephanie “Steve” Shirley. Freelance Programmers was one of the first consulting software development firms, and one of the most successful. When by-then-Dame Stephanie Shirley sold the company in 2007, it was worth £400 million. In 1962, when Freelance Programmers was helping to establish the software industry, it employed only women programmers. It only hired its first male programmers in 1975 when, ironically, it was forced to by the passage of Sex Discrimination Act in the UK. At that point there were 300 women working as programmers at Freelance. So, in 1962 we have a company in which the actual, well-documented percentage of female programmers is 100%.⁵

The third reference to 50% figure in the Infotech report is by the editor of the report C.J. Bunyan, who in his lengthy (150 page) introduction/summary to the report highlights both Aron and Harold’s assessments. Bunyan, who edited and authored numerous industry reports from this period, seemingly found nothing to disagree with in these estimates.

Although I do not cite them in The Computer Boys, there are other references to the 50% figure outside of the Infotech report. A 1964 article in the Guardian by Maureen Eppstein argued that 50% of programmers in the UK were women.⁶ I first discovered this reference in Janet Abbate’s 2012 book Recoding Gender, which is based on both historical research and a series of fifty-two oral histories she conducted with women who had worked as programmers in both the US and UK in the early decades of computing.⁷ On the very first page of the first chapter of that book, Abbate quotes Paula Hawthorn, who worked as a programmer at Texaco in the mid-1906s. According to Hawthorn,

It never occurred to us that computer programming would eventually become something that was thought of as a men’s field. At that time … it was at least half women.⁸

Note here both the (again, contemporary to the late 1960s) claim that 50% of all programmers were women and Hawthorn’s expressed surprise at her realization that programming was anything other than women’s work.

I should note that Janet Abbate herself does not endorse Hawthorn’s claim as being a true reflection of the actual percentage of women in computing in this period. To the degree that she even attempts to provide numerical estimates, she follows the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from the early 1970s.

But Hawthorn is not the only woman cited by Abbate who clearly believed that the percentage of programmers in the 1950s who were women was significant. As Elsie Shutt, another pioneering innovator in the software development consulting industry expressed in her interview with Abbate,

It really amazed me that these men were programmers, because I though it was women’s work.”

In this quote Shutt appears to be talking about her time as a programmer at Raytheon in the early 1950s. By 1957, Shutt had been forced to leave the company because she had gotten pregnant, and had founded Computations, Inc., which like Freelance Programmers employed 100% women. Shutt ran her company successfully for more than four decades. As far as I know, none of the employment records that would definitely document this claim remain in existence, but this is typical of the corporate records of smaller companies, and see no reason to doubt Schutt’s assessment of the state of the programming industry in the era that she helped define it.

And so we see that there are multiple, plausible claims from the 1960s that the percentage of computer programmers who were women was as high as (or even more than) 50%. There are also lower estimates. In a 1966 study of programming proficiency, Raymond Berger and Robert Wilson of the Electronic Personnel Research Group at the University of Southern California identified 28% of the 366 government civil service programmers as being women.⁹ This is the source I relied on for my lower abound of roughly 30%. Of course, without knowing exactly how Berger and Wilson selected their sample, it is uncertain how well representative their data represents the industry as a whole, but that is the best data I had to go on at the time, and their report was published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCPR (Special Interest Group in Computer Personnel Research), the most relevant and prestigious professional publication in this area. When I was researching The Computer Boys, it was not as easy to access historical materials as it is today. And even if it had been, there are simply not many sources of reliable, quantified data from the 1950s and 1960s.

The first official government statistics on programmer employment comes from 1956 report by the US Labor Department on “Employment Opportunities for Women Mathematicians and Statisticians.” “It was a fact,” according to this report, “that many industrial laboratories employed only women in their computing groups; others employ a high percentage of women.” (from Abbate, 65, emphasis mine) The focus of this study on college-educated mathematicians and statisticians seems to suggest that it is talking about higher-level computing occupations such as programming and systems analysis, but it is also true that the term “computing group” potentially covers a variety of types of work, some of which were almost exclusively feminized (such as key-punch operator, or the now obsolete category of “computer operator”), and none of which we would today consider to be aspects of computer programming. That being said, the report also cites specifically one example of a laboratory in which “67% of the programming staff were women.”

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics did not begin tracking programmer labor until 1970, and their estimate of the percentage of women in computing was 23%. As I (and others) have argued elsewhere, there are numerous reasons to believe that their data under-represents the number of women working as programmers (and, for that matter, the number of men)¹⁰ Bruce Gilchrist, who wrote extensively about labor issues in the computer industry and who held executive positions both in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the International Federation of Information Processing Societies (IFIPS), reviewed the 1970 BLS report and noted that the BLS numbers were significantly lower than earlier industry estimates.¹¹ Even prior to its publication, he had criticized the BLS report as being “based on relatively little firm data” and noted particularly the “lack of widely accepted standard definitions for occupations such as programmer, systems analyst, computer operator, etc.”¹² These fundamental ambiguities, combined with a reliance on self-reporting and the tendency of some workers to inflate their job titles, meant that some forms of work systematically misrepresented. He notes particularly errors in the categorization of keypunch operators and computer operators, which were roles particularly associated with women.¹³

Over the course of the 1970s, Gilchrist and his co-author Richard Weber attempted to develop a better data set on programmer employment, consistently arguing that the BLS data was insufficient. But even as they developed alternative and more inclusive measures of programming labor, they acknowledged that their own data sources also under-represented the “significant and probably growing amount of programming” that we being performed by people and organizations who were not fully visible in the formal statistics.¹⁴ Often they relied on a different data set from the BLS Area Wage Studies which excluded, among other groups, employees of educational institutions, scientific programmers, agricultural employees, and the self-employed. As far as I am aware, Gilchrist and Weber make only one attempt to estimate the percentage of female programmers, and they highly qualify this in the same way that they do all of their estimates. In that study, their figure of 21% corresponds closely to the BLS statistic.¹⁵ But as they point out in their 1974 attempt at “Enumerating Full Time Programmers,” the lack of standard categories and structural biases in the data meant that, at best, they could “paint only a hazy and incomplete picture of the employment situation in computer related occupations.”¹⁶

The fact that even basic terms like “software” and “programming” were being actively defined and negotiated during the 1950s makes it difficult to rely on job titles or self-descriptions of work. Consider the female operators of the ENIAC, the so-called “ENIAC Girls” (the use of such gendered language, while unpalatable to modern sensibilities, is essential to understanding the gender dynamics of early computing): as both Janet Abbate and Thomas Haigh have correctly noted, both “coder” and “programmer” are anachronisms when applied to the work these women did. Such concepts and categories did exist at the time. And yet the work these women did undeniably helped shape the practices that would become programming, and many of them would go on to work in roles that would become labeled as “programmer.” And they most definitely saw themselves as pioneering programmers.¹⁷ Do we count them as programmers? I would, but I can also see the argument for not doing so. If we do consider them to be computer programmers, than for that brief moment in history, at that particular (but highly visible and influential) place, the percentage of programmers who were women was 100%. As we have seen, much depends on which moment and which organization one chooses as a representative snapshot.

All this being said, the “between 30-50%” figure so often cited from The Computer Boys was never meant to be a definitive estimate of the percentage of working programmers who were women. In my research I generally resist trying to precisely enumerate the number of computer programmers (male or female) working in the period covered by the book (which is roughly 1946-1968). In fact, a key argument of the book is that it would be almost entirely pointless to even attempt to do so, since this is the period during which the very categories of what constituted “computer work” were being actively negotiated. Who “counted” as a computer worker was a highly contested question. Much of the scientific and informational work that today we associate with computers did not originate with computing (data processing was a well-established industry long before the advent of electronic computing, and IBM was a globally dominant information technology company decades before it manufactured its first computer), and many of those who happened to use computers in their work still identified primarily as engineers, scientists, systems analysts, or professional managers. Not only were there no industry-standard job categories for computer work in this period, practitioners themselves used a variety of terms to describe what they did and who they were. Trying to be too precise about the total number of “computer workers” would be a pointless exercise, and in my written work I try to be careful to avoid doing so. In fact, I embrace this ambiguity, in large part because I believe is more authentic to the experience of my historical actors. But that computer programming was seen in the 1950s and 1960s as uniquely accessible to women — in stark contrast to later periods —is undeniable. (For more on my historical work on gender and computing, see the posts YOUR CAREER IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING and THE COMPUTER GIRLS? as well as my articles “‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions“¹⁸ and “Making Programming Masculine.”¹⁹). See also the work of Janet Abbate and Mar Hicks, among others.

1
Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (MIT Press, 2010), p. 237.
2
Canning, Richard. 1974. “Issues in Programming Management.” EDP Analyzer 12 (4): 1–14.
3
Aron, Joel. 1973. “Manpower Control in Large Computer Projects.” In Computing Manpower : International Computer State of the Art Report, edited by C. Bunyan, 327–47. Maidenhead: Infotech Information Ltd.
4
Harold, Suzette M. 1973. “The Role of Women in Computing.” In Computing Manpower : International Computer State of the Art Report, edited by C. Bunyan, 195–215. Maidenhead: Infotech Information Ltd.
5
Shirley, Stephanie, and Richard Askwith. 2013. Let It Go: The Story of the Entrepreneur Turned Ardent Philanthropist.
6
Eppstein, Maureen. 1964. “The Computer Women.” Guardian, January 31, 1964.
7
Abbate, Janet. 2012. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. History of Computing. London, England: MIT Press.
8
Abbate, p. 1
9
Berger, Raymond M., and Robert C. Wilson. 1966. “Correlates of Programmer Proficiency.” In Proceedings of the Fourth SIGCPR Conference on Computer Personnel Research – SIGCPR ’66. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
10
See Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over, as well as Loseke, Donileen R., and John A. Sonquist. 1979. “The Computer Worker in the Labor Force: New Occupations and Old Problems.” Sociology of Work and Occupations 6 (2): 156–83; Greenbaum, Joan. 1976. “Division of Labor in the Computer Field.” Monthly Review 28 (3): 40.Kraft, Philip, and Steven Dubnoff. 1986. “Job Control, Fragmentation, and Control in Computer Software Work.” Industrial Relations 2 (25).
11
Gilchrist, Bruce, and Richard E. Weber. 1974. “Enumerating Full-Time Programmers.” Communications of the ACM 17 (10): 592–93.
12
Gilchrist. 1969. “Manpower Statistics in the Information Processing Field.” Computers & Automation.
13
Weber, Richard E., and Bruce Gilchrist. 1975. “Discrimination in the Employment of Women in the Computer Industry.” Communications of the ACM 18 (7): 416–18.
14
Weber, and Gilchrist. 1972. “Employment of Trained Computer Personnel: A Quantitative Survey.” Communications of the ACM.
15
Weber, Richard E., and Bruce Gilchrist. 1975. “Discrimination in the Employment of Women in the Computer Industry.” Communications of the ACM 18 (7): 416–18.
16
Gilchrist, Bruce, and Richard E. Weber. 1974. “Enumerating Full-Time Programmers.” Communications of the ACM 17 (10): 592–93.
17
Bartik, Jean, Jon T. Rickman, and Kim D. Todd. 2013. Pioneer Programmer. Truman State University Press.
18
Ensmenger, Nathan. 2015. “‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions.” Osiris 30 (1): 38–65.
19
Ensmenger, Nathan. 2010. “Making Programming Masculine.” In Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing.

Extras

Black Programmers

February 23, 2022 nathanen Leave a comment

In celebration of Black History Month, I have been reflecting on what my scholarship might have to say about the history of African American computer programmers. I have posted previously about race, class, and gender in history of computing, but that was many years ago, and there have been some exciting developments in the literature in the past few years.

When I was writing The Computer Boys, there was almost no literature available on the intersection of race and computing. Nor was there much data to be found in the primary sources.

In their analysis of data the 1970 Census and the Department of Labor’s Area Wage Surveys, Bruce Gilchrist and Richard Weber suggested that out of a total of 161,337 working programmers in the United States, 5,837 (3.6%) were African American. Of male programmers (124,956 total), just 3.2% (4,008) were African American. Of female programmers (36,381 total), slightly more than 5% (1,829) were women.¹

The 1970 Census data also tracked programmer’s of “Spanish heritage”. There were 2,957 male programmers and 602 female programmers in this category.

I have already written about why I think the official numbers underestimate the total number of working programmers. Given the fluidity and limitations of racial categories in Census data in this period, I have similar concerns about this data.

In addition to purely quantitative data, there were indications in my historical sources of not only the contributions of African Americans, but to some interesting questions related to race and computing. For example, in the late 1960s, during a time a particularly visible and violent racial strife, there were several attempts to provide programmer training to black communities. But while some of these were legitimate (and a few were government-sponsored) there were also a number of exploitative vocational schools that preyed on Black communities. In Chapter 3 (“Chess Players, Music Lovers, and Mathematicians”) of the book I write about the larger phenomenon of these schools and their problematic reputation within the industry.

Update: the artist ann haeyoung is developing an oral history project on the IBM Black Workers Alliance that overlaps with the period I cover in book. This is a fascinating project! I had no idea this group existed.

Since The Computer Boys was published, there are a number of histories of Black programmers that have been written. The most prominent of these is Margot Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures (dramatized in the film, also from 2016), which tells the stories of some of the African American women who worked as “human computers” and programmers in the space program.² The film in particular focused on just three of these (Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson), but there were many others: Christine Darden, Annie Easley, Melba Roy Mouton, Jeanette A. Scissum, to name just a few.³

One of the earliest scholarly discussions of race and computing in the scholarly literature is Arvid Nelson’s “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine,” which was published in 2017 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.⁴ I was editor-in-chief of the Annals at that point, and so can say definitively that in the almost four decades that that journal served the journal of record for the history of computing community, that was the first article that explicitly addressed the historiography of race and computing.

More recently, there are a number of scholarly articles and books that deal with questions of race and computing. A few of these are historical, although most deal with more contemporary issues. Here are a few that focus specifically on the African American experience.

Eglash, Ron. 2002. “Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text 2 (20): 49–64.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

Shetterly, Margot Lee. 2016. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins

Williams, Jeannette, Yolande Dickerson, The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956. United States, National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and Center for Cryptologic History. 2001.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

Brock, André L. 2019. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.

McIlwain, Charlton D. 2020. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter.

Katz, Yarden. 2020. Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press.

Also, since African American inventiveness is not a recent phenomenon, here are a few classics from the history of technology

James, Portia P., and Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. 1990. The Real McCoy: African-American Invention and Innovation, 1619-1930. Washington, D.C.: Published for the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Fouché, Rayvon. 2005. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. JHU Press.

Sinclair, Bruce, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2004. Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Green, Venus. 2001. Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

1
Bruce Gilchrist and Richard Weber, “Enumerating Full-Time P Communications of the ACM 17, no. 10 (1974): 592–593.
2
Shetterly, Margot Lee. 2016. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins
3
See for example Jade Reyerson, “Places of Hidden Figures: Black Women Mathematicians in Aeronautics and the Space Race,” National Park Services. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm
4
Nelsen, R. Arvid. 2017. “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39 (1): 29–51.

Extras, Resources

Recent finds

October 19, 2017 nathanen 2 Comments

I have not been very diligent about keeping up with this blog lately. In part this is because my online activities have been focused on building up a bibliography of scholarship on the history of technology and gender. Although it is not confined to information technology specifically, it does thoroughly cover the available literature on gender and computing. You can find the printable PDF version here, but I am hosting the source material as a shared Github repository in the hopes that this will make the resource more useful to other scholars.

There are a few recent works in the history of computer programming that are worth highlighting, however.

The first is a new book by Gerard Alberts called Computerpioniers: het begin van het computertijdperk in Nederland (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017). As you might infer from the title, it is written in Dutch. The title roughly translates into English as Computer Pioneers: The beginning of the computer age in the Netherlands. I unfortunately do not read Dutch, but I know Gerard and his work and have talked about this history on many occasions. This is an important and original contribution to our field. Buy a copy if only as an encouragement to the publisher to issue a translation!

The second is a very recent article by Ksenia Tatarchenko entitled “The Computer Does Not Believe in Tears”: Soviet Programming, Professionalization, and the Gendering of Authority , which was published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Alas, for those of you who are not professional academics, this will likely be hidden behind a paywall. But pay attention to Tatarchenko and her work. Her work on the history of Soviet computing is just stellar, and part of an exciting reinvigoration of that field.

In fact, speaking of Soviet computing, Ben Peter’s 2016 book How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet was just awarded the 2017 Vucinich Book Prize for “the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences.” This is a well-deserved award for an excellent book, and it is particularly nice to see research in the history of computing getting recognized by the broader historical community!

Finally, Jeffrey Yost has published a book that is so fresh that my copy has not yet been delivered. It is called Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press, 2017). I am so excited about this book, which takes an even broader view of the history of computer work than The Computer Boys, and encompasses consulting services, data processing, programming, and systems integration, among other topics. My understanding is that it covers a longer time period as well, from the 1950s to the present.

Extras

Goodbye, Mr. Bond…

May 23, 2017 nathanen Leave a comment

When I teach the history of Silicon Valley, I open my lecture with a clip from the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die. My point it not to talk about Bond, but rather his wristwatch — a Pulsar LED, one of the first of our mobile digital devices. Understanding the unique moment in history when digital watches still seemed like a pretty neat idea is key to understanding the strange and powerful economics of the semiconductor industry.

In recognition of the passing today of Roger Moore, here is an excerpt from Computer: A History of the Information Machine that I wrote about the history of the digital watch:

In the 1973 film Live and Let Die, the stylish secret agent James Bond traded his signature wristwatch, a Rolex Submariner, for the latest in high-tech gadgetry, a Hamilton Pulsar digital watch. Unlike a traditional timepiece, the Pulsar did not represent time using the sweep of an hour-and-minute hand; instead, it displayed time digitally, using a recently developed innovation in microelectronics called the light-emitting diode, or LED. In the early 1970s, the glowing red lights of an LED display represented the cutting edge of integrated circuit technology, and digital watches were such a luxury item that, at $2100 for the 18-karat gold edition, they cost more even than an equivalent Rolex. The original Pulsar had actually been developed a few years early for the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, for a time, access to this technology was limited to the domain of science fiction and international espionage.

Within just a few years, however, the cost (and sex appeal) of a digital watch had diminished to almost nothing. By 1976 Texas Instruments was offering a digital watch for just $20 and, within a year, had reduced the price again by half. By 1979 Pulsar had lost $6 million dollars, had been sold twice, and had reverted back to producing more profitable analogue timepieces. By the end of the 1970s, the cost of the components required to construct a digital watch had fallen so low that it was almost impossible to sell the finished product for any significant profit. The formerly space-age technology had become a cheap commodity good—as well as something of a cliché.

The meteoric rise and fall of the digital watch illustrates a larger pattern in the unusual economics of microelectronics manufacturing. The so-called planar process for manufacturing integrated circuits, developed at Fairchild Semiconductor and perfected by companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), required a substantial initial investment in expertise and equipment, but after that the cost of production dropped rapidly. In short, the cost of building the very first of these new integrated circuit technologies was enormous, but every unit manufactured after that became increasingly inexpensive.

The massive economies of scale inherent in semiconductor manufacture—combined with rapid improvements in the complexity and capabilities of integrated circuits, intense competition within the industry, and the widespread availability of new forms of venture capital—created the conditions in which rapid technological innovation was not only possible but essential. In order to continue to profit from their investment in chip design and fabrication, semiconductor firms had to create new and ever-increasing demand for their products. The personal computer, video game console, digital camera, and cellphone are all direct products of the revolution in miniature that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But while this revolution in miniature would ultimately also revolutionize the computer industry, it is important to recognize that it did not begin with the computer industry. The two key developments in computing associated with this revolution—the minicomputer and the microprocessor—were parallel strands unconnected with the established centers of electronic digital computing.

Extras

Programmed Inequality

January 12, 2017 nathanen Leave a comment

Just a quick note about a notable new book: my friend and fellow historian of computing Marie Hicks has just published her study of computerization in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The book focuses on the British government’s systematic neglect of its largest technical workforce — namely women — and the negative consequences this had for not only the British computer industry but also the nation as a whole.

You can expect a more thorough review shortly. In the meantime, order the book!

Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise