The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the by Nathan Ensmenger

By Nathan Ensmenger

The contentious heritage of the pc programmers who constructed the software program that made the pc revolution attainable.

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Additional info for The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (History of Computing)

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44 In fact, this focus on theory served computer science well as a disciplinary strategy in the modern research university; if it did not satisfactorily meet the needs of industry, then so be it. ”46 The competing pressures to regulate the industry while at the same providing enough programmers to meet constantly growing demand proved difficult to balance. Perhaps the most important reason why the “personnel problem” dominated the industry literature during the late 1950s and early 1960s has to do with a fundamental structural change in the nature of software development.

As was mentioned earlier, programming was frequently seen as a black art whose success or failure was dependent on the idiosyncratic abilities of individual programmers. This notion was reinforced by a series of aptitude tests and personality profiles that suggested that computer programmers, like chess masters or virtuoso musicians, were endowed with a uniquely creative ability. Great disparities were discovered between the productivity of individual programmers. “When a programmer is good, he is very, very good.

61 By defining the software crisis in terms of the discipline of software engineering, the NATO conference set an agenda that influenced many of the technological, managerial, and professional developments in commercial computing for the next several decades. In the interest of efficient software manufacturing, the black art of programming had to make way for the science of software engineering. The NATO conference has achieved almost mythical status in the literature on software development. Not only did it deeply imprint the discourse of software crisis on the consciousness of both the computer industry and the broader public; it also introduced a compelling solution.

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