Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry by Jeffrey R. Yost (review)

Jeffrey R. Yost, associate director of the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the history of information technology since the dawn of the electronic age. There is no shortage of studies of electronic computers and of the companies that manufactured and sold them. But once the equipment was installed at a customer’s site, the real work began: how to get the computers working well enough to justify the expense of purchasing and installing them. That was not just a matter of getting the hardware to run reliably, although that was an issue. Nor was it only a matter of training customers to use computer languages including FORTRAN and COBOL, although that, too, was important. Also critical was analyzing the customer’s specific needs and matching those needs with the capabilities of the electronic computer. The computer is, by its nature, a general-purpose machine. But every customer has a unique set of requirements, which the user can meet only with some effort. Yost’s book chronicles the rise of a variety of approaches to address that need.

In the book’s subtitle, Yost calls the industry “computer services.” In succeeding chapters, he elaborates on this term, describing firms that entangled themselves to varying degrees with the users. Initially the computer manufacturer “bundled” these services into the cost of the equipment. Large-scale Defense Department projects could not be handled that way due to their complexity and scale, leading to the creation of “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers” (FFRDCs), including MITRE and the System Development Corporation. At the other end of the spectrum, Automatic Data Processing (ADP) began processing payrolls well before the computer era, using at mechanical calculators and punched card machinery. Small- and medium-sized businesses were happy to let ADP handle this routine but critical task. Under the leadership of Frank Lautenberg, later a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, ADP flourished and grew. In between these extremes were firms that took over varying degrees of data processing and programming. The most well-known was Electronic Data Systems (EDS), founded by H. Ross Perot, whose company managed the complexities of handling Medicare payments, fees, and regulations after passage of Medicare legislation in 1965.

Yost makes heroic efforts to differentiate among these varying entities, and at times the reader has difficulty parsing the definitions. What they all have in common is their place in between the general-purpose computer and its high-level programming languages on one side, and the customer’s specific needs on the other.

With the invention of the microprocessor and personal computer, this world began to fall apart. As the PC acquired more processing power and large capacity disk storage, users found that they could do a lot of work using databases and spreadsheets without turning to outside consultants. That shock was later compounded by the advent of local area networking from Novell, followed by the incorporation of Ethernet into PCs. Then came the Internet and the World Wide Web. The latter sections of Yost’s book chronicle the struggle of established services firms to adapt. The author also describes several new entities that arose in the new environment of computing in the Internet age. Some of the new entrants provided opportunities for women entrepreneurs, as Yost describes. Currently the trend is to outsource one’s IT needs onto the “cloud,” with firms supplying “software as a service.” The evolution of IT work continues.

The title of the book, Making IT Work, is deliberately ambiguous. These firms were critical in fulfilling the promises of automation made by the early computer pioneers. But customers were unpleasantly surprised at how much the computer “made work” for an army of employees, who had to be brought into the customer’s offices, and who had to be paid. Ross Perot was not the only member of this group who amassed extraordinary wealth...