Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957 (review)

Computers and Commerce recounts the history of two important players in American computing: the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and Engineering Research Associates. Arthur Norberg's book begins with the creation of the two firms and continues through their eventual consolidation at Remington Rand and later at the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand. Norberg's primary interest is the individual personalities and corporate cultures at both firms, and the ways in which their interactions were revealed in the machines they produced.

Engineering Research Associates, headquartered in Minneapolis, was created out of the Communications Division of the United States Navy. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, based in Philadelphia, was the brainchild of J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, formerly on the engineering faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. These two small companies, Norberg explains, took different approaches to similar problems. What they shared was an overarching creativity: "The computer designs of these firms constituted a revolutionary technology. They required a rethinking of how problems should be solved and a search for ways to improve business practice" (p. 11).

Norberg is most interesting in his discussion of the difficulties the firms faced in developing and marketing their products. Launching itself as a business for government clients was a particular challenge for newly established Engineering Research Associates, seeking to become a navy contractor in the 1940s. At that time, government policies restricted contracts to firms with a record of success, making it nearly impossible for new businesses to get off the ground. Engineering Research Associates found a creative solution by identifying a more established firm as its front and becoming its subcontractor.

The historical period in question was one of intense innovation in the fledgling computer industry, a decade that took computers out of their origins in military contexts and delivered them to a broad set of clients in government, academia, and business. Norberg provides a close reading of the histories of two important companies, and he details the creation and diffusion of many specific machines in an effort to bring smaller actors to the table in a period whose histories are dominated by accounts of IBM. He uses the histories of these companies as windows onto larger forces that defined this decade in computing history. First, strong networks connecting academia, government, and industry were vital to the development and diffusion of computing machines. Second, a shift from calculating machines and punch-card storage to automatic computing characterized much of the technological innovation of the period. Third, technical needs for speed, storage, and reliability were the chief problems that focused designers' attentions. Fourth, in an era before widespread development of general-purpose computers, firms first chose to develop separate lines of scientific and commercial hardware systems before recognizing that a single multipurpose platform, accompanied by specialized software, could fit their clients' needs.

Written by the founding director of the Charles Babbage Institute, this book's strength lies in its use of archival sources from Babbage Institute collections, and it is peppered with organizational charts and photographs of people and machines. Its engagement with secondary materials, particularly from the last decade, is less robust. Many of the ideas Norberg presents intersect with the ideas of other scholars about scientific and technological innovation both within the computer industry and in scientific and technological industries more broadly. Some reflection on the role of the military-industrial-academic complex—how it affected the computer industry in ways that reinforced or undermined other scholars' claims—would have been useful. Nonetheless, Norberg's meticulous account of the early genealogy of the American computer industry—spin-offs, buyouts, mergers, and the history of forgotten firms—will be of great interest to scholars seeking to expand the early history of the computing industry beyond the current paradigm in which IBM continues to dominate.