The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (review)

This book is a recent addition to the MIT Press series in the History of Computing, which, since its inauguration in the mid-1980s, now has nearly twenty-five titles. A glance at the titles of the earlier volumes reveals how far the history of computing has evolved in the past quarter-century. The early works dealt with the details of specific pieces of hardware, or were personal memoirs of computer pioneers, or straightforward histories of corporations. These books have been of great use to historians, and they have held up well. But they did not address key historical questions. Who were the consumers of this technology? How were existing patterns of social and economic life disrupted by the computer? Who else beside the computer engineers and the industry executives played a role in bringing the “information age” into existence? Above all, who were the people who wrote the programs—without which the computer was useless—once computers began being installed in large numbers? The Computer Boys Take Over addresses these questions, especially the latter, about those who developed computer software. It is a welcome addition to this series, and offers a glimpse into how the history of computing has matured and has begun to link computing with other larger themes of history.

“Computer boys” was the name given to the early programmers, analysts, and other software specialists by their contemporaries, “. . . in part a term of endearment, in part a disparagement . . .” (p. 12). By the mid-1950s most large and many smaller corporations in the United States felt compelled to acquire one or more of these machines, from vendors including IBM, Sperry-UNIVAC, Honeywell, and a few others. They found to their dismay that with the computer came a small army of specialists who alone had the technical expertise to get these expensive machines to produce something useful. That was the price to be paid to benefit from this new invention.

But even after staffing the data-processing center with “computer boys,” profits did not automatically follow. Perhaps the analysts did not accurately model the business processes they were to computerize, or perhaps the programmers underestimated the complexity of the programs they were to write. Or—and this appears again and again—perhaps the programmers were not very competent. Thus arose the myth that a single good programmer is more productive than a dozen or more average programmers. Nathan Ensmenger examines this perception in detail—a perception that persists today at Silicon Valley companies that pamper their superstar programmers with free juice bars, on-site child care, and yoga—noting that this “productivity paradox” was recognized early on, but still persisted, unsolved, up through the 1980s.

Beginning in the 1950s, the senior managers of companies found themselves dealing with a new class of highly paid employees who had little loyalty to the company’s products or mission. They were so much in demand that they could and often did quit in the middle of a project. The myth arose that they dressed unprofessionally and did not adhere to basic standards of personal hygiene. That image persists in the form of the “nerd” in popular culture. Related to that image is the issue of gender, which this book also examines in detail. Early in the computer age there were ample opportunities for women to enter this field, but those opportunities diminished as the field matured. The term “computer boys” is unfortunately as accurate today as it ever was, although there is no reason why women cannot be equals in the art of programming.

While that conflict between traditional managers and the new computer specialists played out, another conflict arose, and this is the second major theme of the book. That conflict was over the professionalization of programming itself. On one side were those who sought to place the newly named discipline of “computer science” on a foundation of mathematics and theoretical logic. They sought and...