Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Introducing the Early Digital Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

9. Foregrounding the Background: Business, Economics, Labor, and Government Policy as Shaping Forces in Early Digital Computing History

Authors : William Aspray, Christopher Loughnane

Published in: Exploring the Early Digital

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

This paper places the early history of digital computing in the United States, during the period from 1945 to 1960, in the larger historical context of American business, labor, and policy. It considers issues concerning the business sectors that chose to enter into early digital computing, the robustness of the general economy and the importance of defense as an economic driver, the scientific race with the Russians, and gendered issues of technical labor – and how each of these helped to shape the emerging mainframe computer industry.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter The Media of Programming
next chapter “The Man with a Micro-calculator”: Digital Modernity and Late Soviet Computing Practices
Footnotes
1
Not very far into the writing of this paper, the authors discovered Thomas Haigh’s excellent but infrequently cited paper, “Computing the American Way” (2010). His paper has a purpose similar to this one, and we commend our readers to examine his paper carefully. We have intentionally refocused our paper to take a different tack from the one Haigh takes, but nevertheless there are a few places at which the two papers overlap.
 
2
Some examples of excellent contextualized computer histories include Campbell-Kelly (1990) on ICL and the British computer industry, Lecuyer (2005) on Silicon Valley, Bassett (2007) on semiconductor history, Edwards (1997) and Akera (2008) on Cold War computing, Heide (2009) on punched-card systems, Rubin and Huber (1986) on the knowledge industry in the United States, and Haigh and Paju (2016) on IBM in Europe. There are many more good examples of literature that could be pointed to here. However, the goal of this paper is to present a brief and readable account without trying to do justice to a full bibliographic analysis. This paper can thus be regarded as more of an essay than a traditional research literature review.
 
3
The focus of this paper is early computer history. Some audiences would be more interested in the history of information rather than the history of computing, and this topic is also shaped by similar exogenous forces. One approach to this broader topic in the United States is taken by Rubin and Huber (1986), who describe the knowledge industry as including education, research and development, the media of communication, information machines, and information services. A more recent approach to the history of information in the United States is given by Cortada (2016), which traces the use of information in government, business, education, and people’s everyday lives since 1870.
 
4
There are typically some aberrations in these composite profiles, and the prosopographer simply has to live with these aberrations. For example, NCR, which had built codebreaking equipment during the war, had already learned about electronics and computing when the mainframe computing industry was established. IBM handled its lack of electronics expertise in part by stepping out of its role as a business machine manufacturer after the war and also becoming a defense contractor, utilizing government defense contracts to build up its research labs, research personnel, and electronics expertise. So, in this one respect of familiarity with electronics, NCR and IBM were uncharacteristic of the typical business machines company, which generally had little such expertise. But in many other respects, both IBM and NCR were similar to the other business machine manufacturers.
 
5
There had been excess profit taxes imposed by the federal government during the war. These were revoked in 1945 but reimposed in 1950 because of the Korean War. For an analysis of corporate tax incentives in the 1950s in the United States, see Thorndike (2011). The authors have not been able to find specific cases in which companies entering the computer industry after the Second World War were given tax incentives, but they may exist. IBM, for example, capped its profits at 1.5% on government business during the war and had no postwar revenue slump for which it might have taken advantage of tax credits. In fact, the company grew rapidly in the postwar years. Clearly, defense contracts to certain of these companies were more important than tax incentives in the postwar era.
 
Literature
Abbate, Janet. 2012. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRef
Akera, Atsushi. 2008. Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Appel, Toby A. 2000. Shaping Biology: The National Science Foundation and American Biological Research, 1945-1975. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Aspray, William. 2016. Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing: A Historical and Social Study. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.CrossRef
Aspray, William and Williams, Bernard O. 1994. “Arming American Scientists: NSF and the Provision of Scientific Computing Facilities for Universities, 1950-1973,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 60–74.CrossRef
Aspray, William and Williams, Bernard O. 1993. “Computing in Science and Engineering Education: The Programs of the National Science Foundation,” Electro/93 International, vol. 2 (Communications Technology & General Interest), IEEE and ERA, Conference Record, Edison, NJ, April 27-29.
Aspray, William, Williams, Bernard O., and Goldstein, Andrew. 1996. “The Social and Intellectual Shaping of a New Mathematical Discipline: The Role of the National Science Foundation in the Rise of Theoretical Computer Science and Engineering.” In Ronald Calinger, ed. Vita Mathematica: Historical Research and Integration with Teaching. Mathematical Association of America Notes Series.
Barnard, John. 1982. “American Workers, the Labor Movement, and the Cold War, 1945-1960, pp. 115–145 in Bremner and Reichard, op.cit.
Bassett, Ross. 2007. To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bix, Amy Sue. 2013. Girls Coming to Tech: A History of American Engineering Education for Women. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Bremner, Robert H. and Reichard, Gary W. eds. 1982. Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1960. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982.Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 1990. ICL: A Business and Technical History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Cayton, Mary Kupiec et al., eds. 1993. “The Postwar Period Through the 1950s.” Encyclopedia of American Social History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Ceruzzi, Paul. 1989. Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.MATH
Ceruzzi, Paul. 2003a. A History of Modern Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clowse, B.B. 1981. Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Cortada, James W. 1993. The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930 to 1960. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Cortada, James W. 2003. The Digital Hand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cortada, James W. 2005. The Digital Hand: Volume II: How Computers Changes the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
Cortada, James W. 2007. The Digital Hand: Volume III: How Computers Changed the Work of American Public Sector Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
Cortada, James W. 2016. All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States Since 1870. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRef
Ceruzzi, Paul E. 2003b. A History of Modern Computing. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.
England, J. Merton. 1963. A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945-1957. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.
Edwards, Paul. 1997. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ensmenger, Nathan L. 2012. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fiske, Emmett. 1989. From Rolling Stones to Cornerstones: Anchoring Land-Grant Education in the Counties through the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, Rural Sociologist 9(4): 7–14.
Flamm, Kenneth. 1988. Creating the Computer: Government, Industry, and High Technology. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Galambos, Louis. 1970. “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” The Business History Review Vol. 44, No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 279–290.CrossRef
Greenberg, Daniel. 2001. Science, Money, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haigh, Thomas. 2010a. “Computing the American Way: Contextualizing the Early U.S. Computer Industry,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 8–20.MathSciNetCrossRef
Haigh, Thomas. 2010b. “Masculinity and the Machine Man: Gender in the History of Data Processing,” in Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing ed. Thomas J. Misa, IEEE Computer Society Press: 51–72.
Haigh, Thomas and Petri Paju. 2016. “IBM Rebuilds Europe: The Curious Case of the Transnational Typewriter,” Enterprise & Society 17:2 (June): pp. 265–300.
Haigh, Thomas, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope. 2016. ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRef
Hart, D.M. 2010. Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic policy in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Heide, Lars. 2009. Punched-card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hyman, Harold. 1986. American Singularity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Johnson, Arthur M. 1982. “American Business in the Postwar Era,” pp. 101–113 in Bremner and Reichard, op cit.
Jones, Kenneth M. 1986. “The Government-Science Complex,” pp. 315–348 In Bremner and Reichard, op.cit.
Keats-Rohan, K.S.B., ed. 2007. Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook. Oxford: University of Oxford Linacre College Unit for Prosopographical Research.
Kevles, Daniel. 1977. “The National Science Foundation and the Debate Over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-1945: A Political Interpretation of Science – The Endless Frontier,” Isis, vol. 68 (March 1977): pp. 5–26.
Kleinman, Dan. 1994. “Layers of Interest, Layers of Influence: Business and the Genesis of the National Science Foundation,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, vol. 19: pp. 259–282.
Kleinman, Dan. 1995. Politics of the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lecuyer, Christophe. 2005. Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRef
Lomask, Milton. 1976. A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Maddox, R.F. 1979. “The Politics of World War II Science: Senator Harley M. Kilgore and the Legislative Origins of the National Science Foundation,” West Virginia History, vol. 41 (1): pp. 20–39.
Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, Jeffrey Yost. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014.
Mazuzan, George. 1988. The National Science Foundation: A Brief History. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.
Misa, Thomas, ed. 2010. Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Misa, Thomas. Forthcoming. “Gender Bias in Computing,” in William Aspray, Historical Studies in Computing, Information, and Society: The Flatiron Lectures. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Mounier-Kuhn, Pierre. 1999. L’informatique en France de la Seconde Guerre mondiale au Plan Calcul. Science, Industrie, Politique Gouvernementale (Paris: CNAM).
Neal, Homer A., Tobin L. Smith, and Jennifer B. McCormick. 2008. Beyond Sputnik: U.S. science policy in the twenty-first century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRef
Norberg, Arthur L. 2005. Computers and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Paglin, M.D. 1989. A Legislative History of the Communications Act of 1934. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Puaca, Laura Michelatti. 2014. Searching for Scientific Womanpower. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRef
Pugh, Emerson W. 1995. Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and its Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reingold, Nathan. 1987. “Vannevar Bush’s New Deal for Research: Or the Triumph of the Old Order,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, vol. 17(2): pp. 299–344
Rose, Henry. 1962. A Critical Look at the Hatch Act, Harvard Law Review 75(3): 510–526CrossRef
Rossiter, Margaret. 1995. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
Rubin, Michael Rogers and Mary Taylor Huber, 1986. The Knowledge Industry in the United States, 1960-1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smulyan, Susan. 1996. Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting 1920-1934. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Stern, Nancy B. 1981. From ENIAC to UNIVAC. Bedford, Mass: Digital Press.
Usselman, Steve. 1993. “IBM and Its Imitators: Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the International Computer Industry” Business and Economic History Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall): 1–35.
Usselman, Steve. 1996. “Fostering a Capacity for Compromise: Business, Government, and the Stages of Innovation in American Computing,” Annals of the History of Computing Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 30–39.CrossRef
Wang, J. 1995. “Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar American Science: The National Science Foundation Debate Revisited,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, vol. 26: pp. 139–166.
Yates, JoAnne. 2008. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Metadata
Title
Foregrounding the Background: Business, Economics, Labor, and Government Policy as Shaping Forces in Early Digital Computing History
Authors
William Aspray
Christopher Loughnane
Copyright Year
2019
Book
Exploring the Early Digital

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02151-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-02152-8

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8_9

Premium Partner

    Image Credits