Modern · 1950
The Computer Age Dawns
The computer age did not begin in a garage. It began in laboratories and military contracts. ENIAC, finished in 1945, filled a room and calculated artillery tables. UNIVAC I, delivered in 1951, was the first commercial computer sold in the United States. By the mid-1950s, IBM and its competitors were placing machines in insurance companies, government offices, and universities. The people who ran them were a new kind of staff, and the people whose arithmetic they replaced often did not see the machine at all.
1950 is the decade when calculation stopped being a clerical skill and started being an operation you scheduled, programmed, and fed.
The room and its crew
A 1950s computer installation was a department. Operators mounted tapes and punched cards, watched console lights, and restarted jobs that halted. Programmers wrote instructions in machine code or, later, in early languages such as Fortran, released in 1957. Keypunch operators, overwhelmingly women, translated forms into cards at high speed and were judged on strokes and error rates, a direct descendant of the typing pool. Engineers and customer engineers, the field staff who kept vacuum tubes and then transistors alive, were the aristocracy of the site.
The famous early programmers of ENIAC were women, hired as computers, the job title for a person who computed, and then assigned to configure the machine. As programming gained status and pay through the 1950s and 1960s, the occupation masculinized and the women who had defined it were written out of the public story. The museum should be plain about that. The first job was not born male. It was reclassified.
What the machine took
Insurance firms, railroads, and census offices had employed rooms of clerks to post ledgers, compute premiums, and tabulate by hand or with earlier punched-card equipment from Hollerith's company, which became IBM. Electronic computers did not empty those rooms overnight. They took the repetitive numerical core and left the exceptions, the customer contact, and the judgment. Clerks who only added columns were exposed. Clerks who knew the account survived longer.
The human computer, a person employed to calculate, is one of the cleanest extinctions in this museum. Observatories, engineering offices, and the wartime projects had hired them, often women with mathematics degrees, because the work was skilled and the pay was allowed to be modest. Once the machine was reliable, the job title survived only as a metaphor.
A priesthood, for a while
Access to the machine was rationed. You did not sit down and compute. You submitted a job, waited, and collected printout. That queue created operators who controlled the schedule and programmers who spoke a language their managers could not read. The mystique was useful for salaries and terrible for everyone who needed a number and had to beg a department for it.
The limitation is what the next chapters undo. A computer that lives in a locked room, tended by a crew, is still a factory. The personal computer takes it out of the room. Until then, 1950's legacy is a set of occupations, operator, programmer, keypunch, field engineer, that the nineteenth century would not have recognized, built on the quiet removal of the person who used to do the arithmetic.
Work that grew
- Programmer
- Computer operator
- Keypunch operator
- Field engineer
- Systems analyst
Work that lost its place
- Human computer
- Large ledger-posting rooms
- Hand tabulation of routine statistics
Companies of this chapter
Largest
- General Motors
The largest private employer in the world for long stretches of the postwar decades.
- AT&T
The Bell System, a regulated monopoly that employed operators, installers, and a famous research lab.
- Standard Oil of New Jersey
The largest piece of the old Standard Oil, later Exxon, and a global payroll.
New at the time
- IBM
Moving from punched cards to electronic computers, and about to become the industry.
- Remington Rand
Buyer of the Eckert-Mauchly company, and the firm that delivered UNIVAC I in 1951.
- Hewlett-Packard
An instruments company, founded in 1939, that became a path into commercial electronics and computing.