IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 12

DAVID HEMMENDINGER

The Computer Boys Take Over
Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
By Nathan L. Ensmenger. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2010, 336 pages.

igital computers seem to improve constantly, and their programs are impressive,
even if not flawless. From within the software industry, however, the view is of a
series of crises - crises in the availability of programmers, in their education, in their management, and in
the very software engineering enterprise in which they
engage. Yet the history of software and of its producers has received far less attention than the history of
computer hardware. The attention that it has received
has often been akin to the "great machines" and "great
men" focuses of some other computer history; one book
on programming languages even refers to the "hero
languages."Historians of computing such as Martin
Campbell-Kelly, Atsushi Akera, and Tom Haigh have
recently been addressing that imbalance - the last two,
like Ensmenger, studied in the History and Sociology of
Science Department at the University of pennsylvania.
The book under review is a welcome addition.
Ensmenger describes the origins of computer programming and the competing interests that shaped
its practice. It is about the growth of a practice -
of programming or of software engineering - and
about differing views of it as a craft, a profession, or a
technology, and about the periodic crises that seemed
to characterize the activity and its products. It is also
about the masculinization of an activity in which
women initially had a large role.
Computer programming as a job began with the
ENIAC at the end of World War II. The ENIAC was
not initially a stored-program computer, and so the
task of translating a plan of computation into machine
terms was carried out by wiring the components
instead of writing machine code. At first it appeared
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2247728
Date of publication: 14 March 2013

that this task would be routine once the plan was
worked out, and would be done by the women who
had previously computed gunnery tables by following
simple plans of calculation. What had seemed to be
a job of routine coding, however, rapidly turned out
to be a more difficult one that required understanding how the computer worked, how it might fail, and
how to get the most out of its very limited capabilities.
rather than simple coding, programming became a
black art at which certain people were highly skilled.
programmers, it seemed, were born, not made.
As the computer industry grew during the 1950s and
1960s, industry publications warned of a shortage of
programmers. Ensmenger describes recruiting attempts
such as IBM ads in the New York Times and other publications in 1956 that sought people with an interest in
music, chess, or simply with "a lively imagination."The
first ads elicited only two applicants new to programming, and only one of those worked out. A 1968 effort
included testing Sing-Sing prison inmates, with job
offers to good candidates upon release.
In the 1960s, manufacturers such as the System Development Corporation (SDC) and IBM used
aptitude tests and psychological profiles to identify
programmers. The tests frequently emphasized mathematical skills, though there was little evidence that
those skills were important in much data processing.
psychological traits of good programmers, such as creativity and emotional stability were also hard to identify
in tests or profiling. One set of studies found that disinterest in people characterized programmers, both male
and female, reinforcing the lore of the geeky hacker.
The notion of programming ability as innate,
even if hard to characterize, should make the field
as accessible to women as to men. It didn't turn out
that way. Tests that focused on mathematical skills
selected against women, who often had not studied

David Hemmendinger is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308;
email:hemmendd@union.edu.
12

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2013

email:hemmendd@union.edu

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013