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

摘要

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 corpora-tions. 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 "infor-mation 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 ad-dresses 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.