By Nathan Ensmenger
The contentious heritage of the pc programmers who built the software program that made the pc revolution attainable.
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Additional info for The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (History of Computing)
Sample text
At the same time that the costs of software were visibly rising, a series of highly public software disasters—the software-related destruction of the Mariner I spacecraft, the IBM OS/360 debacle, and a devastating 24 Chapter 1 criticism of contemporary EDP practices published by McKinsey and Company—lent credence to the popular belief that an industry-wide software crisis was imminent. The industry literature from this period is rife with scandals, complaints, laments, and self-recriminations. This all suggests that by the mid-1960s, the rhetoric of crisis became firmly entrenched in the vernacular of commercial computing.
In many of these accounts, programming is represented as a subdiscipline of formal logic and mathematics, and its origins are 32 Chapter 2 identified in the writings of early computer theorists Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The development of the discipline is evaluated in terms of advances in programming languages, formal methods, and generally applicable theoretical research. This purely intellectual approach to the history of programming, however, conceals the essentially craftlike nature of early programming practice.
But as many FORTRAN and COBOL programmers would soon realize, the dull and mechanical aspects of software development did not disappear with the advent of compilers and automatic programming languages. Nor did the intellectual challenges associated with analysis and design. Mistakes were inevitable, even from the most proficient of programmers. In one widely recited and tragic (and possibly apocryphal) example, a minor transcription error in control software for the Mariner I probe to Venus caused the spacecraft to veer off-course four minutes after takeoff, forcing NASA to destroy it remotely.