[SIGCIS-Members] petroleum and computers

[Bill Degnan]

Hello.
This is my first post. 

The archives at the Hagley Museum in Wilmington Delaware USA will have information on this subject, specific especially to DuPont and IBM but very possibly the entire petroleum industry of the era you're discussing.  DuPont, if you include them as part of the petroleum industry, was a significant consumer of computer resources during this time.

Best,

Bill Degnan
University of Delaware
Computer History

-------- Original Message --------
> From: "Scott Campbell" <sm2campb at uwaterloo.ca>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:12 AM
> To: "Deborah Douglas" <ddouglas at mit.edu>
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] petroleum and computers
> 
> For what it's worth with regards to the Canadian situation, although
> the petroleum industry (particularly Imperial Oil) showed very early
> interest in the 1950s in computing, it was never dominant consumer of
> computers/computing resources. I don't think the early work was even
> related to petroleum seeking, but an inventory control system. We
> certainly didn't have much of an aerospace industry in Canada. Here
> the power users throughout the 1960s with the big machines were
> finance (banking and insurance) and to a lesser degree, governments.
> 
> Scott
> 
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 18:47, Deborah Douglas <ddouglas at mit.edu> wrote:
> > Colleagues,
> >
> > Recently, I received a question about a claim that the petroleum-seeking
> > geophysics industry was once the greatest consumer of computers, only
> > surpassed at some later point by the federal government.  No citation was
> > given and there is quite a bit of skepticism but where would you advise us
> > to look to refute this claim (or perhaps my own aerospace bias is too strong
> > and the claim is true!).
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Debbie Douglas
> >
> >
> > Deborah G. Douglas, Ph.D.
> > Curator of Science and Technology
> > MIT Museum, N51-209
> > 265 Massachusetts Avenue
> > Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
> > ddouglas at mit.edu .  617-253-1766 phone  .  617-253-8994 fax
> > http://web.mit.edu/museum  .  http://webmuseum.mit.edu .
> > http://museum.mit.edu/150
> >
> >
> >
> >
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