[SIGCIS-Members] Importance of history to practitioners

[Murray Turoff]

click on the gmail added messages to get the last part of my prior message.

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 5:02 PM, Murray Turoff <murray.turoff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Liza I appreciate your comments but i would like to add what i think is an
> important observation.
>
> I got my PhD in physics in 1965 but i was fortunate in my last two years
> of my bachelors summer I spent
>
> in a naval lab that had a vacuum tube burrows computer that filled a gym
> and you could walk through the middle of it.
>
> I than got an IBM fellowship from my graduate physics department in mass
> where i was told to go to MIT and learn how
>
> to program on their "large" IBM machine so i could do any programming for
> any of the physics professors that needed it.
>
> One things that was definitely exciting about that was a lot of computer
> people came from many different fields and it was
>
> highly interdisciplinary around 1960 through about the early 1970's.  But
> it was the mathematicians and the management scientists
>
> that were taking over the field with some engineers.  there was very
> little social science presence and that is a long story.  The social
> scientists
>
> did not come back till Ben Schniderman's book (software psychology) in
> 1981 and after they also got into using personal computers.
>
> The big problem was the attitude of computer scientists was that they
> could replace people with programs and every problem had a logical
> solution.
>
> Experience did not count in making decisions and that upper management
> could run their company from their office.  This was the standard MIT
>
> evening program for managers in the late sixties.  While finishing my phd
> in the last three years I was a part time systems engineer in the Boston
> branch
>
> office of IBM advising.  This leads to many interesting stories in those
> early dates.  The IBMer was some sort of priest with a new truth or
> religion!!  I was almost fired by showing in one company that the problem
> was due to a lack of human communication between different units of the
> company instead of designing a massive linear program for them to
> implement. We are dealing with the history of computer science we should
> take up the many problems and mistakes that were also made in its history.
>  Abby Mowshowitz wrote some good stuff on what could go wrong or right in
> those early days.
>
>
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
> *please send messages to murray.turoff at gmail.com
> <murray.turoff at gmail.com>  do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu>
> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage:
> http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
>



-- 





*please send messages to murray.turoff at gmail.com <murray.turoff at gmail.com>
do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor
EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff
<http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
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