Debbie, The oil industry has been instrumental in advancing 4-d imaging which is real heavy data crunching. I can't give you specifics, but I would not be surprised that it was the largest user in the pre-Google era. I know (and can give a secondary cite) that in the 1970s the oil industry used encryption to fax logging data from ships and rigs to research labs and their computers. Jonathan ----- Original Message ----- From: Deborah Douglas <ddouglas@MIT.EDU> To: members@sigcis.org Sent: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:47:25 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] petroleum and computers 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@mit.edu • 617-253-1766 phone • 617-253-8994 fax http://web.mit.edu/museum • http://webmuseum.mit.edu • http://museum.mit.edu/150 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members -- Jonathan CoopersmithAssociate Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4326 979.845.8584 979.862.4314 fax http://aggiegaijin.blogspot.com/ ; Secretary Section L, History & Philosophy of ScienceAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)www.aaas.org