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@uwaterloo.ca> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 11:12 AM To: "Deborah Douglas" <ddouglas@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@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@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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