Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Importance of history to practitioners
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@gmail.com <murray.turoff@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>*
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@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@gmail.com <murray.turoff@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@gmail.com <murray.turoff@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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Murray Turoff