Code Nation. Michael J. Halvorson
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circuit technology and also a maker of Timetime-sharing time-sharing systems. (They sold their successful operation to Xerox in 1969.) Accordingly, Mr. Smith also knew something about customers, and he quickly pointed out that most users were treated disdainfully by system designers, who seemingly devised software systems for themselves. Their overdesigned programs felt to him like “games”—i.e., eccentric, inward-facing diversions, representing the tricks of show-offs rather than any real attempt to satisfy the needs of users.
Our final comment comes from Professor Perlis, Alan Alan Perlis (1922–1990), who offered a new point—that software systems often contain too much functionality. This was another voice of concern about system complexity, which Perlis knew would translate into rising costs and overdesigned systems. Perlis would certainly have known. He was a savvy computer scientist and administrator who organized one of the first academic computer science programs in the U.S. He also believed that computer programming should be taught widely in schools, and we will see later what contributions he made to the learn-to-program movement. For starters, Perlis designed the Internal Translator (IT) Internal Translator (IT) programming language and co-designed Algorithmic Language (ALGOL) Algorithmic Language (ALGOL) with a committee of 13 computer scientists. He advocated for the rights of both programmers and users throughout his distinguished career.
Here is the point. By the late 1960s, computers and software systems had radically changed—and so had users and customers. During this era, software was becoming highly complex, and it was rapidly incorporating support for advanced features such as Multitasking multitasking and time-sharing. Software was also becoming “unbundled” from hardware sales, and as the process moved forward commercial programs took on the attributes of modern consumer products. These features included improved design concepts, compelling lists of features, market-based pricing, product reliability, and customer support from the software makers and third parties.
The decoupling of software services began in the mid-1960s and gained momentum when IBM announced in June 1969, that it would begin pricing software separately from hardware during the coming year.16 In less than a decade, software sales was re-organized into discrete channels, including lines for OEMs.Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), retail stores, mail order customers, foreign translation markets, custom licensing products, and more. By the 1980s, boxed and shrink-wrapped Computing mythologiessystems for customers Systemfor customers software packages with attractive designs became the norm for the emerging PC industry, and these goods were manufactured in facilities that were governed by the best practices of supply-chain management, warehousing, fulfillment services, and accounting. In short, PC software markets were built on the firm foundation of mainframe and minicomputer sales and support. Contrary to popular opinion, the corporate software products industry remained very strong in the U.S. for decades.17
The software crisis of the late 1960s created an important mythology about computing in Europe and the U.S., because it called into question the reliability of software systems and the development processes connected to them. Worries about complexity would remain in the software industry for decades, resurfacing again in the era of GUIs and Enterprise computing enterprise computing in the 1980s and 1990s. To address the issue, software managers introduced engineering principles and encouraged their employees to work in teams that were efficient, on time, and under budget—desirables that became an obsession for later programming contexts. In a subtler way, the software crisis also elevated a new group in the history of computing—users, who through market influence and creative action would change how software products were designed and used. Over time, these customers would help to make technology companies among the most valuable corporations on earth.
2.4Counterculture movementThe Counterculture Movement Computing mythologiescounterculture movement
In the 1950s and 1960s, the centers of mainframe computing research in the U.S. were to be found in the headquarters of IBM in upstate New York and in the academic labs of nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, a relatively compact region of California between San Jose and San Francisco became a crucible not only for political protests and a thriving counterculture but also a new set of computing paradigms that would deeply influence the technical Roszak, Theodore world.18Counterculture movement Computing mythologiescounterculture movement
A seminal text in the communication of counterculture values was Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), which criticized the dominant industrialized cultures of Europe and America and suggested new ideals for disaffected citizens, students, and intellectuals.19 Roszak rejected what he called Technocracy technocracy in modern societies, the oppressive regimes of corporate and technological expertise that seemingly dominated society and regimented social and intellectual life. His work echoed themes from other works of the period, including C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956), Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1964), and Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1967). Technology had its merits, these texts argued, but in the era of cold wars, nuclear weapons, and the expanding military-industrial complex, technology could also become a force of dehumanization. To reject this mindset required a transformation of consciousness, a mode of transcendence stimulated by new types of knowledge and collaborative styles of living.
If this social and political protest seems like a rejection of the mainframe computing culture that we have just surveyed, it was—at least in part. Countercultural intellectuals came to view most of the scientists who worked on government and military projects as Big Brother loving bureaucrats who were supporting the wrong team. The fact that many of the employees who worked on these projects also had concerns about the ethics of the military-industrial complex was beside the point, at least for a while.
In his description of the counterculture movement, Fred Turner has identified two groups that envisioned the transformation of consciousness as the essential task for healing American society in the 1960s. The first group withdrew from society and formed egalitarian communes in places like northern California, Colorado, and New Mexico. These communes could be in rural or urban areas, but they were unified in their rejection of middle-class, Cold War America and its presumed values. The second group focused on mind-expanding experiences including sexuality, psychedelic drugs, music, and alternative spiritualties. Counterculture movement Computing mythologiescounterculture movement These countercultural experimenters often remained in society but developed a similar utopian outlook to those who choose to live in the communes.20
Figure 2.4Spectators at the New Games in 1973 watch as Stewart Brand, a leader of the counterculture movement, lays out sticks for a group activity. Brand became fascinated with the collective use of small-scale tools.Brand, Stewart (Photo by ©Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Collectively, Turner labels the two groups New Communalists New Communalists, and he draws attention to their unique interests in small-scale tools and technologies. Unlike many in the New Left—the political activists who rejected computers along with bombs, weapons, and other symbols of the military-industrial complex—the New Communalists found a role for tools in their worldview, especially if the tools could be used to disentangle corporate America from the military and their perceived stranglehold on society.
Foremost among Bay Area New Communalists was Stewart Brand (1938– ), a charismatic writer and publisher who became an unofficial spokesman for the counterculture movement in the 1960s and 1970s. (See Figure 2.4.) Brand’s comprehensive publication, Whole Earth Catalog The Whole Earth Catalog, proposed to offer small-scale Counterculture movement Computing mythologiescounterculture movement tools to those who would transform consciousness and society, either through self-sustaining communes or individual expressions of love, learning, and harmony. The first Whole Earth Catalog Whole Earth Catalog, published in Menlo Park in 1968, outlined its mission through a short statement on the first page:
The