The Computer Boys Take Over―Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise

This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and thepeople who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines,inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, it tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legionsof computer specialists--programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers--whotransformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of themodern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, thesespecialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact ofelectronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the "computer boys" weretaking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society ingeneral. In The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan Ensmenger traces the rise topower of the computer expert in modern American society. His rich and nuanced portrayal of the menand women (a surprising number of the "computer boys" were, in fact, female) who builttheir careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power,identity, and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerizedsociety.

In his recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyesof its principle revolutionaries, Ensmenger reminds us that the computerization of modern societywas not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but wasrather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.

Nathan Ensmenger is Assistant Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.