TITLE: How a government boondoggle paved the way for the expansion of computing
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 13, 2019 3:12 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In
an old interview at Alphachatterbox,
economist Brad DeLong adds another programming tale to the annals
of unintended consequences:
So the Sage Air Defense system, which never produced a single
usable line of software running on any piece of hardware -- we
spent more on the Sage Air Defense System than we did on the
entire Manhattan Project. And it was in one sense the ultimate
government Defense Department boondoggle. But on the other hand
it trained a whole generation of computer programmers at a time
when very little else was useful that computer programmers could
exercise their skills on.
And by the time the 1960s rolled around we not only ... the fact
that Sage had almost worked provided say American Airlines with
the idea that maybe they should do a computer-driven reservations
system for their air travel, which I think was the next big
Manhattan Project-scale computer programming project.
And as that moved on the computer programmers began finding more
and more things to do, especially after IBM developed its System
360.
And we were off and running.
As DeLong says earlier in the conversation, this development
upended IBM president Thomas Watson's alleged claim that there
was "a use for maybe five computers in the world". This famous
quote is almost certainly
an urban legend,
but Watson would not have been as off-base as people claim even
if he had said it. In the 1950s, there was not yet a widespread
need for what computers did, precisely because most people did
not yet understand how computing could change the landscape of
every activity. Training a slew of programmers for a project
that ultimately failed had the unexpected consequence of
creating the intellectual and creative capital necessary to
begin exploring the ubiquitous applications of computing. Money
unexpectedly well spent.
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