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• W4366809664 abstract "1012 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Dr. Cortada is an executive consultant with the IBM Consulting Group and the author of a dozen books on the history and management of computing. A Bibliographic Guide to the History ofComputerApplications, 1950-1990. By James W. Cortada. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+278; index. $85.00 (hardcover). James Cortada has been the most prolific ofwriters on the history of computing. His books have alternated between analytical works on some facet of the computer industry and bibliographic guides to the literature on computing. As befits one who has held a series of management and sales positions with IBM, he has emphasized the business applications of the computer and helped to steer the field away from purely internal studies of specific machines. Cortada’s latest book continues in that vein: it is a lightly anno­ tated bibliography of about sixteen hundred items, which looks solely at applications of computers to selected fields. In the preface he notes that “ [historians are now just beginning to study the his­ tory of applications as they wean themselves away from writing only histories of machines.” He is correct, although to be fair it should be noted that several good studies of applications, such as those by Dutch scholars Jan van den Ende and Dirk de Witt, have appeared recently. This bibliography is intended as a guide to those who would ad­ dress that deficiency. It is divided into two chronological sections, the first from 1950 to 1965, the second from 1966 to 1990. Within those are subdivisions into general subject areas—accounting, agri­ culture, banking, etc. Cortada’s rationale for the main division is that around 1965 computer usage (as well as the industry) was trans­ formed by large systems such as the IBM System/360. Not only did the number and scope of installations greatly increase, so too did applications. And, he stresses, “it was in this period that applications, while very expensive, began to pay for themselves” (p. xv). His argu­ ments for choosing 1965 are compelling and for the most part accu­ rate, but one could easily make a strong case for other years and other phenomena. An alternate year that springs to mind is 1981, the year the IBM Personal Computer was introduced. That would introduce an asymmetry into the bibliography, but was that year not also a watershed? It would have been better to make no such gross distinction at all. This issue is not trivial, for it brings the reader to the crux of the intellectual problem that Cortada faces. He has undertaken this work because he recognizes that the computer is an important facet of modern society because of the way it has been applied to assist with other tasks. The more successful it has been, the more it has transformed both itselfand the nature of the tasks it supports. Even­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1013 tually computing will disappear into the infrastructure of modern life, when every machine is “smart,” every human activity has been or is being computerized. Thus, as the entries progress in time, Cortada ’s subject divisions get muddy. For example, I found entries for my own area ofinterest, aerospace, under a variety ofsubjects: “mili­ tary,” “airline reservation systems,” “aerospace,” “aviation,” even “science” (e.g., an article on Russian computers in Aviation Week) and “engineering” (e.g., an entry on the use ofan analog computer to aid in the design ofan airplane). I cannot offer a better alternative except the obvious one: to make no subject or temporal divisions whatsoever, and order things either chronologically or alphabeti­ cally by author. One strength of the bibliography is that the author has searched through trade and popular literature often neglected or overlooked by the scholar. At the same time he seems overly to rely on a few periodicals that never purport to go into much depth, such as Science News Letter and Science Digest. To sum up, this work may have some value for those beginning a study on one or more computer applica­ tions, but one would quickly have to proceed beyond it to something more substantial. Paul Ceruzzi Dr. Ceruzzi is a curator at the..." @default.
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• W4366809664 date "1997-10-01" @default.
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• W4366809664 title "A Bibliographic Guide to the History of Computer Applications, 1950–1990 by James W. Cortada" @default.
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