Managing Editor, Brian Runciman MBCS, looks through the annals of BCS history and reflects on how even in computing, the more things change the more they stay the same.
By the time this column appears, BCS will have launched its latest documentary, in association with Content With Purpose: Digital Pioneers — Recoding our Future. That event prompted me to start a little project long held in mind — looking back into our history to see the crossovers, divergencies, consistencies and long-standing issues that I suspected have always been present in computing as it relates to society.
I wasn’t disappointed. Just looking at the inaugural year of 1957, where we have four issues of The Computer Bulletin (now ITNOW) to choose from, we see some interesting confluences. In the middle of that year, BCS was evolving from the London Computer Group, and complexity was already an issue:
‘We have to bear in mind the great diversity of interests in the field of computational machinery and the techniques allied thereto’, it noted, before going on to say that ‘this wide field falls naturally into three broad divisions, covering the engineering applications of automation techniques, the development and application of computers and the sociological and economic aspects of automation.’
Interesting that, from the off, societal issues are cited.
True to our objectives
By the second issue of this publication, in August 1957, the objects of the Society appeared on the front cover:
- To further the development and use of computational machinery and the techniques related thereto
- To facilitate the exchange of information and views, and to inform public opinion on the subject
- To hold conferences and meetings for the reading of papers and delivery of lectures
- To publish information for the benefit of members
The language is dated, as would be expected, but the goals largely hold up — they’re member-orientated, but also aim to inform the public.
Pitfalls and potentialities
Already by issue three, specific areas were explored in depth — in this case, accounting and a comparison of different machines that could be used for ‘clerical’ purposes. A course advertised in October 1957 had a far-sighted view: ‘The installation of a computer is likely to alter radically the way in which the firm conducts its affairs. The computer is not an accounting machine writ large, it is one of the major contributions of the 20th century to the industrial revolution and consequently is likely to have a profound effect on the manner in which business is organised and conducted.’ And in 2024 business transformation is still a key issue.
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By the time we get to December 1957, BCS displays prescience, and has already started looking at history for lessons.
Professor Hartree is quoted from the inaugural meeting of the British Computer Society in London on 21st October: ‘It is one of the tasks of the British Computer Society, by bringing together designer and user, expert and novice, to minimise the risk of future projects going astray. In the past computers have already suffered one setback through the failure of men to appreciate their special problems.’ The Post Office IT Horizon Inquiry looms large there.
But, even in 1957 there were also warnings made about previously missed, or misunderstood, opportunities:
‘If Charles Babbage had been able to plan his work more surely, or if the government of his day had been able to appreciate its potentialities as well as its difficulties, it is likely that large automatic computers (though not electronic ones) would have been working for many decades past. This in turn would have meant that many of our existing industries would have grown up in a world in which automatic computing was commonplace. Who can say what difference this would have made to our ideas of management?’
And now we are discussing similar principles as AI finally comes of age, and quantum moves into the public consciousness.
