This book analyzes the complex, rapidly evolving, and highly influential computer/IT services industry through a series of company case studies. The cases were selected to best understand key companies, as well as the origin and evolution of the half dozen segments of the IT services industry. Given the book’s heavy concentration on the strategies of and developments at computer services firms, it is a work squarely at the intersection of the history of technology and business history, and contributes to historiography in both of these fields. Drawing extensively on archival materials and sixteen carefully selected oral history interviews by the author, the book also speaks to issues in social and cultural history by exploring professionalization, gender, labor, and users. It is the first scholarly book on the history of the computer services trade—a remarkable industry that was and is critical to the use of computers by organizations and the shaping of information technology worldwide.
Most of the cases studies in this book were made possible by extensive analysis of archival materials. This includes the cases of Diebold and Associates/Diebold Group, Inc., International Business Machines (IBM), C-E-I-R, Inc., System Development Corporation, the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations (ADAPSO), Tymshare, Inc., the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses (NACCB), and Control Data Corporation. These and several of the other cases are enhanced by the oral histories I conducted that are now publicly available at the Charles Babbage Institute. Oral histories (at CBI and CHM) conducted by other historians and researchers also proved highly useful. Published primary sources, especially articles contemporaneous to developments in trade publications, company publications, and national newspapers also were quite useful—particularly Datamation, Computerworld, EDP Analyzer, Business Machines, IBM News, Think, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Likewise, company annual reports were a significant source of financial and other information.
Few scholars have studied the history of the computer services industry. Martin Campbell-Kelly’s excellent book, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (MIT Press, 2003), has chapters on “The Origins of the Software Contractor, the 1950s,” and “Programming Services, the 1960s.” In these two chapters, systems integration and programming services are more the focus than consulting, data processing/service bureaus, or facilities management. The book does not examine the services industry’s later evolution (1970s and beyond), and thus, the two chapters principally serve as a prehistory to the book’s main topic, the software products trade. Campbell-Kelly and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz’s From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry (Harvard University Press, 2015) is an insightful and concise book on all three of the major IT global industries—the computer, software products, and services trades—and is structured in a way that the relative attention to the three industries is in that order. These two scholars also published an important article (“Economic Perspectives on the History of the Computer Time-Sharing Industry, 1965–1985” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 1 [2008]: 16–36) on the economic history of time-sharing, indicating how the time-sharing industry persisted into the early personal computer era before its decline. On ADAPSO, Thomas Haigh wrote three “Biographies Department” contributions (cited in chapter 5) in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing that usefully explore the evolution of this significant trade association—especially enlightening is Haigh’s analysis of the trade group’s battle with the banking industry over what many ADAPSO members believed were anti-competitive practices by large banks.
The book takes a fundamentally different approach to examining IBM’s history than all of the many existing books and articles on the company. Prior historical scholarship on IBM has focused on IBM hardware, where the company recorded the vast share of its revenue through much of its more than hundred year history. The iconic mainframes—the IBM 701, IBM 650, IBM 1401, and IBM System/360—are center stage in this literature. My book reinterprets IBM as fundamentally involved in services—for punch card tabulation machines and then computers—from its origin in 1911 to the present. In substantial part, IBM has always been a services company. Prior to 1970 much of this services work (maintenance, programming, systems integration, and so on), which was performed by IBM customer engineers, systems engineers, and other technical staff, was not priced or charged, it was “bundled” to support the company’s hardware business. Between 1970 and 1988, in implementing “unbundling,” a meaningful portion of services was charged to customers. In 1989 IBM began to expand its data center operations and soon launched its Global Services Division—charging for all services. With this, services became IBM’s largest business and the company became the global leader in IT services in revenue—distinctions it holds to this day. Regardless of whether IBM charged for services, this work was always critical to IBM’s competitive advantage. IBM’s hardware, of course, was important and there has been some high quality scholarship on the company; most notably, Steve Usselman has published a number of outstanding articles and book chapters on IBM’s history. His scholarship on IBM has concentrated on the firm’s strategies and its position with respect to its global competitors, as well as on political economy. With regard to the latter, he provides compelling analysis of antitrust and IBM leaders’ long-term dialogue with the US Department of Justice (DOJ), including the firm’s defense against lawsuits brought by the DOJ. While Usselman’s focus has not been services, his important scholarship stands out in being very much informed by both software and services in IBM’s different eras. A very useful survey—which is focused primarily on IBM hardware—is Emerson Pugh’s Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology (MIT Press, 1995). Robert Sobel’s IBM: Colossus in Transition (Times Books, 1981) also concentrates heavily on hardware but is less comprehensive than Pugh’s study (and while it has a short bibliography, it does not have notes/citations).
Paul Ceruzzi published an engaging book on an IT region’s development over six decades, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (MIT Press, 2008). Not only is this Washington, DC, metro region a central point for routing Internet traffic, it also is an area peppered with major facilities of computer services firms focused on defense contracting, including Computer Sciences Corporation, Planning Research Corporation, and CACI. While Ceruzzi briefly discusses these companies, he offers minimal contextualization of their place in the broader IT services industry. Ceruzzi has a different goal, which he successfully accomplishes, characterizing technology and a changing regional landscape and culture. On India’s services industry two recent works make substantial contributions, Ross Bassett’s The Technological Indian (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Dinesh C. Sharma’s The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution (MIT Press, 2015). Bassett concentrates on analysis of the long-term influence of MIT and its Indian graduates on education, science and technology research, and industry in India. Sharma also examines the deep roots of India’s technology, showing how recent developments are the product of many decades of the nation’s embrace of technology and its development of underlying institutional infrastructure. On the history of gender and computing there are three standout works: Janet Abbate’s Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (MIT Press, 2012), Thomas J. Misa’s edited volume Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing (Wiley 2010), and Marie Hicks’ Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). All three provide useful discussion, analysis, and framings. Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technological Expertise (MIT Press, 2010), is the leading study of the history of programming and the programming profession. More broadly, there are many strong scholarly books and articles on computer history (with minimal or no direct content on IT services) that provide important context, as well as some works on other technologies or industries that connect thematically, hence the numerous citations to secondary works throughout the book.