The Use of Computers in Business Organizations
Withington
1966
I wonder how many people found this book helpful in recent years? (and no, I don’t mean historians, curators or archaeologists) This book makes my case for at least GLANCING at a shelf list once in awhile. Even lazy librarians can scan a shelf list for any date from the previous CENTURY when looking at computer titles! You don’t even have to get out of a chair! Okay, now I feel better…
9 responses so far ↓
Chuck // June 17, 2009 at 4:10 pm |
And Watson, the first CEO of IBM, thought that three or five computers would be all the the world would ever need!
Debi // June 17, 2009 at 4:16 pm |
I was hoping this title isn’t in our collection. It is. It will now be weeded. Sheesh.
Debi // June 17, 2009 at 4:23 pm |
Here are some other gems from that same area of the shelf:
Bright Future Careers with Computers (1969)
Computer Programming for Chemists (1965)
The Real Computer: its influences, uses, and effects (1969)
Time-sharing Computer Systems (1968)
Susie // June 17, 2009 at 7:59 pm |
What’s really scary is that Worldcat shows 333 libraries that have this title, and it is also in Google books
To Preserve and Protect « Collections 2.0 // June 19, 2009 at 1:55 pm |
[...] stuff needs to be in an academic library for historical purposes. But how many of these do we really need to save? Can we really know if there is any “just-in-case” need? [...]
Christian Berger // July 1, 2009 at 1:03 am |
I do not think this book is outdated. Many businesses could need computers. I mean look around you. Send a simple e-mail to a business theese days and it’ll still be processed by a human as they won’t use computers to do any work.
In most businesses computers are nothing more than typewriters and e-mail terminals.
Andy Lovas // July 14, 2009 at 12:50 am |
I was there. The people around me were the best and brightest available. None of us saw the potential, particularly of microprocessors, which then didn’t exist. The lesson, I believe, is not to limit anticipations of the future by simply extrapolating what exist at the time. If it is possible, then eventually it will become probable. Dare to think it and, if not you, someone will make it happen .
Nick Moffitt // July 14, 2009 at 4:02 am |
I do not think that the age of a book on computing necessarily indicates its obsolescence. I have quite a few genuine classics in my personal collection, and I do refer to them from time to time.
While it’s true that specific aspects of the technology have changed, the underlying science remains valid and interesting. The book you list here is likely not desired by the patrons of this library, but I would weep hot tears if anyone tried to pull classic LISP texts or historic operating systems volumes.
That said, Christian Berger, you should be aware that the type of computer described in the book listed above bear little resemblance to the models you are familiar with (at least from a general user’s perspective — the underlying mathematical principles of automatic computation still haven’t changed). In 1966 most computers lacked permanent disk drives, keeping all software in RAM and storing and loading data from tapes loaded manually by support staff at user request.
That was if you were lucky enough to be on one of the earliest timeshare systems! More likely, you used a card punch machine to generate a stack of cards containing batch job instructions and/or FORTRAN code. Then you put your stack into a mailbox, went to lunch, and hoped that the printout of your results would be in your mailbox by the time you were done. If you made a typo, that was another three hours’ work to correct and try again.
LG // August 6, 2009 at 9:14 pm |
And yet, I’m sure we have stuff like this, or worse, in my own library. Weeding is discouraged because we still have space on our shelves and if we started weeding they’d look empty. When I work on my database maintenance projects, I always wonder how much less I’d have to do if we could just weed the horribly out of date stuff and just GET RID of the records for those books.