On the train back from Manchester yesterday (where I had the privilege of taking part in a workshop with Thomas Schelling as well as other top economists like Bob Hahn and Partha Dasgupta, at the University's Sustainable Consumption Institute), I started reading The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Progammers and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan Ensmenger. Although just two chapters in, I can tell it's going to be fascinating.

I've already learnt that the earliest computer programmers were all women because the chaps who designed the systems thought that implementing their plans in a way the machines could understand was a trivial matter. Something like knitting or operating a telephone switchboard. Low status work, and therefore ideal for women, the successors to the women clerks who had been the 'human computers' of the pre-war era. It soon became clear that the women who handled the machines all day every day – the ENIAC and EDSAC – were becoming much more adept with computers than the chaps, however. For example, six valves an hour blew, on average, and the women were so familiar with the machines that they could usually tell which one was going next. That would never do, and programming became higher status, better paid, and definitely for men.

The book is also right to say that: “It is the history of computer software and not of the computer itself that is at the heart of the larger story of the computer revolution of the mid- to late-20th century. What makes the modern electrical digital computer so unique in all the history of technology – so powerful, flexible, and capable of being applied to such an extraordinarily diverse range of purposes – is its ability to be reconfigured via software into a seemingly infinite number of devices.”

A full review will follow when I've finished.