ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Infrastructure to Abstraction: How Computer Science became a Science of Planning

• In Event: Computer Sciences

English Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners portrayed computer science as a theoretical discipline aligned with mathematics rather than engineering. Historians often read this as a quest for prestige or professional identity. This paper instead situates the “dematerialization” of computer science—its reconceptualization as an abstract science of planning—within the political economy of mid-century universities and the computer industry. Drawing on national conferences, ACM and NSF committees, and internal reports from institutions such as Michigan, Minnesota, and Stanford, I argue that abstraction emerged not simply as an intellectual preference but as a material and managerial solution to the high costs of computing hardware and the shifting structure of university labor. As firms—especially IBM—tightened their grip on hardware development and leasing, universities increasingly oriented their computing programs toward symbolic manipulation, modeling, and systems planning: forms of work that required less equipment and more credentialed intellectual labor. This reorientation linked computer science to management science and operations research, fields that framed computing as a general-purpose technology for reorganizing work. Computer science thus became a discipline that trained “mental engineers”—experts who converted administrative, scientific, and business problems into programmable procedures. By recovering this political-economic logic, the paper shows that the emergence of computer science as an abstract discipline is inseparable from broader transformations in American higher education: the rise of knowledge-economy rhetoric, the pressure to produce technical manpower, and the increasing use of computation to rationalize intellectual labor itself.

Author

• Sam H Franz, University of Pennsylvania