Capital as a matter of computation: industrial operations and computer science in the United States, 1947-1967

• In Event: Computers and Assetization: Organizational and Historical Approaches

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, manufacturing firms were responsible for the largest share of computer acquisitions and leases in the United States. More than simply sites of early adoption, however, factories and industrial operations became laboratories and model problems for the development of new ideas in computer science. This paper documents how mathematical challenges associated with managing fixed capital—including scheduling, inventory management, and planning industrial equipment—became central computational problems in the emerging fields of optimization research, database management, and computer simulation. Siting these intellectual developments within corporate efforts to deskill industrial labor and geographically reorganize factory production in an assault on postwar union power, this paper describes early and specific patterns of influence between capitalism and computational ideas in the Cold War. It concludes by describing three products of the fusion of capital and digital computing in this period: the development of national time-sharing infrastructure for large manufacturing firms, the assetization of computer time, and finally, new methods for optimizing financial risk through computer-based portfolio management techniques.

Author

• Devin Kennedy, University of Wisconsin-Madison