Like many terms of art in electronic computing, the concept of the “operating system” represents an appropriation of earlier, pre-computer processes and procedures. Today, of course, we think of an operating system – such as Windows, Linux, or OS X – exclusively as a type of software (indeed, as the original, irreducible essence of software). And yet through much of early decades of electronic computing, the “operating system” was only part of a larger socio-technical system of operations involved in electronic computing.

In this paper presented at the recent Society for the History of Technology Conference, explores the complex system of operations that surrounded most corporate computing efforts in the first decades of electronic computing. Here are the slides.