communications of the acm

In this month’s Communications of the ACM, I have a short “historical reflection” on the recruitment and training of programmers in the 1950s. The essay is a short gloss of the material covered in chapter two of The Computer Boys Take Over, “Chess-players, Music-lovers, and Mathematicians.”

Among other things, it discusses the use of aptitude tests and personality profiles to identify programmer talent. Employers didn’t quite know what they were looking for, other than the “twinkle in the eye,” the “indefinable enthusiasm,” that marked those individuals possessed by “the programming bug that meant…we’re going to take a chance on him despite his background.”