IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1058-6180/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE 1 In one inquiry it was found that a successful team of computer specialists included an ex- farmer, a former tabulating machine operator, an ex-key punch operator, a girl who had done sec- retarial work, a musician and a graduate in math- ematics. The last was considered the least competent. 1 H.A. Rhee, Office Automation in Social Perspective (1968) The first computer programmers came from a variety of occupational and educational back- grounds. Some were former clerical workers or tabulating machine operators. Others were recruited from the ranks of the female “human computers” who had participated in wartime manual computation projects. Most, however, were erstwhile engineers and scientists recruited from military and scientific hardware develop- ment projects. For these well-educated computer “converts,” it was not always clear where com- puter programming stood in relation to more tra- ditional disciplines. In the early 1950s, the disciplines that we know today as computer sci- ence and software engineering existed only as a loose association of institutions, individuals, and techniques. Although computers were increas- ingly used in this period as instruments of scien- tific production, their status as legitimate objects of scientific and professional scrutiny had not yet been established. Those scientists who left “respectable” disciplines for the uncharted waters of computing faced self-doubt, profes- sional uncertainty, and even ridicule. The physi- cist-turned-computer-scientist Edsgar Dijkstra recalled this difficult process of self-transforma- tion in his 1972 Turing Award Lecture (reveal- ingly titled “The Humble Programmer”): I had to make up my mind, either to stop pro- gramming and become a real, respectable theo- retical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become … what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? After all what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware col- leagues, who, when asked about their profession- al competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. 2 Dijkstra was by no means alone in his assess- ment of the ambiguous professional status of computing personnel. Over the previous decade, computing had managed to acquire many trappings of a profession: research labo- ratories and institutes, professional confer- ences, professional societies, and technical journals. Indeed, as William Aspray has sug- gested, many of the structural elements of a computing profession were in place by the end of the 1950s. 3 But the existence of professional institutions did not necessarily translate readi- ly into widely recognized professional status. Throughout the 1960s, computer specialists continued to wonder at the “almost universal contempt” (or at least “cautious bewilderment and misinterpretation”) with which program- mers were regarded by the general public. 4 In 1967, the US Civil Service Commission declared data-processing personnel to be nonexempt employees, officially categorizing programmers and other computer specialists as The ‘Question of Professionalism’ in the Computer Fields Nathan L. Ensmenger University of Pennsylvania In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the “question of professionalism” became a pressing issue for the emerging commercial computer industry. Just who was qualified to be a programmer? Competing visions as to the answers to these questions contributed to an ongoing debate that caused turf wars, labor shortages, and varied approaches to professional development. The author explores the many diverse attitudes and opinions on what professionalism meant in the 1950s and 1960s.