ABSTRACT
As the computer left the laboratory in the mid-1950s and entered both the defense industry and the business world as a tool for data processing, for real-time command and control systems, and for operations research, practitioners encountered new problems of non-numerical computation posed by the need to search and sort large bodies of data, to make efficient use of limited (and expensive) computing resources by distributing tasks over several processors, and to automate the work of programmers who, despite rapid growth in numbers, were falling behind the even more quickly growing demand for systems and application software. The emergence during the 1960s of time-sharing operating systems, of computer graphics, of communications between computers, and of artificial intelligence increasingly refocused attention from the physical machine to abstract models of computation as a dynamic process.
