King of the Seven Dwarfs

1010 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE desired end. The computer, which relies on rigid rules and routines but ultimately can be used to solve an almost infinite array of prob­ lems, brings this fundamental feature of technology into sharp re­ lief. The tradeoffs between order and opportunity were all the more apparent before 1960, when the crude state of electronic compo­ nentry severely constricted the freedom of programmers and placed special premiums on logical design and wiring. Meanwhile the terri­ fying power of the atom bomb, together with the tensions of cold war politics, raised the problems these men confronted to a level of urgency few technicians have known. Was it really so wrongheaded or narrow-minded of them to embrace the cumbersome electronic behemoths and pursue the objective ofa fail-safe defense? Were they not exhibiting something of the very same desire for liberation that Edwards himself feels so strongly? Steven W. Usselman Dr. Usselman is associate professor and graduate coordinator in the School of History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Tech. His extended essay on “Com­ puter and Communications Technology” recently appeared in the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1996). King of the Seven Dwarfs: General Electric’s Ambiguous Challenge to the Computer Industry. By Homer R. Oldfield. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+252; notes. (Price not given). King of the Seven Dwarfs offers a history of General Electric’s role as a vendor of computer products over a fourteen-year period in the late 1950s and 1960s. GE, like many other companies in the 1950s with expertise in electronics or office machinery, entered the new computer market briefly but evacuated when it could not compete profitably. For a time it was, after IBM, the second largest supplier of computers in the United States. The “seven dwarfs” refers to the seven companies that competed against IBM (and each other) in the new computer market of the 1950s and 1960s (Burroughs, Hon­ eywell, Sperry Rand, et al.). GE entered the market with an extraor­ dinary product—ERMA—a check-handling system built to order for the Bank of America. It later developed and marketed interactive systems, such as the GE Datanet 30, as well as a series of generalpurpose computers. In 1970, GE got out of the computer business, selling its operations to Honeywell. The book provides a narrative account of how GE won the ERMA bid and then built and sold these systems. Homer Oldfield describes the engineering problems encountered and overcome, and he pro­ vides a detailed look at how GE management operated, including a fascinating look at the internal politics of the company. An early GE participant and executive in the computer business, Oldfield por­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1011 trays GE as a company reluctant to enter the computer business, deciding to do so only after a group of engineers won a $31 million contract from Bank ofAmerica to build ERMA. Senior management is shown resisting entry into this new business, torn by doubts about GE’s ability to compete against IBM, on the one hand, and con­ cerned, on the other, that it might offend its potential rival, which was one of GE’s largest customers for electrical components. Old­ field demonstrates that an insufficient commitment to the computer business, management instability, and excessive bureaucracy all con­ tributed to GE’s failure. This occurred despite important engi­ neering achievements, such as the construction of dozens of ERMA systems and high-performance general-purpose computers, and de­ spite GE’s significant contributions to online systems in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Oldfield based his study on a large body of interviews and on an exchange of letters in the 1990s with engineers in GE’s computer business. A unique and effective feature of this book is his extensive use of dialogue and quotes from the participants, giving the reader the feeling of witnessing the events as they unfolded, almost as with a novel. The effect is powerful: what otherwise might have been a dull book to read is hard to put down. King of the Seven Dwarfs makes an important

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