“Content Is Meaningless, and Structure Is All-Important”: Defining the Nature of Computer Science in the Age of High Modernism, c. 1950–c. 1965

The purpose of this article is to historize the definition of computer science, particularly the characteristic ambiguity of the discipline toward the computer. This ambiguity is foundational to computer science and has its roots in the response of university computer centers to the commercialization of computing in the mid-1950s. University computing experts developed an understanding of the activity of computing disentangled from the computer itself, a conceptual shift that went together with a parallel process of dematerialization of the notion of computer. These transformations were facilitated by the ascendance of a high modernist agenda in the sciences in the United States. University computing experts embraced the high modernist agenda and developed analogies across programs, notations, and a notion of the computer now understood as a model of computation. This immaterial conflation of notations, programs, and representations of the machine, would become one of the core tenets of computer science.