Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share

In November 1956, Paul Armer went before an audience of data processing managers to expound upon the virtues of cooperation. Armer was one of the founders of Share, a computer user group made up of customers of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Share was indeed a cooperative organization, if a somewhat curious one. The idea to create the first nationwide computer user group originated with a group of computing center directors intent on improving the operations of their own facilities. They envisioned an organization that could set technical standards, and much more: among their concerns were a shortage of skilled programmers, high labor costs, and, most important, the inefficiency inherent in the fact that firms that had purchased an IBM mainframe still had to write their own programs to perform basic computing functions, a situation that resulted in a massive duplication of programming effort. 1