40 years ago today: Computer Weekly January 24 1974

2/10

IT didn't matter 40 years ago

Almost 30 years before Nicholas Carr famously wrote "IT doesn’t matter", in the Harvard Business Review, a bloke called Ivan Catt, was earning a reputation as a disbeliever. In a book published in January 1974, Catt wrote: "I look in the computer industry I find decadence, financial disaster and confusion." In the book he claims that at least 50% of companies are unhappy with their computer installations, and 20% of such installations are disasters, sometimes bankrupting the companies which bought them.

The next page, has an article on Sun Alliance replacing tape-based records system with disc taken from page 3 of the January 24 1974 edition of Computer Weekly.

The National Museum of Computing has a full copy of every print edition of Computer Weekly since our first in September 1966, and is now digitising the archive.

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