According to the financial statement of the Association for Computing Machinery of 1957 income from sale of publications amounted to one dollar and fifty cents.
About that time the U.S. Civil Service was advertising for electronic engineers to work on computers at annual salaries ranging from $4000 to $11,000.
In 1958 the Science Education Newsletter declared: "Computers are here to stay."
"Even with careful checking, far more errors are made in the coding than in all the rest of the problem put together...one goes off the machine, finds and corrects a small error, and then waits hours, or sometimes days, before the machine is again available. Program testing is thus frequently a matter of weeks, and we know of cases where it has stretched over months." (T.P. Gorman, JACM 1, p.260, 1954)
[I was still programming like that in the late 70's. Programs were edited by instructions punched on cards. The first time I sat down to Apple Pascal on the Apple II+ (64K), with its nice P-system editor written by Ken Bowles, and almost instantaneous compilation, I thought I had gone to heaven.]
"The most important...assurance of efficient operation is to have
intelligent operators...
"The actual coding of a problem is very much an individual effort. A
good notation would be a real help here, but we have unfortunately
inherited...a set of machine orders which are probably as complex as
any in existence...we have minimized the disadvantages by providing
convenient cards with the order code and notation precisely
summarized...
"All is not as dismal as might seem from the long list of
difficulties." (C.C. Gotlieb, JACM 1 p.124, 1954)
"...any attempt at universality of problem-oriented languages will result either in inadequacy...or such extensiveness as to become useless." (Report of the Share Committee on Universal Languages, 1958)
"It is extremely desirable to have a language for stating problems. Existing programming languages are procedure-statement languages in which a problem to be solved cannot be stated---only the procedure for solving it can be stated...Could a usable language of this sort exist? We are not certain." (From a letter to the Editor, 1959)
[Algol, Fortran and Lisp all appeared around this time.]
And finally..
"The high speed could not be very effective, were it not supported by a large internal storage capacity. In the IBM 702 the main storage device is the electrostatic memory with a capacity equivalent to 125 punched-cards, and it can be supplemented by one or more magnetic drums each storing 750 cards worth." (JACM 1 p. 149, 1954)
[A capacity equivalent to 125 punched-cards. Imagine!]