Desk Set (1957)

Of all the computer films that will feature evil machines, malevolent hackers, and corrupt corporations, none is as terrifying as “Desk Set.” The threat created by EMERAC (Electro-Magnetic Memory and Research Arithmetic Calculator), the “electronic brain,” was all too real and in the half century since the film’s release, that threat is still becoming clearer every day.

When Grace Hopper invented the first code compiler in 1952, she bridged reality and theory in computer languages. The door was now open for application software, complex operating systems and computer users who didn’t have to be the same people who built the machines. As dramatized in “Desk Set,” when a business bought a computer in those early days, technicians came to the work site and built the machine there. Software on disk was a long way down the road so computer analysts and programmers, the true “hackers,” came on site and wrote the program directly into the machine using ones and zeros. This is known as machine language and the compiler allowed for assembly computer languages. So-called higher languages followed and computer manufacturers realized that the computer was now ready to move from the deep recesses of government agencies, aircraft designers, and academic research centers into the carpeted and air-conditioned office buildings of the United States and the world.

What changed everything was Fortran, one of the most successful computer languages. Development began in 1954 and by 1957 it was ready to be sold commercially. One of the first higher languages, Fortran made working with a computer accessible to people who didn’t have a clue as to what RAM or ROM meant. All that was left for IBM was beating General Dynamics to the customers. (General Dynamics licked its wounds for thirteen years and then got to supply the computers for “Colossus: The Forbin Project.”)

The corresponding major hardware development was the use of transistors. Invented in 1948, transistors allowed for smaller, faster and cheaper computers. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints. By 1956, the second generation of computers – now tubeless and smaller – crawled up out of the digital-primordial sea and established itself on the beachhead of the future.

So if IBM is on the cusp of creating an electronic workforce that will displace incalculable numbers of workers, how does it sell the idea that these machines really aren’t anything to worry about?

How about a romantic farce with an aging Spencer Tracy and an utterly annoying Katharine Hepburn that features an electronic brain as a romantic competitor? As ridiculous as this may seem, IBM – for reasons of its own – became heavily involved in the production of “Desk Set.”

The film centers on a TV network’s research department that is staffed entirely by women. The Federal Broadcasting Company (a thinly disguised NBC) has hired Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) to install two “electronic brains.” One will run the accounting department and the other will be placed in Bunny Watson’s (Katharine Hepburn) research department.

The story runs as a typical Hollywood office comedy and in the end the real threat isn’t EMERAC making the researchers obsolete (which at this vantage point is inevitable) but that Sumner will love EMERAC more than he loves Bunny Watson. The flick ends with the usual warm glow of another moronic Hollywood love story and the threat of the computer – minimized by Sumner’s constant tinkering with it using one of Bunny’s hairpins – seems overblown and remote.

It is no coincidence that all of the researchers who feel their future threatened by a computer are women or that the operator of EMERAC is a woman. The year that “Desk Set” was released also saw the beginning of IBM’s “My Fair Ladies” program luring women to a career in technology. For a story about one of those Fair Ladies, go here.

EMERAC is presented accurately except for the keyboard interaction. At the time, computers – still without operating systems or application software – were fed punch cards and then printed out the results. “Desk Set” is also one of the few – and probably the only – office comedy filmed in Cinemascope, a process usually reserved for westerns and sand-and-sandals epics. Apparently IBM wanted EMERAC – which IBM built for the movie – to be shown in the most impressive way possible. This is an extreme example of product placement decades before it became so ubiquitous as to be unnoticeable.