EARLY INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE LIFE-INSURANCE AND COMPUTER INDUSTRIES- THE PRUDENTIAL BERKELEY,EDMUND,C

This paper studies how a representative of one commercial user industr y, life insurance, interacted with key players in the newly forming co mputer industry after World War II but before any computers were sold for commercial purposes. In particular it shows how Prudential's early computer expert and proselytizer, Edmund Callis Berkeley, viewed comp uter technology and ifs potential uses in life insurance, as well as t he ways in which he influenced its development. Immediately after the war, Berkeley set out to educate his superiors at Prudential and the l ife insurance industry as a whole about the potential uses of computer s for insurance; at the same time, he communicated that industry's nee ds, especially in the areas of rapid input-output and verification, to potential computer vendors. His internal efforts culminated in the co ntract Prudential signed for a Univac computer. Although the contract was ultimately broken, Berkeley's efforts appear to have influenced J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John Mauchly in their development of the tec hnology. Berkeley's activities in the 1940s reveal that interaction be tween vendors and representatives of potential commercial users was ea rlier and more intense than historical accounts of computing generally recognize and that users may exert a powerful influence on the develo pment of technology.