Evolution of ICT at work

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This guest post is written by Jack Arrington, who contributed 50% of the genetic material required to produce TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Jack was around at the very beginning of what we today call the Information Technology business. In 1950 pure business necessity drove Bank of America, then the largest bank in the world, to look for ways to automate the labor intensive job of handling checks. From that necessity ERMA was born, one of the first large scale data processing machines for business. Jack joined Bank of America in 1963 as a Computer Operator Trainee. He retired in 2002 as Head of Data Processing Operations.

2009 is the half-century milestone in the use of information technology for business applications, and it’s an opportunity to look back and give a nod of appreciation to those early IT entrepreneurs.

In the mid-20th century, the majority of people did not have checking accounts and none of them had bank-issued credit cards. Those in the lower and middle economic classes mostly relied upon cash to buy goods and pay bills. If funds needed to be sent long distances, Western Union provided facilities for the purchase of money orders that were communicated via telegraph and could be retrieved by the payee in another town or country. But the process of consumer banking was tailored for the needs of people who lived most if not all of their lives in the same town. Banking activities were mostly limited to home and car loans and the average customer was well known by the banking staff.