The Origins of the Architectural Metaphor in Computing: Design and Technology at IBM, 1957–1964

The familiarity of the term computer architecture makes it easy to forget the fundamental strangeness of the comparison it implies. When we speak about a buildings architecture, we suggest that it has an aesthetic as well as a utilitarian function. An architect seeks not just to shelter the users of a building from the elements but also to give shape and meaning to the activities that take place within and around the building. Architects use a vocabulary of design elements grounded in a rich historical tradition to achieve this. The notion that a computer can have an architecture implies that a computer is in some sense like a building. But how? Can a computer be grounded in an historical tradition in the same way that a building can be? If not, why not? In this study, I argue that computer architecture represents more than a simple terminological transfer from one field of practice to another. When the architectural metaphor entered the computing domain, it changed in ways that are specific to computing machinery. Computing absorbed the architectural metaphor into its practice and made (a subset of) architectural concepts its own.