Early Interactions between the Life Insurance and Computer Industries

This paper is a study of how representatives of one commercial user industry, life insurance, interacted with some players in the newly forming computer industry in the years after World War II but before the slae of any computers for commercial purposes. In particular, this interaction shows how pioneers in life insurance, including the Prudential's early computer expert and proselytizer Edmund C. Berkeley and a broader industry effort by a special committee of the Society of Actuaries, viewed computer technology and their potential use of it, as well as the ways in which they influenced its development. Both sets of actors played important roles in educating their own firms and the life insurance industry as a whole about the potential uses of computers for insurance, as well as communicating that industry's needs, especially in the areas of rapid input/output and verification needed for routine transactions processing, to computer vendors. These interactions suggest that the theme of co-evolution of information technology and its use in life insurance, previously established in a study of the tabulator era, continues into the early computer era. Thsi paper reinforces the notion that users can and do shape information technology, just as information technology has a shaping influence on the way users do work.