Computers lived in the so-called back office, tended by specialized information technology staff—Nelson’s “priesthood”—who typically had little direct contact with the front office marketing, sales, and management staff. Corporate computing followed a strictly hierarchical model, in which systems architects would carefully mediate the requirements of the front office into structured documents that formed the basis for rigid, deterministic programming regimens designed to maximize efficiency and minimize risk. Information flowed in tightly controlled channels. The age of the desktop PC was still over the horizon.The command-and-control model of enterprise computing fueled the industry’s growth in the postwar era, but during the late 1960s and 1970s an alternative vision of human-centered computers began to percolate. In Palo Alto, California, a group of former Engelbart disciples came together at the legendary Xerox PARC, a research and development facility that Xerox founded in 1970 with the express mission of creating “the architecture of information.”
