I'm sorry, but the truth desperately matters in your account. Timelines are very important in understanding how knowledge flows from group to group and from generation to generation. In particular, these things need to be highlighted:
- Computers became commercialized around 1952-54. Immediately prior to that, physicists hired programmers for the clerk work of coding up their problems (interesting note: they usually were women. You can find the story online of the programmers who worked with von Neumann. It's very interesting).
- Business adoption was pretty good! In fact, by the late 60s, software was exhibiting its standard characteristics - buggy, late, expensive, hard to control. See the NATO conference on software engineering, 1968.
- In the early 60s, dynamic languages came about in the form of Lisp. This did not take off until, AFAIK, Perl started making headway in the 90s.
- Cobol, Fortran, and others that I don't remember were standard in the 50s & 60s. And everywhere. These preceded the foundation of computer science as an academic discipline, which became institutionalized in 1969, give or take.
- Where did these business developers come from? I don't have job ads, but in my readings from the journals of the times, academic work seems to have gone on fairly apart from the line of business development.
How do these differences change the crux? We are in the process of the industry splitting into technicians and developers and this is overall a good thing?
I think they are interesting details, for sure, but I don't see exactly why you think they're relevant on a first order approximation.
- Computers became commercialized around 1952-54. Immediately prior to that, physicists hired programmers for the clerk work of coding up their problems (interesting note: they usually were women. You can find the story online of the programmers who worked with von Neumann. It's very interesting).
- Business adoption was pretty good! In fact, by the late 60s, software was exhibiting its standard characteristics - buggy, late, expensive, hard to control. See the NATO conference on software engineering, 1968.
- In the early 60s, dynamic languages came about in the form of Lisp. This did not take off until, AFAIK, Perl started making headway in the 90s.
- Cobol, Fortran, and others that I don't remember were standard in the 50s & 60s. And everywhere. These preceded the foundation of computer science as an academic discipline, which became institutionalized in 1969, give or take.
- Where did these business developers come from? I don't have job ads, but in my readings from the journals of the times, academic work seems to have gone on fairly apart from the line of business development.