The Code of Banking: Software as the Digitalization of German Savings Banks Martin Schmitt To cite this version: Martin Schmitt. The Code of Banking: Software as the Digitalization of German Savings Banks. IFIP International Conference on the History of Computing (HC), May 2016, Brooklyn, NY, United States. pp.141-164, 10.1007/978-3-319-49463-0_10. hal-01620141 HAL Id: hal-01620141 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01620141 Submitted on 20 Oct 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License The Code of Banking: Software as the Digitalization of German Savings Banks Martin Schmitt Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, Germany
[email protected] Abstract. To the present day the history of banking software is nearly untold. While there is already some literature on the use of computers in the banking industry, most of it focuses only on the hardware and its restrictions (cf. Cortada 2006). The logic behind these machines remains untold. With the advent of the computer as a universal machine since the 1950s, business processes have been written into code, not hard wired into the machine.