Abstractification – A New Approach to the Evaluation of the History of Operations Research in the USA, Western Europe and Germany Queuing in front of a toll bridge in Chicago 2008 – a research domain of Operations Research. Foto by Warren Black, 2008, at Flickr.com. Licence according Creative Commmons. Working Paper on the History of Computing No. 6/2019 Richard Vahrenkamp Logistik Consulting Berlin Email:
[email protected] Web: www.vahrenkamp.org Section 10 was published in Richard Vahrenkamp, Nominal Science without Data: The Cold War Content of Game Theory and Operations Research, in: Real World Economics Review, vol. 88, 2019, pp. 19–50. Section 11 was published in Richard Vahrenkamp, Mathematik trifft auf Machtkalkül. Kybernetik und Operationsforschung in der Reformära der DDR 1962–1970, in: Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED–Staat, Heft 44/2019, pp. 152–167. A short version of this paper will be published in the journal Management Revue under the title “Mathematical Management” end of 2021 Translated from German by the AI software DeepL Status: 24 June 2021 1 Content 1 Introductory remarks ..................................................................................................... 3 2 The Origin of Operations Research in the Cold War Context ................................................. 6 3 The transmission of the linear programming to other mathematization approaches .......... 10 4 The successful institutionalization of Operations Research 1950 - 1980 in the USA, Europe and West Germany ................................................................................................................. 11 5 The reluctant application of Operations Research in industry .......................................... 29 6 The rise of business informatics as a barrier to operations research ................................... 33 7 The initially problematic use of the large computer in mass data processing ...................... 35 8 Management Science and Operations Research ................................................................