Computing in Construction

Abstract

The construction industry has been using computers since the arrival of the early valve driven machines in the 1950s. Most of the larger organisations had purchased their own mainframes by the end of the 1960s and many others were beginning to use remote terminals via GPO lines to timesharing bureaux. By the mid 1970s a considerable number of good, well tried and tested programs had been developed by a variety of different sources for a variety of different applications. The industry, however, is highly fragmented consisting of a number of different professional and other groups. Each distinct group comprises of firms varying in size from one employee (plus dog) to several thousand. This paper attempts to outline the progress that has been made by the construction industry in using computers to meet its own many and varied requirements.