40 years ago today: Computer Weekly January 24 1974

Almost 30 years before Nicholas Carr famously wrote "IT doesn’t matter", in the Harvard Business Review, a bloke called Ivan Catt, was earning a reputation as a disbeliever. In a book published in January 1974, Catt wrote: "I look in the computer industry I find decadence, financial disaster and confusion." In the book he claims that at least 50% of companies are unhappy with their computer installations, and 20% of such installations are disasters, sometimes bankrupting the companies which bought them.

The next page, has an article on Sun Alliance replacing tape-based records system with disc taken from page 3 of the January 24 1974 edition of Computer Weekly.

The National Museum of Computing has a full copy of every print edition of Computer Weekly since our first in September 1966, and is now digitising the archive.

More articles from the Computer Weekly archive

• What was happening in the IT world in July 1969 when Apollo 11 achieved its goal of putting a man on the moon?
• The first edition of Computer Weekly: September 22 1966