Computer Sciences Corporation

» see csc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Roy Nutt was a programmer at United Aircraft and Fletcher Jones was a middle manager at North American Aviation. In April 1959 they set up a company in Los Angeles with three employees and a Honeywell contract to write a business-language compiler called FACT. FACT lost to COBOL, which barely mattered in the end: by 1963 Computer Sciences Corporation was the biggest American software company and the first of them a stock exchange would list, at a point when most people did not accept that software was a business you could list at all.

From 1961 it was writing systems for the American federal government, and federal work went on to define the rest of its life. Revenue was 411 million dollars in 1979 and 9.4 billion by 2000, when it had roughly 60,000 people working out of 600 locations. Headquarters stayed in El Segundo for four decades and then moved to Virginia in March 2008, which is the move a California software house makes once it has quietly become a defense contractor.

On 3 April 2017 it merged with the services arm of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was itself the former EDS, and the result was named DXC Technology. Mike Lawrie ran CSC at the end and ran DXC afterward. Typing csc.com today lands on dxc.com carrying a query string that still reads merger=true, a redirect that has been announcing the news for nine years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually sold ~

CSC sold institutions their own computing departments back to them. Visa applications from people trying to enter Britain, patient records for the NHS, a tax filing system for the IRS, contract work for the FBI and the CIA: the contracts were enormous and the brand was deliberately absent from the thing the user touched. A nurse in an English hospital in 2011 was working inside CSC software, and the name was nowhere on her screen.

That invisibility is why the name only ever surfaced in public when something broke. DynCorp came in 2003 and Covansys in 2007, with Xchanging following in 2015, and each purchase added another set of government relationships rather than another product.

~ the receipts ~

In June 2013 Margaret Hodge, chairing the Public Accounts Committee in the House of Commons, called CSC "a rotten company providing a hopeless system," referring to its multibillion-pound share of the National Programme for IT and the Lorenzo records contract for the NHS. The American job was worse in pure money. CSC was hired in 1998 to modernize tax filing and promised the IRS an automated refund fraud detection system by January 2006; it never arrived, and the estimated cost of its absence ran between 200 and 300 million dollars.

In February 2011 the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a fraud investigation into the company's accounting in Denmark and Australia. The chief financial officer at the time put the Australian figure at 19 million dollars of irregularities and errors combined. It ended with the regulator accusing former chief executive Mike Laphen of fraud and clawing back 4.35 million dollars of his pay.

~ the last ticker ~

Nothing much stopped on 3 April 2017. The contracts transferred and the staff kept their desks. What ended was a fifty-eight-year-old name that had been listed in New York since 1968.

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