The reform of administrative computer technology under the French government's Plan Calcul (1966-1975) was not based on a univocal intention or a specific representation of its future effects.
Computer technology was not the vector of a single, coherent and stabilized modernization effort. On the contrary, it was introduced as a function of conflicting imperatives. The resources available to the agents of that reform enabled them to assert divergent representations of the tool they were championing. While computer technology altered the connections between them, the impossibility of imposing irreversible decisions bred protracted uncertainty about its real modernizing potentialities and favoured the buildup of incompatible conceptions, which in turn contributed to its spread during that period.