The 480

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The 480 is a didactic future history novel of social commentary by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick (1965).

It created a well-crafted futures studies political campaign scenario that forecasts both our computer insecurity and meta-ethics challenges for social network analysis applications during the 21st century.

The novel criticizes the socio-political effects on society at large from the use of computers by large corporations. The 480 in the title is meant to echo IBM's very successful System/360 series of mainframe computers. Another interpretation of the 480 in the title is that this was the number of socio-economic classes that define the American electorate.

Lederer and Burdick collaborated on several other didactic novels, the most famous being The Ugly American (1958).