Computers.

Finally. More or Less

The Digital Incunabula

Remember the problem of Ballistics?

John Mauchly & ENIAC

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator/Computer; more about ENIAC here

This demonstration ignored something quite crucial.

WHO did the programming?

HOW LONG did it take to set the program up?

Consider what the newspapers said at the time

Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics . . . Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering… You will find that the slogan here as elsewhere is ‘WOMEN WANTED!

  • Department of Labor's Women's Bureau

Harvard Observatory

Programming - Competences

Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage, Padua, 2015. link

Grace Hopper

The Eniac Six

The Secret History of the ENIAC Women | Kathy Kleiman | TEDxBeaconStreet

worth your time to watch

or checkout her book, 'Proving Ground'

We're now in the period of digital incunabula

The missing supervening social necessity?

Nuclear War

But first! A Detour!

Alan Turing

Alan Turing

'On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem'

The Turing Machine

A 'Turing machine' reads its current state and a symbol on a tape. It looks up instructions on what to do when it is in this state with that symbol. This might make it move the tape backwards or forwards, and write or delete a symbol.

ok, let's see if we can make sense of this (coloured circles are 'states', squares are spaces along the tape).

Turing isn't the only person thinking along these lines, right?

Speaking of metaphors... back to Babbage

Ok, back to the war: Turing is working at Bletchley Park & there's an ENIGMA to be solved

...see what I did there?

Bomba

designed by Marian Rejewski in 1938 to crack Enigma

"It was luck the security people didn't know [about Turing being gay] early on, because if they had known, he might not have obtained his clearance and we might have lost the war"

a member of Turing's team. Unironically.

Bombe to Colossus

Post War Developments Doldrums

Everybody is spent. But then that von Neumann paper starts to circulate...

Multiple teams are exploring these machines that sit on the calculator/computer barrier

last technical hurdle to solve is the problem of memory

From One Supervening Necessity to Another

Project Whirlwind

  • starts off as a kind of analogue computer meant to simulate flight on multiple kinds of airplanes being developed during the war
  • most expensive of the various computing projects; navy loses interest
  • airforce takes over: the only machine that could plot intercept courses for strategic long range bombers
  • solves the problem of magnetic memory

caption says 'Joe Thompson at Whirlwind console'. Who was Joe Thompson?

Meanwhile in Britain

Manchester Baby

built to test another solution to the problem of memory runs a stored program from memory in 1948 - another 'first computer!' moment

Allies no longer sharing information quite so much, at least not about computers

  • Act of congress in 1946 closes off data sharing with allies over nuclear work
  • Britain sets out to build its own expertise
  • Decides that all such experiments ought to be centralised at the National Physical Laboratory
  • The 'official' British Computer will be built at NPL, and they turn to Turing to make it, the 'Automatic Computing Engine'

suicide

The Death of Alan Turing

The Period of the Digital Incunabula is Over

In the UK, commerical versions of the Manchester 'Baby' are being sold by the Ferranti corporation as general purpose business computers by 1951

By 1952, IAS machine comes online

The Digital Age Begins

"There will never be enough problems, enough work for more than one or two of these computers... stop this foolishness with Eckert and Mauchly" - Howard Aitken

IBM finally gets in on the act

Incidentally, on some accounts, this is when the digital humanities are born - Fr. Roberto Busa

Programming still an issue

-every computer has its own wiring, circuits, designs, idiosyncracies

-people like Grace Hopper are building compilers and higher level languages to ease programming and provide some interoperability

-but male programmers liked the secrecy of the way things were

Which sets the stage...

-every machine is unique

-every machine is ever larger, more expensive

-living on the gov't dime: both the funder, and buyer for these devices, largely.

-Eventually, something's gotta give: is it an effective use of money to build machines like this that could often stand (comparatively) idle?