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Digital, Electronic Computers: Competences & Social Necessities

Competences

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• If you can build a machine that thinks, it therefore must have a mind

• The idea that you can build a machine that changes what it does based on its own calculations is an idea not solved until 1936

• Alan Turing
  • New age of speedy publishing, development of ideas
  • Need to systematize what is going on
  • Idea that if we can put all this math into one system of things that can be proved, we will know everything
  • Comes up with thought experiment, Turing machine
    • Thinking of problem in series of steps, to see what can be done/if the problem can even be solved
    • Each observation that human computer makes changes a state of mind
    • Machine can read, write, scan, and remember series of binary
    • Enables him to identify such a problem
    • Machine can compute any computable problem, if he can express it properly
    • First to publish this idea, but there were many others working on the same ideas, publishing similar work within months of Turing, despite being isolated from the other
    • What are the things percolating in the ether?
    • The machine depends on Boolean algebra
• Shannon again & telephone relays/exchange
  • Focus on how accurately a message can be relayed
• When combining info theory with Turing’s universal computer, you have a way to simulate any work that can be done by a human computer

• ‘Electronic brains’ start hitting pop culture in 40s and 50s

• Back to Babbage
  • Turing drawing inspo from his work
  • Use of punch cards w instructions and data
  • Babbage used info from silk industry
  • Souped up calculators -> stage leading to digital computation despite dying out in WW2
  • No social necessity for Babbage’s machine

• Emergence of modern corporation post Civil War

• Tide Prediction Machine + Tabulators
  • Parallel kinds of ‘computing devices’
  • Kevin’s tide calculator for dif points around the world
  • Kevin proposes in 1876 a way of linking several similar devices together physically to simulate differential equations
  • the mechanisms to achieve this not developed until the 1920s… and Vannevar Bush
  • If people are numbers, they cease to be human…
  • We don’t need computers for business, nor science
  • Analog computers
  • ‘Programming’ these machines:
    • Literally bashing them into different shapes with hammers and wrenches
    • Useful for scientific analysis
• George Stibitz (Bell Labs) - 1937
  • Builds first complex calculator - Model 1
  • Does a demo in Dartmouth, model 1 is in NYC, runs demo via telephone
  • First time computing device is activated over telephone wire
  • builds 4 specialized calculators during the war, each one more sophisticated than the next
  • Rendered obselete in 1950s by pure electronic calculation
• Konrad Zuse -1936
  • Relieved of active duty, sent back to work with instructions to build calculator for missiles -> Z4
  • in ‘45’, Zuse flees with Z4, is captured
• Howard Aitken - same time as Zuse
  • Harvard. electronic calculator to help with thesis work, brings to military in 1937
  • Military says no, even though its own reviewing engineer wanted it, refers Aitken to IBM and Thomas Watson (president)
  • Watson agrees to fund Aitken
  • In 1939, Navy and IBM make him a naval commander and give green light to run machine
  • First machine, Mark 1
  • Similar to Z3 or Bell model 2

Existing ‘social necessity’ good enough for electrico-mechanical calculators

Ballistics

• Industrialization of War over 19th century - new guns
• Reverend Francis Brashforth produces first firing tables
• US military in aftermath of civil war establishes testing range to train ballistifc officers
• Tables calculated by typically women, by hand
• 15 tables produced per week, upwards of 40 needed

Mauchly & ENIAC

• HiddenFigures
• ShiftPerspectives
• @lightWhenComputersWere1999sourcenote
• Electrical number integrator and Calculator/Computer
• Frequent use of women for work
• Mauchly’s secretary recreates memo from notes, they take it to Oswald, who falls off his chair and says ‘give him the money!’
• Programming the machine the night before, studying the diagrams made by engineers, reverse-engineering the whole thing
• Machine runs answer
• the programmers are not invited
• The role of the women were (are) ignored

Grace Hopper

• Maths prof at Vasser
• During the war, she joins the Navy, they send her to Aitken, who gives her shit
• He gives her one week to get equations on the machine with no diagrams or extra info
• Grace Hopper worked with machines at the level of pulses of electricity
• Eventually brings together businesspeople, sits down, and designs language for them to use so their machines are inoperable (Coble)
• Studies wiring diagrams
• Interrogates engineers
• “Writes the freakin’ manual”
• DOESNT GET HER NAME ON IT??????
• She finds the first bug in the machine
• Fly broke everything up
• ‘The Eniac Six’
  • 6 female engineers
  • keeping track of diagrams manually
  • wrote first algorithms that could write other algorithms
  • All in positions of authority, no credit received
  • Company still cannot convince others to buy it
  • Rand corporation buy it in 1950, women must report to inexperienced male superiors
  • The 6 must do that job themselves
  • Projected 2 would sell in a year, the women sold 42 in 2 years
  • Managed tax payments, building, programming
  • The work that no one valued gets coded female early on
  • They end up training their male replacements once money is involved
  • They were even ignored in the anniversary of the ENIAC

We are now in period of digital incunabula

• Missing supervening social necessity? Nuclear War

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