#historic-developments #internet-infrastructure #computers #Women-employees #United-States #British-colonialism
Computational Incunabula: The British Experience
Colossus
- Developped during WWII
- Emerges from the Bombe
- Never fully declassified until well after war
- Supervenening necessity: German wolfpack
- Started encrypting clues into the TIMES crossword puzzle
- Reliance on ‘old boys’ network
Enigma
Privacy
- Provides sense of privacy for commercial messages
- Goes back to Arther Sherbius
- Substitution cypher
- If you can change wiring with each keystroke, you have polyalphabetic subsitution cypher
- Hard to break without help of a machine
- By the 30s, every military branch is using one of these machines
- Sharing knowledge with british and french
- Polish codebreakers bring a souped up calculator
Hut 8 & Bletchly Park
- British understood broad conceptual ideas
- Working on improved bombs
- No room for experimentation - had to break the code
- The Germans used plaintext words to signal starting and stopping
- Radio operators may screw up - forgetting to turn on a rotary
- Bombe churns through probabilities
- Sending coordinates and other messages to british ships
- Germans add another rotor onto encryption machine
- British don’t know for certain
- Full story is never known - still have classified info from this period
Bombe to Colossus
- Turing’s teacher, Max Newman, leads design of Colossus
- Could suggest best match for pattern within text
- Second colossus could figure out which pattern to try
- Integrating valves the key
- Neutralizing german encryption
Post War Developments: Doldruks
SupplyDemand
- Multiple teams exploring these machines that sit on calculator/computer barrier
- Urgency is gone; everyone losing steam in terms of compuing design
- Newman writes draft of report on EDVAC
From One Supervening Necessity To Another
- Project Whirlwind
- Analogue computer simulating flight on multiple kinds of airplanes being developed during 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 problem of magnetic memory
- COLD WAR starts (buh buh bahhhhhhh)
- Soviets detonate atomic bomb 1949
- Americans detonate H bomb
- Needed lots of computing
- All unique - needed to learn everything from scratch
- HiddenFigures
- Joe Thompson - first African American man to work on these machines; what was his story??
- NEVER accept photographs at face value
Meanwhile in Britain
- Manchester Baby
- Tiny computer
- Test computers
- Core of commercial computer
- Built to test another solution to the problem of memory
- Runs a stored program from memory in 1948 - another ‘first computer’ moment
- Could make claim that it is ‘the first real computer’
- 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 centralized at the National Physical Laboratory
- The ‘official’ British Computer built at NPL, and they turn to Turing to make it ‘Automatic Computing Engine’
- Turing can’t explain why computers matter due to Secrets Act
Death of Alan Turing
- Moves to Manchester 1948
- His house is burgled - he calls to police. In course of investigation, Turing is forced to admit he is homosexual. 1952
- He was found guilty of gross indecency; imprisonment or probation with chemical castration
- Loses security clearances. chooses castration (high dosages of estrogen)
- Commits suicide 1954
- Pardoned in 2012
- Man who saved Britain dehumanized, condemmed under Buggary Laws that are not appealed util 2003
- Gov. more concerned about indecency
- Idea of ‘the wrong people’, aka not cis white rich men evicerates computing industry
- Had the women train ‘the right kinds of men’ to take over their own jobs
- Potential future research - Alan Turing’s story
Period of Digital Incunabula is Over
- Commercial versions of ‘Manchester Baby’ being sold by Ferranti corporation
as general purpose business computers
- By 1952, IAS machine comes online
- 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” - Aitken, who probably ate his words later
- Canadian early computing?
- Woman formerly connected with Queens U went to U of T and set up computer science program
IBM Finally Gets On The Act
- Incidentally on some accounts, this is when the digital humanities are born
- When Rand starts selling UNIVAC computers, they start following Newman’s plan, releasing it as 701
- Idea of re using/upgrading existing calculators
Programming is 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 inoperability
- Mostly male programmers liked the secrecy of the way things were
- Helps them maintain their position of power
- High priesthood effect
- Not much security, relying on effect that computers are ‘too hard’
Is it time for the Internet yet?
- Existence of digital computers
- Existence of telecomm networks
- Info theory
- Ideas around flow control, logic, algorithms
- “System designed to prevent breakdown during Cold War”
- The truth is more nuanced