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2019 | Buch

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Exploring the Early Digital

herausgegeben von: Dr. Thomas Haigh

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : History of Computing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

Changes in the present challenge us to reinterpret the past, but historians have not yet come to grips with the convergence of computing, media, and communications technology. Today these things are inextricably intertwined, in technologies such as the smartphone and internet, in convergent industries, and in social practices. Yet they remain three distinct historical subfields, tilled by different groups of scholars using different tools. We often call this conglomeration “the digital,” recognizing its deep connection to the technology of digital computing. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary studies of digital practices, digital methods, or digital humanities have rarely been informed by deep engagement with the history of computing.Contributors to this volume have come together to reexamine an apparently familiar era in the history of computing through new lenses, exploring early digital computing and engineering practice as digital phenomena rather than as engines of mathematics and logic. Most focus on the period 1945 to 1960, the era in which the first electronic digital computers were created and the computer industry began to develop. Because digitality is first and foremost a way of reading objects and encoding information within them, we are foregrounding topics that have until now been viewed as peripheral in the history of computing: betting odds calculators, card file systems, program and data storage, programmable calculators, and digital circuit design practices. Reconceptualizing the “history of computing” as study of the “early digital” decenters the stored program computer, repositioning it as one of many digital technologies.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Introducing the Early Digital

Abstract

This introductory chapter outlines the objectives of the book, explaining how adopting “early digital” as a frame can encourage new perspectives on established topics within the history of computing and productively integrate concerns from related fields such as media theory and communications history. Haigh encourages historians to take digitality seriously as an analytical category, probes the differences between analog and digital computing, and argues that the ability of a machine to follow a program is fundamentally digital. He also introduces the contributions of the individual chapters in the book, situating each within this broader analysis of digitality and its historical materiality.

Thomas Haigh

Chapter 2. Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing

Abstract

The chapter discusses why the venerable words analog and digital were appropriated by inventors of the numerical computer for different types of computers in the United States in the 1940s, what alternatives were proposed, how they became paired keywords, why closure occurred so quickly in the United States (by 1950), and the different ways in which digital and analog engineering cultures interpreted the terms in the 1950s and 1960s, and speculates why the concerns raised at the 1950 Macy conference on cybernetics, and also by a couple of other computer engineers, that the terms were vague and that analog was not the logical opposite of digital were ignored. I comment on the relatively weak progress narrative of analog vs. digital computers in science journalism to the early 1970s, even though scientists and engineers had appropriated the terms to distinguish between an analog past (Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer) and a digital future (the ENIAC).

Ronald R. Kline

Chapter 3. Forgotten Machines: The Need for a New Master Narrative

Abstract

History of computing seeks, amongst other things, to provide a narrative for the overwhelming success of the modern electronic digital computer. The datum for these accounts tends to be a finite set of machines identified as developmental staging posts. The reduction of the datum to a set of canonical machines crops out of the frame other machines that were part of the contemporary context but which do not feature in the prevailing narrative. This paper describes two pre-electronic systems designed and built before the general-purpose stored programme digital computer became the universal default and the de facto explanandum for modern history. Both machines belong to the era in which “analog” and “digital” emerged as defining descriptors. Neither of these machines can be definitively categorised as one or the other. The Julius Totalisator is a large online real-time multi-user system for managing dog and horse race betting; the Spotlight Golf Machine is an indoor interactive golf gaming simulator. Their descriptions here are with a view to expanding the gene pool of early devices of reference and at the same time voice historiographic concerns about the way in which master narratives influence criteria of historical significance.

Doron Swade

Chapter 4. Calvin Mooers, Zatocoding, and Early Research on Information Retrieval

Abstract

Historians of computing know of Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) for several contributions to electronic computing and programming languages. This paper describes a less well-known development by Mooers. Around 1950, he devised a coding scheme for edge-notched cards—a decidedly “low-tech,” nonelectronic method of information storage and retrieval, based on cards with notches cut into their edges. In spite of his experience and training in electronics, Mooers believed that existing digital computer projects were ill-suited for the storage and retrieval of large amounts of information. Edge-notched and other cards had been in common use for data retrieval, but none were able to handle the explosion of information occurring in the sciences after World War II. “Zatocoding” was to address the deficiencies of both existing electronic computers and of other card systems, as it was based on a more theoretical understanding of the nature of information and its retrieval. Zatocoding did not prevail, but I argue that the theoretical work done by Mooers proved later to be of fundamental importance to modern databases, encryption, and information retrieval.

Paul E. Ceruzzi

Chapter 5. Switching the Engineer’s Mind-Set to Boolean: Applying Shannon’s Algebra to Control Circuits and Digital Computing (1938–1958)

Abstract

It belongs to the lore of computer science that Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis (1937) revolutionized the design of (relay) switching circuit design. However, as often is the case when taking a closer look at the historical records, things were slightly more complex. Neither was Shannon’s paper an isolated result in switching theory, nor was it immediately absorbed into the engineers’ daily practice. It proved to be only usable in a small number of situations and had to be used in conjunction with other techniques and the engineer’s know-how. Boolean algebra would only become more important and more generally useful once standard situations were created.

Maarten Bullynck

Chapter 6. The ENIAC Display: Insignia of a Digital Praxeology

Abstract

This paper argues that digital computing is sustainably organized by the distributed agency of visual displays. By a praxeological analysis based on Harold Garfinkel’s “net-work theory,” it can be shown that the operability of the ENIAC – the first programmable digital general-purpose computer – is based on three properties that are characteristic of computing today: the nonrepresentational, public, and discrete nature of computer screens. This means that something can be read off the display that wasn’t originally intended. The digital display is characterized by an administrative practice (of registry) and not solely by the form of visualization. In this case, light dots do not yet represent digital image signs as we understand them today – as an arbitrary allocation of significant and significate. The single point of light does not exhibit a dissimilar but a strictly coupled coordinative relationship to its reference object. The ENIAC display targets the comprehensible representation of digit positions instead of the readability of digits. Its purpose is not the semantic interpretation of primary information; its importance is constituted at the level of secondary information, through which a praxeological path structure is revealed.

Three praxeological characteristics indicate that the technical constitution of the first computer display is designed for structural pragmatic incorporation of a human counterpart, while, at the same time, the scope of action is being restricted: (1) ENIAC’s computer program is defined by the fact that it controls the tasks that must be completed and simultaneously rejects the human-readable semantic representation of interim results. The idea of electronic digital computers lies in the deletion of human-interoperable intermediaries. (2) The public demonstration of the ENIAC exhibited (a) that digital computing entails a sequence of operations and a distributed calculation, (b) that the data visualization on a light display is faster than on paper, and (c) that all data are simultaneously visible on distributed displays in the process of their computing. (3) The ENIAC display therefore constitutes a decoupling of the calculation process and its integral representation. Since the ENIAC, we have been dealing with analytical images that display situations that are not immediately visible.

Tristan Thielmann

Chapter 7. The Evolution of Digital Computing Practice on the Cambridge University EDSAC, 1949–1951

Abstract

Cambridge University was very unusual, if not unique, among British universities in that it had established a centralised computation facility—the Mathematical Laboratory—in 1937, long before the advent of stored-program computing. The laboratory contained a variety of computing machinery, including desktop calculating machines and a differential analyser. During 1947–1949, the laboratory built the EDSAC, the world’s first practical stored-program computer. The EDSAC provided a massive increment in computing power that rendered the earlier equipment largely obsolete. However, the pre-existing computing infrastructure and practices profoundly shaped how the EDSAC was used and what it was used for.

Martin Campbell-Kelly

Chapter 8. The Media of Programming

Abstract

We revisit the origins of the modern, so-called “stored program” computer during the 1940s from a media-centric viewpoint, from tape-driven relay computers to the introduction of delay line and cathode ray tube memories. Some early machines embodied fixed programs, but all general-purpose computers use a medium of some kind to store control information. The idea of a “memory space” composed of sequentially numbered “storage locations” is crucial to modern computing, but we show that this idea developed incrementally and was not fully articulated in John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. Instead, the designers of computers based around delay line memories conceptualized their structure using different temporal and spatial schemes. Referencing the correct data was not just a question of “where” but also one of “when.”

Mark Priestley, Thomas Haigh

Chapter 9. Foregrounding the Background: Business, Economics, Labor, and Government Policy as Shaping Forces in Early Digital Computing History

Abstract

This paper places the early history of digital computing in the United States, during the period from 1945 to 1960, in the larger historical context of American business, labor, and policy. It considers issues concerning the business sectors that chose to enter into early digital computing, the robustness of the general economy and the importance of defense as an economic driver, the scientific race with the Russians, and gendered issues of technical labor – and how each of these helped to shape the emerging mainframe computer industry.

William Aspray, Christopher Loughnane

Chapter 10. “The Man with a Micro-calculator”: Digital Modernity and Late Soviet Computing Practices

Abstract

Technology played a defining role in the socialist version of modernity across the entire life span of the Soviet state. During the 1980s, the Soviet popularizers of computing technology mobilized the expressive power of Vertov’s 1929 masterpiece, The Man with a Movie Camera. When the nation’s most prominent popular scientific magazine, Nauka i Zhizn' [Science and Life], started a column devoted to both playful and serious applications of programmable calculators, it was titled “The Man with a Micro-calculator.” In this chapter, I argue that this reference reflected a consistent late Soviet preoccupation with introducing the population to a “digital” version of the socialist technological modernity, where a modest digital device, the programmable calculator, played a key role. I trace the massive scale of diffusion of computing practices around programmable calculators during the last decade of the Soviet Union’s existence to exploit the nonlinear temporality encompassed in the notion of “early digital.” Breaking with the established chronology of hardware development culminating with the so-called ‘‘Personal Computer Revolution,’’ the “early digital” helps to reveal how the “man with a micro-calculator” was imagined as the man of the future.

Ksenia Tatarchenko

Backmatter

Titel: Exploring the Early Digital
herausgegeben von: Dr. Thomas Haigh
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-02152-8
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02151-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8