6. The ENIAC Display: Insignia of a Digital Praxeology

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.