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Social Construction and the British Computer Industry in the Post-World War II Period
The rhetoric of Americanisation: Social construction and the British computer industry in the Post-World War II period By Robert James Kirkwood Reid Submitted to the University of Glasgow for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economic History Department of Economic and Social History September 2007 1 Abstract This research seeks to understand the process of technological development in the UK and the specific role of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ in that process. The concept of a ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’ will be developed throughout the thesis through a study into the computer industry in the UK in the post-war period . Specifically, the thesis discusses the threat of America, or how actors in the network of innovation within the British computer industry perceived it as a threat and the effect that this perception had on actors operating in the networks of construction in the British computer industry. However, the reaction to this threat was not a simple one. Rather this story is marked by sectional interests and technopolitical machination attempting to capture this rhetoric of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’. In this thesis the concept of ‘threat’ and ‘falling behind’, or more simply the ‘rhetoric of Americanisation’, will be explored in detail and the effect this had on the development of the British computer industry. What form did the process of capture and modification by sectional interests within government and industry take and what impact did this have on the British computer industry? In answering these questions, the thesis will first develop a concept of a British culture of computing which acts as the surface of emergence for various ideologies of innovation within the social networks that made up the computer industry in the UK. -
The Early History of Music Programming and Digital Synthesis, Session 20
Chapter 20. Meeting 20, Languages: The Early History of Music Programming and Digital Synthesis 20.1. Announcements • Music Technology Case Study Final Draft due Tuesday, 24 November 20.2. Quiz • 10 Minutes 20.3. The Early Computer: History • 1942 to 1946: Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the Colossus, the Harvard Mark I, and the Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) • 1942: Atanasoff-Berry Computer 467 Courtesy of University Archives, Library, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. Used with permission. • 1946: ENIAC unveiled at University of Pennsylvania 468 Source: US Army • Diverse and incomplete computers © Wikimedia Foundation. License CC BY-SA. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see http://ocw.mit.edu/fairuse. 20.4. The Early Computer: Interface • Punchcards • 1960s: card printed for Bell Labs, for the GE 600 469 Courtesy of Douglas W. Jones. Used with permission. • Fortran cards Courtesy of Douglas W. Jones. Used with permission. 20.5. The Jacquard Loom • 1801: Joseph Jacquard invents a way of storing and recalling loom operations 470 Photo courtesy of Douglas W. Jones at the University of Iowa. 471 Photo by George H. Williams, from Wikipedia (public domain). • Multiple cards could be strung together • Based on technologies of numerous inventors from the 1700s, including the automata of Jacques Vaucanson (Riskin 2003) 20.6. Computer Languages: Then and Now • Low-level languages are closer to machine representation; high-level languages are closer to human abstractions • Low Level • Machine code: direct binary instruction • Assembly: mnemonics to machine codes • High-Level: FORTRAN • 1954: John Backus at IBM design FORmula TRANslator System • 1958: Fortran II 472 • 1977: ANSI Fortran • High-Level: C • 1972: Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories • Based on B • Very High-Level: Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby • 1958: Lisp by John McCarthy • 1987: Perl by Larry Wall • 1990: Python by Guido van Rossum • 1995: Ruby by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto 20.7. -
The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and Its Derivatives, 1948 – 1951”
Expert Report on Proposed Milestone “The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948 – 1951” Thomas Haigh. University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee & Siegen University March 10, 2021 Version of citation being responded to: The Manchester University "Baby" Computer and its Derivatives, 1948 - 1951 At this site on 21 June 1948 the “Baby” became the first computer to execute a program stored in addressable read-write electronic memory. “Baby” validated the widely used Williams- Kilburn Tube random-access memories and led to the 1949 Manchester Mark I which pioneered index registers. In February 1951, Ferranti Ltd's commercial Mark I became the first electronic computer marketed as a standard product ever delivered to a customer. 1: Evaluation of Citation The final wording is the result of several rounds of back and forth exchange of proposed drafts with the proposers, mediated by Brian Berg. During this process the citation text became, from my viewpoint at least, far more precise and historically reliable. The current version identifies several distinct contributions made by three related machines: the 1948 “Baby” (known officially as the Small Scale Experimental Machine or SSEM), a minimal prototype computer which ran test programs to prove the viability of the Manchester Mark 1, a full‐scale computer completed in 1949 that was fully designed and approved only after the success of the “Baby” and in turn served as a prototype of the Ferranti Mark 1, a commercial refinement of the Manchester Mark 1 of which I believe 9 copies were sold. The 1951 date refers to the delivery of the first of these, to Manchester University as a replacement for its home‐built Mark 1. -
Second Industrial Revolution – Computer Safety and Security
Copyright Jim Thomson 2013 Safety In Engineering Ltd The Second Industrial Revolution – Computer Safety and Security “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot- proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” Rick Cook “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” Bill Gates “The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.” Douglas Engelbart “Complex systems almost always fail in complex ways.” Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, August 2003 In the twenty-first century, it is difficult to imagine a world without computers. Almost every aspect of our lives is now tied to computers in some way or other. They are used throughout industry for the control of industrial plant and processes, manufacturing, aircraft, automobiles, washing machines, telephones and telecommunications, etcetera, etcetera. Most domestic electrical hardware now contains some sort of microprocessor control. Microprocessors are now so completely ubiquitous, and so much of our lives is completely dependent on them, that it is a continuous source of surprise to me that the people and the laboratories that led their invention and development are not household names in the same way as, say, Newton’s discovery of gravity or Darwin’s theory of evolution. Microprocessors have caused an ongoing revolution in our lives. The first industrial revolution in the nineteenth century led to steam power for factories, ships, and trains, and also to the ready availability of substances like steel, which transformed the lives of our forebears. -
A Large Routine
A large routine Freek Wiedijk It is not widely known, but already in June 1949∗ Alan Turing had the main concepts that still are the basis for the best approach to program verification known today (and for which Tony Hoare developed a logic in 1969). In his three page paper Checking a large routine, Turing describes how to verify the correctness of a program that calculates the factorial function by repeated additions. He both shows how to use invariants to establish the correctness of this program, as well as how to use a variant to establish termination. In the paper the program is only presented as a flow chart. A modern C rendering is: int fac (int n) { int s, r, u, v; for (u = r = 1; v = u, r < n; r++) for (s = 1; u += v, s++ < r; ) ; return u; } Turing's paper seems not to have been properly appreciated at the time. At the EDSAC conference where Turing presented the paper, Douglas Hartree criticized that the correctness proof sketched by Turing should not be called inductive. From a modern point of view this is clearly absurd. Marc Schoolderman first told me about this paper (and in his master's thesis used the modern Why3 tool of Jean-Christophe Filli^atreto make Turing's paper fully precise; he also wrote the above C version of Turing's program). He then challenged me to speculate what specific computer Turing had in mind in the paper, and what the actual program for that computer might have been. My answer is that the `EPICAC'y of this paper probably was the Manchester Mark 1. -
Early Computer Music Experiments in Australia and England
Early Computer Music Experiments in Australia and England PAUL DOORNBUSCH Australian College of the Arts, 55 Brady Street, South Melbourne, VIC 3205, Australia Email: [email protected] This article documents the early experiments in both Australia had been developed, such as the ‘linear equations and England to make a computer play music. The experiments machine’, the ‘differential analyser’ and the ‘multi- in England with the Ferranti Mark 1 and the Pilot ACE register accounting machine’ (Hemstead and (practically undocumented at the writing of this article) and Worthington 2005: 110; Hally 2006: 11–13). However, fi those in Australia with CSIRAC (Council for Scienti c and the calculating machines still required significant Industrial Research Automatic Computer) are the oldest human intervention, so there was a desire to build an known examples of using a computer to play music. Significantly, they occurred some six years before the automatic calculator with some sort of system to store experiments at Bell Labs in the USA. Furthermore, the the data and the instructions for what to do with computers played music in real time. These developments were the data. important, and despite not directly leading to later highly There were some major technological advances at significant developments such as those at Bell Labs under the the time that allowed the realisation of an automatic direction of Max Mathews, these forward-thinking develop- calculator with memory. One such advance was the ments in England and Australia show a history of computing use of thermionic valves (vacuum tubes), as switching machines being used musically since the earliest development devices. -
De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson
Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson To cite this version: David Anderson. Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Com- puting.. IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on History of Computing (HC) / Held as Part of World Computer Congress (WCC), Sep 2010, Brisbane, Australia. pp.58-67, 10.1007/978-3-642-15199-6_7. hal-01059593 HAL Id: hal-01059593 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01059593 Submitted on 1 Sep 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson University of Portsmouth, “The Newmanry”, 36-40 Middle Street, Portsmouth, Hants, United Kindom, PO5 4BT Abstract A challenge is presented to the usual account of the development of the Manchester Baby which focuses on the contribution made to the project by the topologist M.H.A. (Max) Newman and other members of the Dept. of Mathematics. Based on an extensive re-examination of the primary source material, it is suggested that a very much more significant role was played by mathematicians than is allowed for in the dominant discourse. -
Computer Conservation Society
Issue Number 76 Winter 2016/7 Computer Conservation Society Aims and objectives The Computer Conservation Society (CCS) is a co-operative venture between BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT; the Science Museum of London; and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Manchester. The CCS was constituted in September 1989 as a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. It is thus covered by the Royal Charter and charitable status of BCS. The aims of the CCS are: To promote the conservation of historic computers and to identify existing computers which may need to be archived in the future, To develop awareness of the importance of historic computers, To develop expertise in the conservation and restoration of historic computers, To represent the interests of Computer Conservation Society members with other bodies, To promote the study of historic computers, their use and the history of the computer industry, To publish information of relevance to these objectives for the information of Computer Conservation Society members and the wider public. Membership is open to anyone interested in computer conservation and the history of computing. The CCS is funded and supported by voluntary subscriptions from members, a grant from BCS, fees from corporate membership, donations and by the free use of the facilities of our founding museums. Some charges may be made for publications and attendance at seminars and conferences. There are a number of active projects on specific computer restorations and early computer technologies and software. Younger people are especially encouraged to take part in order to achieve skills transfer. The CCS also enjoys a close relationship with the National Museum of Computing. -
Feb. 12Th Typical Programs Involved the Kurzweil Calculation of Differential Equations in Small Steps, but This Born: Feb
with the ENIAC engineers, such as Arthur Burks [Oct 13]. Raymond C. Feb. 12th Typical programs involved the Kurzweil calculation of differential equations in small steps, but this Born: Feb. 12, 1948; Jacques Herbrand was complicated by the ENIAC’s Queens, New York Born: Feb. 12, 1908; ability to perform multiple Kurzweil is a well-known operations simultaneously, and Paris, France advocate for the futurist and the need for each piece of data Died: July 27, 1931 trans-humanist movements and instruction to reach the [March 30], and also a prolific Although Herbrand died when correct location in the circuitry inventor. He developed the first he was only 23 years old (in a inside a time interval of 1/5000 CCD flatbed scanner, the first mountain climbing accident), he omni-font optical character was already considered one of recognition software (1974), the the greatest mathematicians of first print-to-speech reading his generation. He worked machine for the blind (1976), primarily in the areas of the first commercial text-to- mathematical logic, but also had speech synthesizer (1996), and a significant influential on the the first commercially marketed development of recursive large-vocabulary speech functions. recognition system (1987). In 1934 when Kurt Gödel [April In 1965, he appeared on the CBS 28] introduced the notion of TV show “I’ve Got a Secret”, general recursive functions, he where he performed a piano noted that this idea had been piece that had been written by a suggested to him in the letter Kay McNulty (1938). Her high relay-based computer he had from Herbrand dated April 7, school graduation picture. -
Was the Manchester Baby Conceived at Bletchley Park?
Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park? David Anderson1 School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE, UK This paper is based on a talk given at the Turing 2004 conference held at the University of Manchester on the 5th June 2004. It is published by the British Computer Society on http://www.bcs.org/ewics. It was submitted in December 2005; final corrections were made and references added for publication in November 2007. Preamble In what follows, I look, in a very general way, at a particularly interesting half century, in the history of computation. The central purpose will be to throw light on how computing activity at the University of Manchester developed in the immediate post-war years and, in the context of this conference, to situate Alan Turing in the Manchester landscape. One of the main methodological premises on which I will depend is that the history of technology is, at heart, the history of people. No historically-sophisticated understanding of the development of the computer is possible in the absence of an appreciation of the background, motivation and aspirations of the principal actors. The life and work of Alan Turing is the central focus of this conference but, in the Manchester context, it is also important that attention be paid to F.C. Williams, T. Kilburn and M.H.A. Newman. The Origins of Computing in Pre-war Cambridge David Hilbert's talk at the Sorbonne on the morning of the 8th August 1900 in which he proposed twenty-three "future problems", effectively set the agenda for mathematics research in the 20th century. -
Jewel Theatre Audience Guide Addendum: Alan Turing Biography
Jewel Theatre Audience Guide Addendum: Alan Turing Biography directed by Kirsten Brandt by Susan Myer Silton, Dramaturg © 2019 ALAN TURING The outline of the following overview of Turing’s life is largely based on his biography on Alchetron.com (https://alchetron.com/Alan-Turing), a “social encyclopedia” developed by Alchetron Technologies. It has been embellished with additional information from sources such as Andrew Hodges’ books, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) and Turing (1997) as well as his website, https://www.turing.org.uk. The following books have also provided additional information: Prof: Alan Turing Decoded (2015) by Dermot Turing, who is Alan’s nephew by way of his only sibling, John; The Turing Guide by B. Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, and Robin Wilson (2017); and Alan M. Turing, written by his mother, Sara, shortly after he died. The latter was republished in 2012 as Alan M. Turing – Centenary Edition with an Afterword entitled “My Brother Alan” by John Turing. The essay was added when it was discovered among John’s writings following his death. The republication also includes a new Foreword by Martin Davis, an American mathematician known for his model of post-Turing machines. Extended biographies of Christopher Morcom, Dillwyn Knox, Joan Clarke (the character of Pat Green in the play) and Sara Turing, which are provided as Addendums to this Guide, provide additional information about Alan. Beginnings Alan Mathison Turing was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was born in a nursing home in Maida Vale, a tony residential district of London, England on June 23, 1912. -
Digital Computer Museum Re-Port
DIGITAL COMPUTER MUSEUM RE-PORT 111982 BOARD OF DIRECTORS Charles Bachman C. Gordon Bell Gwen Bell Harvey C. Cragon Robert Everett C. Lester Hogan Theodore G. Johnson Andrew C. Knowles, III John Lacey Pat McGovern George Michael Robert N. Noyce Kenneth H. Olsen Brian Randell Edward A. Schwartz Michael Spack Erwin O. Tomash Senator Paul E. Tsongas The Digital Computer Museum is an independent. non-profit, charitable foundation. It is Staff the world's only institution dedicated to the industry-wide preservation of information pro Gwen Bell cessing devices and documentation. It interprets computer history through exhibits, publi Director cations, videotapes, lectures, educational programs, excursions, and special events. Jamie Parker Exhibit Coordinator Hours and Services Christine Rudomin The Digital Computer Museum is open to the public Sunday through Friday, 1:00 pm Program Coordinator to 6:00 pm. There is no charge for admission. The Digital Computer Museum Lecture Jay McLeman Series Lectures focus on benchmarks in computing history and are held six times a year. Computer Technician All lectures are videotaped and archived for scholarly use. Gallery talks by computer John McKenzie historians, staff members and docents are offered every Wednesday at 4:00 and Sunday TX-O Technician at 3:00. Guided group tours are available by appointment only. Books, posters, postcards, Beth Parkhurst and other items related to the history of computing are available for sale at the Museum Research Assistant Store. The Museum's lecture hall and reception facilities are available for rent on a pre Sue Hunt arranged basis. For information call 617-467-4443.