CYBERNOTES: Concise History of Computing (Incomplete)

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INTRODUCTION

    • It is difficult to construct a history of computers because of the way that innovation in this field is relatively constant. A decade ago, for instance, a history of computing would have focused on companies like IBM, Microsoft, Netscape etc. But today a history would have to focus on Google, Amazon, Facebook, smart phones etc.
    • There are 4 primary ideas of computing history.

THE DIGITAL PARADIGM

  • “Digital” is a means of sorting in which only zeros and ones are used. This is in contrast to a 0-10 scale which humans have always used (which directly refers to the amount of fingers a person has.)
  • Digital logic is binary. It has developed alongside and separately from “analog” logic since the 1930’s, when both terms were invented.

CONVERGENCE

  • Some believe that computers fall in a history of convergence, where techniques, devices, machines, etc., each with their own history, have come together.
  • EXAMPLE: The smart phone is a TV, a radio, a phone, a camera, a computer, a teletype…

SOLID STATE ELECTRONICS

HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACE

  • The idea of the “human-machine” interface or, today, simply “user interface”, concerns how humans relate to digital devices in general.
  • This aspect of the development of computers concerns the questions of usability but are also existential. “How does one use this? How does this effect the user? Are humans going to be replaced by this technology? Are humans being replaced by computers in general?”

CHAPTER 1: THE DIGITAL AGE

  • In Spring, 1942, the US National Defense Research Committee holds a meeting with scientists to build anti-aircraft tech. Bell Labs mathematician, George Stibitz, coined the term “digital” to refer to his contribution which used calculators to fire the gun on time. Ironically, the term referred to fingers, or “digits”, although it used binary calculations.

COMPONENTS OF COMPUTING

  • Mechanical aids for counting are ancient. Pascal invented a counting machine in 1642 which was more advanced than the abacus, which had been used for centuries. In the 19th century, commercial parties began to depend on such automatic calculators.
  • There are two important elements to these early calculators:
  1. Automatic storage and recall of digitally coded information
  2. Automatic execution of stored operations
  • In the 1830’s, Charles Babbage tried to build an “Analytical Engine.” Technological forces had not yet made his vision possible. An analogy could be drawn to Leonardo’s sketches of a flying machine.

Hollerith’s Punched Card

  • In the 1890’s, Hollerith invented the punch card machines to store data for a US Census. The machines used electromagnets and motors but not electricity. Eventually, electrical circuits were used. This allowed for computing to occur very rapidly. Hollerith’s punch card company was purchased in 1924 by Thomas Watson who named the company IBM.
  • A fundamental trait of the digital paradigm is the ability to store information for controls and calculations.
  • “Automatic control” is the 3rd component of computing (the ancestor of today’s software.)
  • Jacquard invented an inside-out version of a device which had been to control machines for centuries on clocks. It has wood pegs and cylinders which rotate to carry out complex operations which let the machine know what to do. Very similar to today’s “Read-Only Memory” (ROM).

Jacquard’s “Loom”, used for textiles and punch cards.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL LINEAGE BETWEEN CLOCKS, A DISCIPLINING TECHNOLOGY INVENTED BY MONKS AND USED TO CONTROL WORKERS, AND MODERN COMPUTING POWER IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED VIA THE PUNCH CARD, BELL LABS, AND DARPA.

  • Page 9:Control, storage, calculation, the use of electrical or electronic circuits: these are….what make a computer.

  • The 4th element of computing is communication. In the 1960’s,  DARPA took great efforts to  reorient digital computers to be inherently networked.
  • In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Telephones use analog currents in which a sound wave is transferred across a line “by analogy” to the original sound. It is not digital. During WW2, Bell Labs digitally encoded it’s first phone call: between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill as a way of encrypting their communication.

FROM TABULATOR TO COMPUTER

Tabulation and punch card operations were almost only done by women.

  • Tabulator’s keep a record of how many holes punched cards have. They are simple counting machines.
  • Punch cards were initially carried between machines by humans. The number of holes per column let the machine know what operation to perform. Aside from the government, railroad companies relied heavily on this method of working.
  • Later, railroads used telegraphs to coordinate which punch cards to use across a large area, between stations etc. Because of the way railroads developed as essential technologies inside of capitalism for the circulation of commodities and people, they were also some of the first to use telephones. In fact, telephone poles were initially constructed alongside railroad tracks to follow the trains between stops. Today, an extremely high percentage of fiber optic cables follow railroad tracks for the internet.
  • The TeleType was invented in 1914. AT&T owned it and sold equipment to offices, governments, and militaries.

ADVENT OF ELECTRONIC COMPUTING

  • Computing systems reached a peak during the Great Depression. The development of machinery for computing, for cash registers, for weighing meats and foodstuffs, and for international communication between the world wars was tremendous and rapid.

This is only mentioned briefly in this book but reflects what we already know about the compulsion of capital to revolutionize productive forces for greater and greater profit and control.

CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST COMPUTERS

Turing Machine, the theoretical prototype for the computer.

  • In 1937, German engineer Konrad Zuse writes:

    For a year now, I have been considering the concept of a mechanical brain…for every problem to be solved there must be a special purpose brain.

  • Where Zuse thought to introduce theoretical math into the development of machines, Alan Turing wanted to bring “machines” – as a concept – into theoretical math.
  • The computer is the “special purpose brain” which can do whatever it is coded to do. It can hold the knowledge of particular operations and also automatically allocate storage for those operations.

THE ADVENT OF ELECTRONICS

  • Throughout the 30’s, IBM and others began using electrical circuits to carry signals across distances, but not to do the actual calculations themselves.
  • In 1938, an Iowa State College physicist and mathematics professor began using vacuum tubes to algorithmically solve for calculations that were highly impractical to solve by humans.
  • During WWII, when research in many countries had stalled out to fight the war, the UK continued to fund a research facility called Bletchley Park. There, Alan Turing and other invented a machine called “Colossus.” The existence of the technology was hidden until the 1970’s, for nearly 30 years. The machine processed text, not numbers. It was used to decrypt Nazi communications.

FIRE CONTROL

  • In 1941, Norbert Weiner, an MIT professor, began researching anti-aircraft development and research which was taking off among leading scientists around the country. He wanted to be able to predict the movements of enemy aircraft via automatic control of the machines. In other words, he wanted to develop a standard by which the machines could “know” where the planes would go.
  • Two Bell Labs researchers developed anti-aircraft guns that used electrical circuits as a kind of “analogue computer.”
  • The guns used a camshaft that was wrapped with wire which would run geometric analysis based on the visual observations about its target. It could thus fire accurately without a human controller. The success of these guns made the ideas of self-regulation and feedback essential to digital engineering.

THE DIGITAL PARADIGM

  • During the 1940’s, many existential questions were raised concerning the role of technology in human life.
  • At the end of the war, Bush, an inventor, wrote an article titled “As We May Think” which proposed the invention of the “Memex.” The Memex would store and recall lots of information very quickly and would allow its user to switch topics very quickly. This device was never built but it was an extremely influential idea for the creators of the World Wide Web.
  • Weiner’s book “Cybernetics” was a very influential text. It influenced many writers who’s writings had more impact then his, including William Gibson, a sci-fi writer, who coined the phrase “cyber-space.”

THE ENIAC

  • Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
  • This device had 18,000 tubes and claimed to be able to predict the path of a missile faster than the missile traveled.

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