The histories of computing(s)

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 119-135

  Mahoney, Michael S ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NEW DEVICES;

TURING MACHINES;

HYBRID COMPUTERS;

EID: 22544438115     PISSN: 03080188     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/030801805X25927     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. R. Kling and W. Scacchi: The web of computing', Advances in Computers, 1982, 21, 1-90, 39, 56-60.
2. Marx made the point in Capital, chapter 15 ('Machinery and large scale industry'), footnote 18: To what extent the old forms of the instruments of production influence their new forms at the beginning is shown among other things, by the superficial comparison of the present power-loom with the old one, of the modern blowing apparatus of a blast-furnace with the first inefficient mechanical reproduction of the ordinary bellows, and perhaps more strikingly than in any other way by the fact that, before the invention of the present locomotive, an attempt was made to construct a locomotive with two feet, which it raised from the ground alternately, like a horse. It is only after a considerable development of the science of mechanics, and an accumulation of practical experience, that the form of a machine becomes settled entirely in accordance with mechanical principles, and emancipated from the traditional form of the tool from which it has emerged.' (K. Marx: Capital, (trans. Ben Fowkes), Vol. I, 505; 1977, New York, NY, Vintage.)
3. E. C. Berkeley, The Computer Revolution (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962).
4. Thus the opening words of Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution (1996, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press): There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.'
5. See, for example, M. S. Mahoney: 'Computer science: the search for a mathematical theory', in Science in the Twentieth Century, (ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre), chapter 31; 1997, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic.
6. M. S. Mahoney: 'Finding a history for software engineering', IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2004, 26, (1), 8-19.
7. Quoted in T. Haigh: The chromium-plated tabulator: institutionalizing an electronic revolution, 1954-1958', IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2001, 23, (4), 77. Despite the tide, Haigh emphasises the slow, evolutionary process of the transition from punched-card machinery to computer systems.
8. As set out in A. W. Burks and A. R. Burks: The ENIAC, Annals of the History of Computing, 1981, 3, 318.
9. For that history, see inter alia M. Davis: The Universal Computer. The Road from Leibniz to Turing, 2000, New York, NY/London,
10. W. W. Norton, and S. Krämer: Symbolische Maschinen: Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abriss; 1988, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
11. See, for example, J. Tann: The Development of the Factory, 1970, London, Cornmarket Press, which is based on the papers of the Boulton and Watt company.
12. SAGE stands for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, WWMCCS for World-Wide Military Command and Control System.
13. J. W. Cortada: Information Technology as Business History: Issues in the History and Management of Computers, ix; 1996, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press.
14. T. Haigh: The chromium-plated tabulator', pp. 75, 94 (see Note 7).
15. J. Agar: The Goverment Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer, 3; 2004, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
16. U. Hashagen, R. Keil-Slawik and A. Norberg (ed.): History of Computing: Software Issues; 2002, Berlin/New York, NY, Springer-Verlag.
17. J. E. Tomayko: 'Software as engineering', in History of Computing, pp. 65-76 (see Note 15).
18. H. Petroski: To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design; 1985, New York, NY, St. Martin's Press.
19. P. Naur and B. Randell (ed.): Sofware Engineering: Report on a Conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germany, 7th to 11th October 1968, 13; 1969, Brussels, NATO Scientific Affairs Division.
20. The report was republished, together with the report on the second conference in Rome the following year, in P. Naur, B. Randell and J. N. Buxton (ed.): Software Engineering: Concepts and Techniques. Proceedings of the NATO Conferences; 1976 New York, NY, Petrocelli. Randell has made both reports available for download in pdf format at homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/ NATO.
21. F. P. Brooks: 'No silver bullet - essence and accidents of software engineering', Information Processing 86, (ed. H. J. Kugler), 1069-1076; 1986, Amsterdam, Elsevier Science.
22. This essay has been reprinted in Computer, 1987, 20, (4), 10-19
23. and in the anniversary edition of The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, chapter 16; 1995, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, chapter 17 of which, '"No silver bullet" refired', is a response to critics of the original article and a review of the silver bullets that have missed the mark over the intervening decade.
24. See www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12766&org=CNS.
25. H. Ford: My Life and Work, 23-24; 1992, Garden City, NY,
26. Doubleday. For a reading of Ford's Model T, see my own web document, 'Reading a machine', www.princeton.edu/~hos/h398/readmach/modelt.html.
27. L. Winner: Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, 202; 1977, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press CWe do not use technologies so much as live them.') In a talk some years ago, Ruth Schwarz Cowan, author of More Work for Mother, related how living for a week in Bethpage Village, a historical reconstruction of an eighteenth century homestead on Long Island, reshaped her relations with her daughters through the cooperative patterns of work required by the household technology of the time.
28. T. Kidder: The Soul of a New Machine, 26; 1981, Boston, MA, Little, Brown.
29. This situation has implications reaching beyond the history of computing. US government records of the 1950s now sit on magnetic tapes that cannot be read because neither the software nor the hardware with which they were created has survived.
30. C. G. Langten: 'Artificial life', in The Philosophy of Artificial Life, (ed. M. A. Boden), 47; 1996, Oxford, Oxford University Press. (Langton's essay was first published in 1989.)
31. A. C. Kay: 'The early history of Smalltalk', in History of Programming Languages -II, (ed. T. J. Bergin, Jr and R. G. Gibson, Jr) 516; 1996, New York, NY, ACM Press.
32. W. McCarty: 'As it almost was: historiography of recent things', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2004, 19, (2), 161-180.
33. J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin: Remediation: Understanding New Media; 1999, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.