precursors

This page highlights some of the writing about figures in 'pre-internet' computing and its impact.

It covers -

• introduction
• Turing
• von Neumann and Wiener
• Bush, La Fontaine and Otlet
• Babbage, Scheutz and the mechanicals
• Claude Shannon

     introduction

One point of entry for understanding the emergence of the contemporary ICT industry and the net is exploration of the lives of pioneers.

Biographical collections abound. These include James Cortada's succinct Historical Dictionary of Data Processing: Biographies (New York: Greenwood 1987) and John Lee's International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1995).

For context there are useful overviews in Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books 1996) by William Aspray & Martin Campbell-Kelly and in Paul Ceruzzo's A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998)

     Turing

The best biography of pioneer Alan Turing remains the quirky Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon & Schuster 1983) by Alan Hodges.  

Hodges has a rich but somewhat polemical Turing site; there is a short biography on John Kowalik's site and on this site.

     Von Neumann and Wiener

John von Neumann's most rounded biography is by Norman Macrae in John von Neumann (New York: Pantheon 1992). 

Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory & the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Doubleday 1993) by William Poundstone concentrates on game theory - disappointingly thin - and the Hungarian wizard's relations with the Los Alamos boys.

William Aspray's John Von Neumann & The Origins Of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT 1990) is a serviceable study of involvement with early electronic computation. Aspray co-edited Papers of John von Neumann on Computing & Computer Theory (Cambridge: MIT 1987), which includes a comprehensive bibliography. There is a crisp account in Paul Strathern's Dr Strangelove's Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius (London: Penguin 2001).

Scott McCartney offers a revisionist account of von Neumann, Eckert & Mauchly in ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer (New York: Walker 1999). Alice & Arthur Burks' The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story (Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press 1988) is a more standard rendition in line with Nancy Stern's From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers (Bedford: Digital Press 1981) and Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer (Bedford: Digital Press 1980) by Kent Redmond & Thomas Smith. Clark Mollenhoff's Atanasoff – Forgotten Father of the Computer (Ames: Iowa State Uni Press 1988) is upbeat.

For Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-73) see Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) by I. Bernard Cohen and Makin Numbers: Howard Aiken & the Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999), co-edited by Cohen & Gregory Welch.

The US cybernetics movement is explored in Steve Heims' The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991) - strong on social theory - and Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002). The Closed World: Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1997) by Paul Edwards, John von Neumann & Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life & Death (Cambridge: MIT Press 1980) by Heims and Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books 2005) by Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman and Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (New York: Birkhäuser 1990) by Pesi Masani are also commended. 

Despite the titles, Edwards and Mirowski are outstanding studies of US government thinking about (and funding of) information technology from the fifties to the 1980s, including the ARPANET.  Not easy reads but replete with insights about the individuals, machinery and mindset that gave birth to the net.  

A perspective on that mindset is provided by the acerbic Paul Strassman in The Squandered Computer (New Canaan: Information Economics Press 1997), exploring why many of the promises of IT have not been fulfilled.

     Bush

WASP savant and administrator Vannevar Bush was profiled in a characteristically uncritical 1998 Wired. His 1945 As We May Think Atlantic Monthly essay is available online and was the subject of a 1995 MIT conference.  

Acclaim for Bush as a 'prophet' of the net or scientist - like that regarding Charles Babbage - is largely misplaced. He deserves greater recognition - along with colleague James Conant - as an administrator of genius, one of the 40's and 50's 'wise men' of science with a finger in every pie from the Manhattan Project and Operation Paperclip through to standardized testing for university entrance.

Among biographies we recommendColin Burke's Information & Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press 1994), the more problematical Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press 1997) by Pascal Zachary and From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush & the Mind's Machine (New York: Academic Press 1992) edited by James Nyce & Paul Kahn.  

His guarded autobiography, Pieces of the Action, was published in 1970, usefully read in conjunction with Mirowski's Machine Dreams, Nathan Reingold's Science American Style (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 1991) and other studies of the 'scientific-industrial complex'. 

For a claim that Bush had been anticipated by Belgian theorist Paul Otlet see W Boyd Rayward's 1994 paper Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet & Hypertext.

Henri Marie La Fontaine and Otlet, precursors of Bush, established the Institut international de bibliographie in 1895. Its 'House of Documentation', reminiscent of schemes proposed by Jeremy Bentham among others, was a vast informational retrieval system through which he proposed to file, index, and provide information for retrieval on anything of note published anywhere in the world. La Fontaine developed a methodology of universal classification and produced major social sciences bibliographies. In 1925 Otlet proposed a microform library consisting of a portable cabinet and a pocket sized viewing device capable of holding as many as 18,759 books (each of 350 pages).

For Otlet see International Organisation and Dissemination of Knowledge. Selected Essays of Paul Otlet (Amsterdam: Elsevier 90) edited by W. Boyd Rayward, Rayward's 1997 paper The Origins of Information Science & the Work of the International Institute of Bibliography and complementary paper on H.G. Wells’s Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-Assessment.

     Babbage, Scheutz and the mechanicals

Charles Babbage, despite recent hype, is at best a great uncle rather than a grandfather of the net. Michael Lindgren's Glory & Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Muller, Charles Babbage and Georg & Edvard Scheutz (Cambridge: MIT Press 1990) is a detailed study of early mechanical computing. 

Herman Goldstine's The Computer: From Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1972) and Paul Ceruzzi's Reckoners: the Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from relays to the stored program concept, 1935-1945 (Westport: Greenwood 1983) have a wider view.

The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage & the Quest To Build The First Computer (London: Little Brown 2000) by Doron Swade is a dual account of the man and reconstruction of his machines at the UK Science Museum; we would have preferred more coverage of Babbage and less of Swade.  However it is of importance for demonstrating that Babbage - with more money and a bit more diplomacy - might indeed have been able to build fullscale mechanical computers using Victorian technology.

There is a more detailed study of Babbage's career in Anthony Hyman's Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1984). Hyman edited Science & Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1989). 

Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time & Invention (London: Faber 1998) edited by Francis Spufford & Jenny Uglow is a collection of essays inspired by Babbage's Difference Engine.

     Shannon

Our profile on Claude Shannon is here.







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