related:
Communication
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This
page highlights some of the writing about figures in 'pre-internet'
computing and its impact.
It covers -
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,
in Paul Ceruzzo's A History of Modern Computing
(Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) and in When Computers
Were Human (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2005)
by David Grier
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.
Kathleen Williams' Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cybersea
(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press 2004)
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