Have US computer pioneers such as John von Neumann and Grace Hopper falsely overshadowed their British counterparts?
Abstract:
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Before the question "Have US computer pioneers such as John von Neumann and Grace Hopper falsely overshadowed their British counterparts?" can be answered it is necessary to tackle the assumptions inherent in its wording and to look at some of the other issues that it raises. Firstly, who are the US computer pioneers? One can infer from the title that John von Neumann and Grace Hopper are among the US computer pioneers - is this the case? Thirdly, who are "their British counterparts?" Before answering the question of whether or not the Americans falsely overshadow the British, one has to ask whether the British are overshadowed at all. One final tacit assumption in the title is that Britain and the US have been the two main powers in the development of computing. While comparing the pioneers of both nations, it will also be useful to consider if this assumption is correct by looking at computer pioneers from around the globe. The essay will attempt to look at all of these and then finally consider the question in the title. |
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Introduction Wilhelm Schickard Charles Babbage Herman Hollerith Alan Turing Tommy Flowers John von Neumann Herman Goldstine Grace Hopper Konrad Zuse Vannevar Bush Some Current Pioneers Conclusion References Related Web Links Back to top |
This is an essay produced at St Andrews University while in the Computer Science department for the module " Professional and Social Aspects of Computing". I then spent the time when I should have been revising for my finals turning it into an HTML document. I hope it was worth it. Any comments or problems?
My History of Computer Science page |
| Introduction
Useful links:
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The fundamental task is to ascertain who are considered the computer pioneers, irrespective of nation. With this information, it should be clear if America has overshadowed Britain. But what is a computer pioneer? The Concise Oxford Dictionary (eighth edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford) gives the following definition of "pioneer": "an initiator of a new enterprise, an inventor, etc." To begin unravelling the relative merits of each individual’s claim to the title of an inventor and initiator of computing, an overview of the development of computing is needed. As this essay is an attempt to discuss whether a certain group overshadows another, it is essential to consider the biases of the sources used. It is hard to say who are the founding fathers of computing. Computers are
primarily calculating machines, so one could consider abaci, and other such
calculating devices, as the original computers. Then those who devised these
would be the true pioneers of computing (as in the first and second sections of
[Wil]). However, the people named in the title imply
this is not the spirit of
the question and this overview will start with the semi-automatic calculating
machines of
Schickard and Babbage, with a
view to a discussion of the electric
and electronic computers of this century.
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| Wilhelm Schickard
References:
Pascal:
Useful links:
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The first person to be considered will be a German named Wilhelm
Schickard (1529-1635), a professor at
Tübingen, Germany. He designed a mechanical calculating machine in 1623
which could automatically add and subtract and, with some assistance, multiply
and divide. That more is not known of him is because his machine was destroyed
in a fire as it was being built and he and his family died in the plague. Only
in 1957 were letters from him found, telling Keppler of his machine. Until this
1957, Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662) was
generally credited as the
designing the first mechanical calculating machine and copies of his machine are
still extant. As well as a starting point in this survey of modern pioneers,
Schickard's story acts a salutary lesson of how hard it is to answer questions
of whether or not history has assigned a false value to any individual's
contribution. It is possible that there are modern pioneers, British or not,
whose revolutionary ideas lie totally unknown and who are overshadowed by all.
Though keeping this in mind, most sources seem to broadly agree on the pioneers
of computing up to the turn of the century. The sources examined have all been
tertiary sources with regard to pre-19th century computing, giving them an added
degree of distance and objectivity.
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| Charles Babbage
References:
Useful links:
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The first British pioneer to be considered is Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Babbage's first machine, his "difference engine", was funded by the British government. At that time, accurate mathematical tables were needed for navigation and an effective calculator would have been of much use in producing these tables. Babbage did not finish the machine but the ideas behind it were sound and other people have made working copies of a Babbage machine from his designs, which he updated a number of times. A Swede named Pehr Scheutz (1785-1873) built the first working difference engine, inspired by Babbage's work. What distinguished Babbage from Schickard, Pascal and others was his "analytic engine". The early machines of the others, and Babbage's own difference engine, could be considered to be mere calculators which made routine mathematical calculations easier. In a period when Babbage was short of money and thus unable to work on the difference engine, Babbage had a major rethink of the project that allowed added flexibility. He came up with the idea of a register, where numbers that were being calculated could be stored and then used in further results. The machine would now need instructions to tell it what to do with the stored results. Babbage realised that a simple and effective way to give the instructions to the machine would be through punched cards in much the same as those used by Joseph Marie Jacquard's (1752-1834) loom. These cards could be combined together to form programs. It was this machine that allows Babbage to be called "the father of the idea of the computer." ([Ash], p 57) Babbage's position in computing's history seems assured, even though he himself did not produce a working machine. | |||||||||||||||
Boole:
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After Babbage, it becomes less obvious who the pioneers are. George Boole (1815-1864), for example, provided the fundamental work in the algebra of logic, which underpins the workings of all digital computers and is named after him. However, can he be considered a computer pioneer? He is truly an initiator of new enterprise but this enterprise was mathematical not related to computing until many years later. [Ash] dedicates a number of pages to Boole and his work whereas [Wil] does not even have a place for him in the index. Further, after the initial work, outlined above, showed that a mechanical
computing tool was more than a pipe dream, much work on computing was carried
out in a number of places and by a number of people independently of, and
concurrently with, one another. This essay will attempt to concentrate on the
primary individuals in turn, though obviously the paths of many of the
characters in the narrative will overlap with others.
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| Herman Hollerith
References:
Useful links:
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At the turn of the century, with the mechanical and other advances that were occurring, it is not surprising that where the ambitious early inventors failed, people would now succeed. Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) "was the inventor of punch-card data processing and the founder of the firm that evolved to become IBM." ([Ral], p 610) As a clerk at the US Census Office, he had to deal with great amounts of
information and he felt that the task of computing worthwhile figures could be
mechanised. According to [Ash], Hollerith was
influenced, in the same way as
Babbage, by Jacquard's looms with their cards containing
the weaving
information. Hollerith's machines beat the competition for the job of collating
American census information by a long shot and these machines can be claimed to
be the first large scale calculating machines.
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| Alan Turing
References:
Useful links:
*Entscheidungsproblem: "is there a procedure that, for every formally statable mathematical, will determine the truth value of the statement?" ([Asp], p 176) |
A great flowering of computing took place on both sides of the Atlantic in the years surrounding the Second World War. In Britain, a large number of mathematicians and other scientists were gathered at Bletchley Park just after the outbreak of war in order to break the Enigma code - the German encryption system. Among these was Alan Turing (1912-1954), a British mathematician. His final mathematics prize at school was "Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik" by John von Neumann. It was in 1936 that Turing, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, produced his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an application to Entscheidungsproblem*." It was in this paper that he introduced the theoretical computers that have become known as Turing machines. These machines have a processing unit with some memory, can read instruction from a tape and can write back to the tape. These Turing machines are a "mathematically precise, theoretical model of the stored-program computer (developed eight years later)" ([Asp], p 176). These machines are still central to many ideas in theoretical computer
science{ such as the open question of whether NP-hard problems are in the set of
P problems }. It was primarily this paper that won Turing a fellowship at
Princeton University, where Turing had studied for his doctorate between 1936
and 1938, and it was von Neumann that offered Turing
a position as his assistant
at Princeton. Turing, however, returned to the UK to take up a position at
Cambridge and shortly after, war broke out. Even now, not all the details of
the work at Bletchley Park, where Turing was stationed, are known. However, it
is known that the work was, as stated above, concentrated on breaking the German
encryption system which relied on a machine known as the Enigma. That this
machine had 1021 initial settings gives some idea
of the enormity of
the task. Turing came up with a number of important developments that led to
the cracking of the Enigma code, which included "bombes" - electromechanical
relay machines whose exact purpose is still not known.
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| Tommy Flowers
Newman:
References:
Useful links:
*[Wil], p 294 |
The bombes, however, were not the final answer in breaking all of the German codes. Prof. M.H.A. Newman (1897-1984), who taught Turing in the foundations of Mathematics at Cambridge and is credited with interesting Turing in the Entscheidungsproblem, also joined Bletchley and found that, though he was not particularly effective at the job he was brought in to do, his job could be mechanised. Under him a machine called the "Heath Robinson" was built, named after a cartoonist who depicted weird and complicated machines made out of numerous odds and ends. This machine, however, had a tendency to break down and though a number of variants were built, none functioned with the necessary stability to provide more than a fraction of the results needed. Thomas H. Flowers (1905-1998) saw these machines and felt that, with his experience at the switch group of the Post Office Research Station, he could do better. Though no positive response was forthcoming from the authorities, he went about creating his machine himself. When the "Colossus" was built, its reliability and speed impressed those at Bletchley and more were commissioned. The colossi were specific purpose machines but can be considered the forerunners of modern machines in that they contained all the necessary functions for arithmetic in terms of Boolean function and they could be wired for other purposes. One of them was rewired after the war to multiplication of base 10 numbers*, but this was quite a tricky task. Flowers is possibly one of the overshadowed pioneers of computing in that most of his work was destroyed after the war and that which was not destroyed was kept secret. Countering this, he was awarded an MBE for his services at Bletchley but, at the time, no one outside of Bletchley Park knew exactly what he had done to be decorated. After the war Flowers returned to his work on the Post Office electronic systems. |
Bletchley Park:
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The work at Bletchley Park, by Churchill's estimate, shortened the war by two years and provided a very solid foundation for computing in the United Kingdom. After the war, all the information gathered and techniques created were still considered top secret. Much was destroyed on Churchill’s orders and those who took part kept silent until recently. This could well account for the overshadowing of British computer pioneers presumed by the title - of the work that Turing did during this period, [Ral], published in 1976, states that work was highly confidential and speculates only that "he gained a detailed knowledge of pulse techniques." [Gol], a book originally from 1972, spends even
less time, giving Turing no
section of his own. The author, Herman H. Goldstine,
was a colleague of John von Neumann
, and his comments are mainly of their interactions with Alan
Turing.
With this in mind it is fair to consider Goldstine's book as a primary source
and it must be treated with the care that is always given to works written by
protagonists. His work, however he endeavours to be candid, cannot be
considered truly objective. [Ral], though ignorant of
the work in the war, is a
tertiary source and does much more justice to Alan Turing, giving both Turing
and von Neumann entries of almost identical length. It seems more likely that
this is a representative view of American publishing and that even 20 years ago,
Turing was not being overshadowed. Turing's work in computing did not end with
war, though he joined Flowers on the honours list with an OBE. During and after
the war he visited America where he met up again with John von Neumann, one of
the principle players in the American's technical work in the war.
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| John von Neumann
References:
ENIAC:
Useful links: |
John von Neumann (1903-1957) was born in Hungary and he travelled and studied at a number of universities in Europe. He was awarded his doctorate in 1925. He continued to work at universities in Europe, producing a number of very influential works in Mathematics. In 1933 he became a permanent professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. In the war, von Neumann's primary work was on the atomic bomb. In 1944 he joined the American computing project in time to see the completion of the ENIAC. To discuss the beginnings of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), it is necessary to take a small step back in time. The two main forces behind the ENIAC were John W. Mauchly (1907-1980) and J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995). Mauchly was involved with a number of people who were considering the possibilities of electric digital machines. In 1941 he moved to the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, where he laid down his ideas for an electronic computer. This came to the attention of firstly Eckert at the Moore School and then Herman H. Goldstine (whose date of birth is absent not only from his book but is in none of the others) at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland. Work on the ENIAC began in April 1943. It was designed as a general purpose machine, with the instruction being set using vast numbers of switches and input and output were also stored on punch cards. Its major failing was that components regularly broke down: at Aberdeen it only operated for about 50% of the time. It took two and half years to reach this stage and its design changed regularly during this time. It is towards the end of ENIAC's construction that John von Neumann enters the picture. Unfortunately, by the time ENIAC was fully operational, the war had been over for three months. His main job with the ENIAC was with supervising testing. What von Neumann took from his time an ENIAC was a very full understanding of its short comings. It was with these in mind that he helped design EDVAC (Electronic Discrete VAriable Computer). In "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", von Neumann outlined what he saw as the main components of a computer. These, in modern terminology, are the arithmetic unit, the control unit, the memory and the input and output devices. The EDVAC was finally completed in 1951. This architecture, as it was developed in the later IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) project, is known as the von Neumann architecture and is still the standard architecture employed by machines today. The IAS project, where Neumann moved after EDVAC, is where "the concept of an electronic computer was created." ([Ash], p 167) It is very compelling to argue that Turing and von
Neumann embody the idea of
US and British pioneer counterparts of the title. The von Neumann architecture
and the Turing machines are, respectively, the practical and theoretical
underpinnings of the subject and both men played similar roles in computer
development before and after the war. That the Americans seem to have got more
initial credit as the inventors of the first computer has a lot to do with the
US government's increased willingness for the top secret work on computers to be
made public.
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| Herman Goldstine
References:
Useful links:
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Goldstine's work, [Gol], unsurprisingly, concentrates on the period just discussed and the years to follow, when he was working daily with many of the pioneers described above. In the preface to the 1993 edition, Goldstine, when commenting on how modern digital computers are found throughout business, mentions the basic structure of the computer "now known as the von Neumann architecture but described by Burks, von Neumann and myself." ([Gol], p X) Perhaps the obvious geniuses, such as Turing and von Neumann, overshadow some of the achievements of the other very intelligent individuals who surrounded them. Interestingly, [Ash] states that the EDVAC report in which von Neumann "outlined the principles for a very high-speed, automatic digital computing system" (p 162) was a joint report with Mauchly and Eckert and the report with Burks and Goldstine "was essentially a very much revised ... version of the ... EDVAC document." (p 166) Thus Goldstine, though not ignored by other sources, is hardly the foremost of those mentioned. His work provides an interesting primary source to compare with the other tertiary sources in the bibliography but one must beware of situations like that outlined above. |
References:
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Despite the British destruction of, and secrecy about, much of the wartime work, it is generally accepted that the first stored program machine was built in the UK{}, though much credit for this must go to the American EDVAC project already mentioned. After the war, Turing was installed as head of the newly formed electronics section in the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Turing himself produced a report on computer design, in 1945 after von Neumann's EDVAC report, and in 1946 a "summer school" on the American proposals helped cement the ideas in the British consciousness. Work took place at a number of sites - at NPL in Teddington and at Cambridge and Manchester Universities. The number of people involved increased and it is hard to single them out as individuals, though Turing worked on all three projects, ending at Manchester. The Manchester MADM (Manchester Automatic digital Machine) was the first functional machine but the Cambridge EDSAC (Electronic Delay Automatic Storage Calculator) named deliberately to pay homage to the American EDSAC was "the first to run nontrivial programs on a regular basis" ([Wil], p 323), which, it is not hard to argue, a fundamental part of being a computer.
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| Grace Hopper
References:
Useful links:
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Grace Hopper (1906-1992), mentioned in the title with John von Neumann, does not easily fit into the mould of all those previously mentioned. That Grace Hopper came up with some fundamental ideas in computer science is hardly in doubt. In 1952, Grace Hopper invented the compiler. This was a program that allowed computer programmers to input commands in a symbolic mathematical code. Prior to this, programmers had to use binary commands. The introduction of the compiler had obvious advantages, giving the programmers a much easier job when trying to remember commands. Not least of the other advantages was in finding errors, which were very hard to spot when all that was visible were strings of 0s and 1s. Hopper is credited with giving the name to computer "bugs", when a moth was found in one of the computers she was working on and she also invented COBOL, the original user-friendly business programming language. In considering Grace Hopper a computer pioneer there are two difficulties. Firstly, it can be argued that Hopper was not a pioneer. With the MADM and EDSAC running, the modern computer had been invented and built and those working in the area could no longer be considered pioneers. Hopper merely refined ideas in a well established domain. Though valid to a certain degree, this objection is rather fussy. New areas of computing are constantly opening up and those at the forefront of these fields remain pioneers. Most people would probably call Hopper a pioneer of computing and she can certainly be considered a pioneer in the field of computer software. This leads to the second problem, which is that most histories of computing, particularly those that are not web resources, focus on hardware. Not one book in the St Andrews library was found when a search was made for Grace Hopper and none of the books quoted in the bibliography include more than a few a pages on Hopper at the very most. This is not really surprising as until recently programming has been considered an art rather than a science - people were considered to have the knack or not. With the invention of easy to use languages, rather than obscure binary code, it was not necessary to be a computer specialist to be a programmer and Hopper had a big hand in this. Where she will finally be considered among the pioneers of computing is, however, hard to say but she should be there. An issue related to this, is that it is hard to say who a British counterpart of Hopper could be. Turing very neatly fits the mould of a British counterpart to von Neumann but, because of the lack of detailed and well-researched information available, it cannot be said whether or not such a counterpart exists for Hopper. An interesting point is that a number of the American scientists were not
Americans by birth. John von Neumann, for example, was a Hungarian by birth and
moved to America in 1930. This point is of more than passing interest and is
included for more than just the pedant. America has a unique position in its
ability to attract leading lights from other countries. This was enhanced by
WWII when a number of academics from Germany and other countries, such as
Hungary, that were threatened by Hitler, fled and often ended up in the USA. In
the field of mathematics, von Neumann's original field and one in which he did
much work, the US turned from a backwater into the major powerhouse in a matter
of years, with obvious knock-on affects in computing.
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| Konrad Zuse
References:
Useful links: |
A man who did not move away from Germany and a computer pioneer who seems
truly overshadowed is Konrad Zuse (1910-1995). Had the work of the
British pioneers at Bletchley Park not
been quite so effective during the war, then maybe Zuse would have greater
recognition. He began work on his computer in order to save himself time with
the calculations needed in his work as an aeronautical engineer. He started
construction of his first machine, the Z1, in 1936. The war initially put a
halt to his work, as he was drafted into the army. Six months later they were
persuaded to release him back to his previous job at an aircraft factory. He
started work on the Z2 immediately and soon he attracted the attention of the
German Aeronautical research unit. His Z3 machine was constructed by 1941 at
the institute and this was as fast as machines constructed by the allies more
that two years later. It was controlled by a program on tape, so though not a
stored program machine in the sense of the Manchester machine and its
contemporaries, it was still a fairly advanced piece of hardware. It was used
primarily in solving complex mathematical equations, in a similar way to the
American use of an analogue machine to help develop the atomic bomb. In
contrast to the American ENIAC which had to be tended very carefully, the Z3
could be left running alone overnight and regularly was. The Z1, Z2 and Z3
machines were destroyed during the war and soon after Z4 was developed in 1945
it was transported around the country to safety. The loss of the war and the
restrictions placed on German military and scientific development severely set
back Zuse's work and further machines produced by him were greatly inferior to
British or American products. However, not only did he produce one of the first
programmable computers, he also produced one of the first programming languages
in "Plankalkül". A descendant of this language is still in use today and
is known as ALGOL and for this alone he should have greater recognition than he
does.
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| Vannevar Bush
References:
Useful links:
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This essay has concentrated throughout on discrete or digital machines, with the latter - machines that work on Boolean logic where information is in the form of two distinct values, normally called 1 and 0 - being the foundation of modern computers. However, a great deal of work was done on analogue machines, especially in the first half of this century. Analogue computers use a continuous range of values to produce their results rather than sticking to values at the ends of an interval. Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) was an American pioneer of computing who worked on analogue computers. His first computer, called "A Continuous Intergraph", was built in 1927. This evaluated a certain class of integrals by means of comparing the current, the voltage and the power of an electric current with respect to time. A further Bush computer, the "differential analyser", was used a great deal by the Americans in producing the atomic bomb. Bush is said to have been a influence on the work developing ENIAC. These machines were very simple when compared to the early digital machine. Using Bush's ideas, a British mathematician built a copy of the differential analyser using only Meccano. | |||||||||||||||
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Meccano analyser:
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Bush and other analogue computing pioneers, though mentioned in some books,
do not seem to be very well known. [Ash] dedicates a
whole chapter to Bush and
the analogue computer, whereas in [Wil] analogue
computing merits but a few
pages. The cause for this disparity is the ubiquity of the digital computer and
that the differences between the digital computer and its analogue cousin seem
so large. The differences between analogue computers and digital computers mean
that analogue designers are not really seen as initiators of modern computing.
However, work is still being done on analogue computing. Some of the current
ideas, with buzz words such as "fuzzy logic," could yet turn the tide
back in favour of some form of analogue computing. An article in New Scientist
magazine from 15 November 1997 highlights
research that uses the transistors in
digital machines, taking into account not only the end states that correspond to
binary 1s and 0s but also the intermediate states. This is obviously an attempt
to return to some form of analogue computing and this, or other similar
research, could produce some profound results. Then Bush and the other
inventors of analogue computing could yet be seen as major pioneers of
computing.
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| Current Pioneers
Noyce & Moore
Cray
Gates
Wozniak & Jobs
Knuth |
Finally, who are going to be seen as the recent or current pioneers of computing to stand along side Grace Hopper? This is a hard question to answer, in the same way as it was hard to fit Hopper into the pantheon of computer pioneers described in the early part of this essay. The microprocessor, a now essential part of modern computing, was designed at Intel, a company founded by Dr Gordon E. Moore, who also came up with Moore's law (which postulates that the speed and power of microprocessors will double every two years), and Dr Robert N. Noyce. However, even now, less than 30 years after it was produced, there is already disagreement about who exactly had the first idea to build a computer on a chip. What is particularly interesting in light of the work of Babbage is that the impetus for this breakthrough was an order for a calculator. The process of events that lead to the design of the microprocessor progresses in a very similar, albeit much faster, way to Babbage's thoughts. Also in the hardware category is Seymour Cray, who designed and built the "supercomputers" that bear his name. People such as Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and still the chairman, and Steve Jobs, who founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and who is its current CEO, are those in the public eye. The Macintosh computer, and the operating system supplied with it, opened up home computing to a huge new public. Microsoft provided the operating system to the original IBM micro-computers with Intel microprocessors and now a Microsoft operating system is run by the majority of computers. These people will undoubtedly earn a place in history, but how significant they will be viewed is hard to say. Even more tricky is to single out theoreticians and academics. Donald Knuth seems a likely candidate, as the author "The Art of Computer Programming", a book which many consider the bible of programming. | |||||||||||||||
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Berners-Lee
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In finding candidates to be considered as current pioneers, it has been very
hard to come across British names. Certainly a great deal of work is still
being carried out in computer science in this country, not least at this
university. A field where a British computer scientist has been instrumental
from the start is the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee is the director of the
World Wide Web Consortium and is credited as the inventor of the web
during his time at CERN. He, however, works at MIT in the States and is hardly
a household name. This obviously does not exclude him from being a British
computer pioneer but seems to typify the current lack of obvious candidates.
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| Conclusion
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It seems fair to argue that the British pioneers, after some neglect from computer historians on the other side of the Atlantic during the 60s and 70s (due mostly to ignorance of the British work during WWII) have not generally been overshadowed. Where the British do not claim the limelight, the work of those that do seems to be genuinely of a higher class. This lack of overshadowing could be because the books used for this essay were British editions of books from a British library. To check this theory, a quick straw pole of internet web sites, was conducted, using a British search engine, www.looksmart.co.uk, and an American one, www.infoseek.com. The results are in the table below. The search was conducted on 29th January 1999, using the general search in Looksmart and the advanced search in Infoseek.
The two British pioneers have the highest number of matches in both searches, with Grace Hopper by far the least (though she still has a not unimpressive number of hits). This on its own does not signify anything - anybody can post whatever they want onto the web and it can be picked up by search engine. In conjunction with the rest of the essay, however, it backs up the claim that British pioneers are not overshadowed. It is still possible that non-English speaking pioneers are being ignored by the Anglophones but all the information makes this seem unlikely. The work of Britain and the US in the war, with its great success and the huge advancements that took place, set both countries up in a very good position to continue pioneering work in the field of computing. | |||||||||||||||
| *[Ash], p 196 |
That someone, somewhere has been overshadowed is not unlikely and, almost
undoubtedly, a 20th century of equivalent of Schickard will emerge. What also
seems likely at this time is that the US will overshadow Britain and the rest of
the world in computing as the 21st century begins in the same way as they have
in the last quarter or even half of the 20th. The latter sections of this essay
have a predominance of Americans, but this seems to be a fair reflection of the
work carried out. Even by 1970, America had ten times as many computers as the
UK*. The American computer industry is
now very large and has a
hugely dominant position in the world market built on the work of those
mentioned above. Such predictions, however, are always risky. The world wide
web should turn computing into a truly global phenomenon, though at this time
the vast majority of those accessing the web are in the US. Even leaving the
web aside, no one can tell when someone will have the inspiration that starts a
paradigmatic shift and the next Turing, about to change the course of computing
in favour of British dominance, could be sitting at the machine beside this one
this essay was written on.
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References
Bibliography
[Ash] Pioneers of Computing, F. Gareth Ashurst, Frederick Muller Limited, London, 1983
[Asp] John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing, William Asprey, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992
[Gol] The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Herman H. Goldstine, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993 (1972)
[Ral] Encyclopaedia of Computer Science, Editor: Anthony Ralston, First Edition, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, New York, 1976
[Wil] A History of Computing Technology, Michael R. Williams, Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey, 1985
World Wide Web Sites{ With the large number of sites dedicated to a topic such as this, it is hard to know exactly where each nugget of information was mined. Thus, this list may not be complete but it is more likely to err on the side of caution and contain sites that, in the end, were not used. All sites that have been used were accessed between 6th and 15th February and, in all cases, it was attempted to find more than one source for any information from the web.}
[Ble] Bletchley Park Home Page, http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/ccc/bpark/
[COB] Hopper, Grace: the Inventor of COBOL, http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~ella/Hopper.html
[GCH] Government Communications Headquarters, http://www.gchq.gov.uk/
[HoC] The History of Computing, http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/index.html
[Hop] Grace Murray Hopper, http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/tap/Files/hopper-story.html
[Inv] The Lemelson-MIT Awards Program Invention Dimension, http://web.mit.edu/invent/
[NSc] New Scientist Planet Science, http://www.newscientist.com/
[StA] St Andrews History of Mathematics, http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/
[W3C] The World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/
[Wom] Past Notable Women of Computing, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/past-women-cs.html
