Abstract
In October 1945, a conference on Advanced Computation Techniques was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many of the presentations at the conference were about a new type of computing machine, one which worked on digital rather than analogue principles, provided a much greater degree of automation than existing machines, and in some cases held the promise of extremely fast computational speeds. There were many differences of detail between these machines, and the fact that one of them, the ENIAC, was the first large-scale electronic machine has often led historians to consider it in isolation as a precursor of later developments. However, when viewed from the perspective of the development of programming, it is evident that a common approach informs the design of all these machines, one which represents a distinctive stage in the development of automatic computation. This chapter gives a brief description of some of these machines and the way they were programmed, before drawing some general conclusions about their common features.
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Notes
- 1.
A brief summary of the conference was given by Archibald (1946).
- 2.
The biographical details in this section are largely taken from Zuse’s autobiography, first published in German in 1984. See Zuse (1993) for a translation.
- 3.
Ceruzzi (1983), p. 29.
- 4.
This description, together with the following details on programming the Z3, are taken from Rojas (2000).
- 5.
Aiken (1937).
- 6.
Aiken and Hopper (1946).
- 7.
The code numbers represent the columns to be punched in each field of the tape. The location code 21, therefore, indicates that columns 1 and 2 would be punched, giving a representation of the binary numeral 00000011, corresponding to register 3.
- 8.
Bloch (1947).
- 9.
- 10.
Mauchly (1942).
- 11.
Burks (1947), p. 756.
- 12.
Fritz (1994).
- 13.
Goldstine and Goldstine (1946) give a contemporary account of the ENIAC, from which many of the following details are taken.
- 14.
Proposal for ENIAC, 4/8/43, quoted in Marcus and Akera (1996).
- 15.
This diagram is adapted from an example given by Goldstine and Goldstine (1946), p. 108. The major difference is that Fig. 5.1 shows the program pulses being passed directly between units whereas the original shows the program lines explicitly, making it harder to following the routing of the pulses.
- 16.
This diagram is adapted from an example given by Goldstine and Goldstine (1946), p. 109. As in Fig. 5.1, the routing of program pulses between units is shown directly, Note that the labelling of the program lines is consistent with the original diagram, and that the program pulses are emitted in the order A1, A2, A3, A5, A6, A4.
- 17.
- 18.
The terminology of pages and blocks reflects the extent to which table tapes were seen simply as an automated version of existing manual tables.
- 19.
The Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance and Harvard University (1947).
- 20.
Williams (1947).
- 21.
Speiser (2000).
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Priestley, M. (2011). Automating Control. In: A Science of Operations. History of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-555-0_5
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