Abstract
In the early twenty-first century, we have so much computing power at our fingertips—as evidenced in our smart phones and tablets and laptops—that it is hard to conceive of the difficulties scientists in the mid-twentieth century experienced in tackling some of their formidable computing challenges. Because of the complete transformation effected by the transition from calculations done by hand—essentially the entire period prior to World War II—to the advent of rapid machine calculations in the post-war period and especially after the early 1960s, it seems to this writer worthwhile to step back temporarily from our focus on white dwarfs to review briefly this remarkable change.
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Notes
- 1.
Smiley (<CitationRef CitationID="CR47” >2010)</Citation Ref>, p. 1.
- 2.
Ibid, p. 3.
- 3.
Ibid, pp. 56 ff.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid, p. 64.
- 6.
Ibid, pp. 89 ff.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Mauchly had previously visited Atanasoff and Berry at the Iowa State campus, and the question of who actually came up first with the key ideas for electronic digital computers was subsequently to become the focus of a bitterly contested lawsuit. The issue was finally decided in Atanasoff’s favor only in 1973.
- 9.
Smiley (<CitationRef CitationID="CR47” >2010</Citation Ref>), p. 89 ff.
- 10.
Ibid, p. 93.
- 11.
Ibid, p. 95.
- 12.
Watson and Petre (<CitationRef CitationID="CR56” >1990)</Citation Ref>, pp. 188ff.
- 13.
The discussion of wartime computational efforts at Los Alamos quotes extensively from Feynman (<CitationRef CitationID="CR12” >1986)</Citation Ref>, pp. 108 ff, except as otherwise noted in the text.
- 14.
In the mid-1930s, IBM was a fairly new company,” Smiley (<CitationRef CitationID="CR47” >2010</Citation Ref>), writes on p. 25, “the product of several mergers, but having its origins in the Tabulating Machine Company, which had been founded in 1896 by inventor Herman Hollerith – his first model had been used in the census of 1900. In 1911, several companies joined to form the CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Corporation, which offered a wide range of services to businesses … Thomas J. Watson, Sr., had become president in 1915, and the name of the company was changed to International Business Machines in 1924. In 1928, IBM introduced the standard eighty-column punch card (the Hollerith card) that came to be familiar to students and secretaries for decades afterward. A 1931 model … seemed exciting at the time—one astronomer declared himself thrilled just watching how quickly the machine went through its additions and subtractions.”
- 15.
Rhodes (<CitationRef CitationID="CR39” >1986)</Citation Ref>, p. 544.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Rhodes (<CitationRef CitationID="CR40” >1995)</Citation Ref>, p. 250.
- 18.
Smiley (<CitationRef CitationID="CR47” >2010)</Citation Ref>, p. 115.
- 19.
Watson and Petre (<CitationRef CitationID="CR56” >1990)</Citation Ref>, p. 135.
- 20.
Smiley (<CitationRef CitationID="CR47” >2010)</Citation Ref>, p. 150.
- 21.
Rhodes (<CitationRef CitationID="CR40” >1995</Citation Ref>), p. 383.
- 22.
Watson and Petre (<CitationRef CitationID="CR56” >1990)</Citation Ref>, p. 188.
- 23.
Ibid, pp. 203 ff.
- 24.
Ibid, p. 207.
- 25.
Ibid, p. 229.
- 26.
Ibid, p. 243.
- 27.
Ibid, p. 295 ff.
- 28.
Ibid, pp. 346 ff.
- 29.
Ibid, p. 382.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid, pp. 383–384.
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Van Horn, H.M. (2015). Interlude: Crossing the Digital Divide. In: Unlocking the Secrets of White Dwarf Stars. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09369-7_9
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