The early history of electronic computing

The British Computer Society has now published the Proceedings of the
conference 'Alan Mathison Turing 2004: A celebration of his life and
achievements', held in Manchester (UK) on 5 June 2004.

See : 
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.00100v005003001003003>http://www.bcs
.org/server.php?show=nav.00100v005003001003003
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.9917>

Readers of this list may be particularly interested in the following three
contributions

David Anderson (Portsmouth) 'Was the Manchester "Baby" conceived at
Bletchley Park?'
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17134>http://www.bcs.org/serve
r.php?show=ConWebDoc.17134

Barry Cooper (Leeds) 'The Incomputable Alan Turing'
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17130>http://www.bcs.org/serve
r.php?show=ConWebDoc.17130

Andrew Hodges (Oxford) 'Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis of
computing'
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17127>http://www.bcs.org/serve
r.php?show=ConWebDoc.17127

Abstracts are appended.


                                                           JVF


David Anderson (Portsmouth) 'Was the Manchester "Baby" conceived at
Bletchley Park?'

ABSTRACT:
Anderson examines the role played by a group of mathematicians and former
Bletchley Park code-breakers under the leadership of Max Newman in the
development of the world's first electronic digital stored-program computer:
"the Baby". The group comprised Newman himself, Jack Good, David Rees and
(latterly) Alan Turing. Based on an extensive re-examination of the primary
source material and archival recordings, Anderson identifies and confronts a
number of key myths underlying the dominant historical account of the
period. 
He considers the extent to which there is evidence to support the contention
that the Manchester Baby actually owed a significant intellectual debt to
work carried out, under conditions of the strictest secrecy during the
Second World War, at Bletchley Park. 
This leads him to reject the "Two project myth" the central claim of which
is that the Baby was developed, without significant outside assistance, by
the engineer F.C. Williams and his research student T. 
Kilburn. Anderson argues that the notion that no significant financial
support for the building of the Baby was provided by Newman is a "Financial
myth" and provides evidence for the first time that despite the general
constraints of secrecy under which the Bletchley Park code breakers had, in
general, to operate, Newman was officially sanctioned in transferring
knowledge gained during the wartime development of the Colossus machine from
Bletchley Park into the civilian world thus challenging the "Myth of
secrecy". This opens the way to arguing that Turing's insights on the theory
of computation may, through Newman's agency, have been more significant in
the early development of British computing than has generally been supposed.

FULL TEXT AT
<http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper3.pdf>http://www.bcs.org/uplo
ad/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper3.pdf


Barry Cooper (Leeds) 'The Incomputable Alan Turing'

ABSTRACT:
The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian 
predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around 
300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing's 1936 discovery (along with 
Alonzo Church) of the existence of unsolvable problems. This paper 
focuses on incomputability as a powerful theme in Turing's work and 
personal life, and examines its role in his evolving concept of 
machine intelligence. It also traces some of the ways in which 
important new developments are anticipated by Turing's ideas in logic.

FULL TEXT AT 
<http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper2.pdf>http://www.bcs.org/uplo
ad/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper2.pdf


Andrew Hodges (Oxford) 'Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis 
of computing'

ABSTRACT:
Half a century after Alan Turing's death in 1954, we can ask whether 
computing can go beyond the framework of computability that he set 
out in his classic 1936 paper On
computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. 
We shall do so in the light of what Turing himself did, starting with 
his work in 1936.

FULL TEXT AT 
<http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper1.pdf>http://www.bcs.org/uplo
ad/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper1.pdf


-- 
J. V. Field
Honorary Visiting Research Fellow
School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
[email protected]
tel/fax +44.20.7736.9198
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/staff/researchstaff/JVField