Re: The early history of electronic computing

All


I should have made it clear that my last post concerning: 'The early history
of electronic computing' was compiled by J V Field.

My apologies for not making this clear when I posted.


Regards

Graham Ellsbury






> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bletchley Park discussion 
> [mailto:BLETCHLEYPARK-0lvw86wZMd/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Graham Ellsbury
> Sent: 20 February 2008 12:20
> To: BLETCHLEYPARK-0lvw86wZMd/[email protected]
> Subject: [BPARK] 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://ww
w.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://ww
w.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://ww
w.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