[SIGCIS-Members] My column on Turing and the Invention of the Computer

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello everyone,

You may be interested in my newly published Communications of the ACM Column
"Actually, Turing Did Not Invent the Computer." (It was supposed to be
"didn't'" but I think that was an informality too far for the ACM).

You can read it at
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/1/170862-actually-turing-did-not-invent-t
he-computer/abstract. Or if you do not have an ACM subscription,
http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/CACMActuallyTuringDidNotInventTheComp
uter.pdf. 

This had its origins in my presentation of some of my ongoing work on ENIAC
over the summer, where I was discussing the different clusters of ideas
found in von Neumann's 1945 "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." I'd
expected that any questions about the attribution of these ideas to von
Neumann would come from partisans shouting that he had merely stolen the
ideas of Eckert and Mauchly and had preemptively noted that while the credit
for these ideas had been disputed the impact of the report hadn't.

Instead, all anyone wanted to talk about was how von Neumann had taken the
ideas from. Turing! Further investigation revealed that a series of
increasingly tenuous claims about the similarity between Turing's famous
paper and the "First Draft" had been spreading in recent years, reaching a
peak with Turing's recent centenary. Professionally trained historians of
computing largely moved on from the events of the 1940s a generation ago,
leaving the history of early computing to computer scientists, philosophers,
logicians, and the partisans of various famous machines and their inventors.
(This is beginning to change again, fortunately). I think also that the
public really has room in its collective memory for just one famous person
per technology, usually its inventor. Thus if someone has heard of Turing
doing something famous with computers then they are likely to assume he
invented the computer.

Hence the need for a concise and balanced assessment of the actual
situation. The paper is indebted to discussions with many of you on this
topic, including Paul Ceruzzi, David Hemmendinger, Edgar G. Daylight, Pierre
Mounier Kuhn, and my collaborator on the ENIAC project Mark Priestley.

Best wishes,

Tom