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

[Janet Abbate]

Keep up the good fight, Tom. 

You might be amused by this excerpt from a 1970 letter to the editor of ACM that I recently came across: 
"In glancing over recent publications of the ACM, I was struck by the dearth of papers on the subject of machine organization or architecture. … 
Apparently the ACM establishment believes, with many others, that von Neumann actually did come down the side of Mt. Sinai with two clay tablets under his arm." 

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate
Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
Virginia Tech
www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS



On Jan 17, 2014, at 3:47 21PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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