[SIGCIS-Members] Diagrammatic models of human computing

Mark Priestley m.priestley at gmail.com
Sun Apr 19 02:43:09 PDT 2015


Hello everybody,

One aspect that hasn't (to the best of my knowledge) been mentioned in
discussions of the origins of the von Neumann/Goldstine notion of
flowcharting is the work that was done in visualizing computational flow as
part of the ENIAC project. (The following comments draw heavily on work
done with Tom Haigh and Crispin Rope as part of the "ENIAC in Action"
<http://eniacinaction.com/> project.)

The famous "plugging and switching" of the ENIAC allowed basic sequences of
operations to be set up (and a bit more than that, but that's a detail) but
the team soon realized - by the end of 1943 - that they would need ways of
combining sequences into structures of arbitrary complexity, involving
repetition and conditional branching. During 1944 they investigated various
ways of doing this "sequence programming" (their term) before settling on
the design of ENIAC's master programmer, the central unit where loops and
branching were controlled. Program structures were illustrated using
"master programmer diagrams" which showed the basic sequences as unanalyzed
blocks linked by simplified representations of the settings of the master
programmer's "steppers". These diagrams first appeared in public in a
report written for the Applied Mathematics Panel in November 1945 and were
later used, for example, by Douglas Hartree to document his 1946 ENIAC
program.

So the ENIAC modeled general computational flow using complex "switches"
(the steppers) that both counted iterations and provided multi-way
branching. The EDVAC design & code of spring 1945 reduced this complexity
to the more primitive notions of binary decisions and address modification.
I suggest that when they came to try to visualize programs in 1946/7, von
Neumann and Goldstine (who clearly would have been familiar with the ENIAC
notation) performed a similar reduction, replacing the steppers on the
master programming diagrams with the "alternative boxes" of their flow
diagram notation. If you do this, you have the basic flow diagram notation:
vN+G's "operation boxes ... where no branching or merger takes place" are
functionally equivalent to the basic sequences appearing on the master
programmer diagrams.

So I don't think it's necessary to look as far afield as chemical
engineering or process modeling to see where the flow diagram notation came
from. We have not found the term "flow diagram" itself anywhere in the
ENIAC literature, however.

Best wishes

Mark

On 19 April 2015 at 09:03, Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk>
wrote:

> I'd be most grateful for pointers to very early flowcharting under any
> name -- esp. prior to Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann, who called
> flowcharts "flow diagrams", in "Planning and Coding of Problems for an
> Electronic Computing Instrument", Part II, Vol. I (1947). This document is
> available for download from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
> Martin Campbell-Kelly, in "From Theory to Practice: The Invention of
> Programming, 1947-51", p. 27, says that the term is "completely original"
> with Goldstine and von Neumann.
>
> Another teasing question is what flowcharting, under any name, has to do
> with the phrase "think out of the box". Any clues?
>
> Yours,
> WM
>
> On 18/04/2015 22:58, Bjorn Westergard wrote:
>
>> There was some chatter about this during the Dearborn conference.
>>
>> I'm struggling to recall where, but I've seen some "flowcharts" for
>> semi-automatic computation with single-operation IBM machines.
>> Flowcharts have a longer history in industrial engineering, which is a
>> tantalizing connection to labor history labor process theory.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Apr 18, 2015, at 5:34 PM, Paul Fishwick <metaphorz at gmail.com
>> <mailto:metaphorz at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I recently listened to a podcast on Pickering's human-intensive computing
>>> for processing astronomical data. Here is a wiki page that contains an
>>> overview and
>>> photograph from 1890:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
>>>
>>> I am seeking diagrammatic workflow models of the types of computation
>>> that occurred
>>> under Pickering's direction, but more generally, any articles or texts
>>> that contain such
>>> diagrams for human computing. I am familiar with modern formalisms
>>> such as
>>> BPMN: http://www.bpmn.org/ in which business workflows might be
>>> formalized. I also have
>>> read Grier's excellent book:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691091579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429392009&sr=8-1&keywords=when+computers+were+human
>>> <
>>> http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691091579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429392009&sr=8-1&keywords=when+computers+were+human
>>> >
>>>
>>> The history and cultural context is interesting to me, and most
>>> appropriate for engaging
>>> readers, however, the main end-point in this story-telling process,
>>> for me, is for people to
>>> appreciate the path toward the diagrammatic formalisms with their
>>> nodes, merges, branches, and
>>> connections.
>>>
>>> If I need to, I can embark on a path toward creating some models with
>>> the written historical
>>> accounts as a guide, but I thought that checking here would be the
>>> best starting location in this
>>> quest for diagrammatic evidence.
>>>
>>> -paul
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Paul Fishwick, PhD
>>> Chair, ACM SIGSIM
>>> Distinguished University Chair of Arts & Technology
>>> and Professor of Computer Science
>>> Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
>>> The University of Texas at Dallas
>>> Arts & Technology
>>> 800 West Campbell Road, AT10
>>> Richardson, TX 75080-3021
>>> Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick <http://utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick>
>>> Lab Blog: creative-automata.com <http://creative-automata.com>
>>> SIGSIM Blog: modelingforeveryone.com <http://modelingforeveryone.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>
> --
> Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital
> Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research
> Group, University of Western Sydney
> _______________________________________________
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