[SIGCIS-Members] The Communicators

[Allan Olley]

Evan,
 	Norbert Wiener was both someone working inside various computing 
fields and was also a best selling author and computers come up both in 
Cybernetics and the Human Use of Human Beings. So I think he must be 
important in terms of understanding the public reception of computing, 
which would have to feed back into computing at some level in addition to 
his contributions to forming a set of research programs in Cybernetics and 
allied fields.
 	Douglas Hartree strikes me as someone who had an outsized 
influence in the perception of computing inside the sciences and technical 
fields in the 40s and 50s if not as much with the general public. Although 
he was also a contributer in terms of just directly doing computing in 
science.
 	I think Alan Turing not only made technical contributions to 
comptuers and computing, I think some of his notable contributions are 
less hard contributions to computing and more talking about computing, 
again both to technically minded and lay audiences. For example he 
actually gave a BBC radio lecture on "Can Digital Computers Think?" and 
in that vein his more famous essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" 
less direct techincal contributions to computing than about computing if 
I understand your sense.
 	BV Bowden's Faster Than Thought, has been mentioned, I would 
second that my sense is that it was read both by those inside the field 
already and the general public and that it was an important starting 
point for many people's understanding of computing. Note Turing was a 
contributor to that.

 	Marshall McLuhan was a very successful author and speaker on ideas 
about communicaiton that included and extended at least a little to the 
use of computers in communications. I don't know much about McLuhan or his 
influence on thought about computers, but it seems like a factor.

 	I'm sure a lot of computer pioneers engaged in some writing and 
talking about computing in general. How successful that was at the time 
and what it did to the computing field is obscure so the above list is 
people I am relatively sure had an outsized influence. For example I know 
that Wallace J. Eckert astronomer, IBM researcher and director of the 
First Thomas J. Watson laboratory co-wrote with Rebecca Jones in 1955 
Faster, Faster Faster, Faster. A Simple Description of a Giant Electronic 
Calculator and the Problems It Solves, about the NORC computer (the Naval 
Ordinance Research Calculator), but also just about how computers in 
general work and can be used.
 	I have no idea what sales were like for that book, but it was translated 
into German at least suggesting some success (or that IBM was really 
desperate to sell it anyway). Eckert also spent some time talking up 
computer and punched card methods to other scientists and engineers 
especially around 1945-1954 and published an early book on Punched Card 
Methods in 1940 that had at least a little influence in science and tech.
 	I suspect if you look at other pioneers (Wilkes, Mauchley, Hopper 
etc.) you can find lots of examples of them writing about computing in 
addition to their direct contributions. How much this shaped letter 
developments is probably somewhat obscure.

 	There are certainly a fair number of books on how cybernetic ideas 
influenced later computer and computer adjacent projects like From 
Cyberculture to Counterculture and Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries 
and Kline's the Cybernetic Moment touches on this more generally. I've 
just been reading a bunch of those books so they are frontmost in my mind. 
Likewise and closely related it is commonly accepted by historians of 
computing in my experience that Operation Research played a big role in 
the use of computers (and in the books I previously mentioned Cybernetics 
and OR is often intertwined), so general thought around that probably 
shaped comptuer use and projects (cue drawing of a WWII plane with bullet 
holes in it).

-- 
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley, PhD

http://individual.utoronto.ca/fofound

On Thu, 17 Mar 2022, Evan Koblentz wrote:

> 
> I’m interested in a new-to-me research angle: the people who changed computing by writing about it.
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> 
> Lovelace comes to mind. So do Vannevar Bush and Edmund Berkeley.
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>  1. Who else should I consider from prior to 1965? (I have the microcomputer generation covered.)
>  2. Are there existing papers on this subject?
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> 
> NJIT logo
> 
> Evan A Koblentz
> Staff Writer, Office of Strategic Communications
> Adjunct Instructor, Ying Wu College of Computing
> evan.a.koblentz at njit.edu • (973) 596-3065
> https://web.njit.edu/~evank
> @TechnicallyEvan
>
> 
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>