(Apologies if this ends up appearing twice on the list, but I think I may have sent it to the wrong address earlier). 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@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@gmail.com <mailto:metaphorz@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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-- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research Group, University of Western Sydney _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org