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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