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.
Lovelace comes to mind. So do Vannevar Bush and Edmund Berkeley.
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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Evan A Koblentz Staff Writer, Office of Strategic Communications Adjunct Instructor, Ying Wu College of Computing evan.a.koblentz@njit.edu • (973) 596-3065 https://web.njit.edu/~evank @TechnicallyEvan