Doug, I suggest you think about this question in the context of signalling and communications more broadly. Specifically, consider the genealogy of telegraphy, which begins with connected machines and includes the idea of remote automation, predating Turing by centuries. Best, Dennis Dennis Yi Tenen Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature Data Science Institute, Affiliated Member, Data, Media and Society Columbia University denten.github.io/ | @dennistenen <https://twitter.com/dennistenen> | 415.215.3315 *Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation <http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26821>* On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 5:44 PM Douglas Lucas <dal@riseup.net> wrote:
Dear SIGCIS members,
I'm a freelance writer/journalist who's published in multiple news outlets on hacktivism and who's lurked on this email list for some time. The past several months, I've been reading a great dealing about Alan Turing and the math behind *Computable Numbers* (fundamental theorem of arithmetic, Gödel encoding, etc). A fairly straightforward question occurred to me, one I hope this list can help answer:
As is well known, Turing's 1936 paper *Computable Numbers* invented the concept of a universal machine, which includes what today would be called an airgapped computer. For quite a while, all computers (universal machines) were airgapped devices. The historical casual chain is clear: first the idea documented in *Computable Numbers *came into existence, and only later are physical computers actually built, initially as standalone, airgapped devices.
But how did plugging computers into one another with wires/cables begin? Did a thinker first conceive of a profound idea underpinning wired/cabled networking, and then only later, engineers implemented that concept in the physical realm? Or, did people first begin hooking computers up to one another, perhaps experimentally, and then a theorist subsequently created an idea to describe/frame what was happening (maybe a mathematical graph theory or something)?
To put it another way, in terms of a simple standardized test-like verbal analogy, *Computable Numbers* is to airgapped computers as ??? is to wired/cabled networking of computers.
I omit wireless connections (e.g., Bluetooth) for the time being.
Thanks much,
Doug Lucas _______________________________________________ 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