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>

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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

_______________________________________________ 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

-- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research Group, University of Western Sydney

Flowcharting was borrowed from industrial engineering. You can find examples in textbooks of the era. Henry Leffingwell's writings on office management have some interesting diagrams that could be considered precursors to flowcharting but they were almost certainly not known to Goldstine et al. I would suggest looking at the Log for the penn differential analyzer or the Ucla differential analyzer to see if they treated problems the same way. _______________ David Alan Grier George Washington University Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 19, 2015, at 4:03 AM, 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>

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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

_______________________________________________ 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

-- 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

One of the very best examples of elaborate plans for human computers is Lewis Fry Richardson’s 1922 book about numerical weather prediction. He designed computing forms that would allow calculations of future weather to be performed in a kind of parallel-processing mode by a vast ensemble of human computers. He did a test calculation using his own forms, but it was a failure due to computational error amplification of a type no one understood at the time. Richardson wrote up an elaborate (and beautifully written) scheme for a kind of stadium filled with some 64,000 human computers (interesting number, that). He called this the “forecast-factory.” The ”factory” — really more like a numerical orchestra for global weather prediction — would have filled a vast theater with 64,000 human computers. The following three paragraphs are quoted from LF Richardson, Weather Prediction By Numerical Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, p 219). "Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little ‘night signs’ display the instantaneous values so that neighboring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand. Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station. Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar. In a neighbouring building there is a research department, where they invent improvements. But there is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre. In a basement an enthusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining of a huge spinning bowl, but so far the arithmetic proves the better way. In another building are all the usual financial, correspondence and administrative offices. Outside are playing fields, houses, mountains, and lakes, for it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely." Peter Lynch has a nice book on Richardson that reproduces the computing forms, and both he and I included François Schuiten’s lovely graphic representation of the forecast-factory in our respective books: Lynch, Peter. 2006. The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson’s Dream. New York: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, PN. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) - Paul Edwards

On Apr 19, 2015, at 10:41 , David Hemmendinger <hemmendd@union.edu> wrote:

Another early source, from the time-and-motion studies pioneers: Process Charts, Frank B. Gilbreth, Lillian M. Gilbreth (1921), American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It's available at https://archive.org/details/processcharts00gilb . Among its symbols are "moved by boy" and "moved by messenger boy".

David Hemmendinger hemmendd@union.edu Professor Emeritus http://athena.union.edu/~hemmendd Computer Science Dept. +1 518 346 4489 Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308 FAX: +1 518 388 6789

...

Flowcharting was borrowed from industrial engineering. You can find examples in textbooks of the era. Henry Leffingwell's writings on office management have some interesting diagrams that could be considered precursors to flowcharting but they were almost certainly not known to Goldstine et al. I would suggest looking at the Log for the penn differential analyzer or the Ucla differential analyzer to see if they treated problems the same way.

---

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

___________________________ Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> and History <http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/>, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming <http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/vastmachine/index.html> (MIT Press, 2010) Terse replies are deliberate <http://five.sentenc.es/> (and better than nothing) University of Michigan School of Information <http://www.si.umich.edu/> 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu <http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/>

(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>

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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

_______________________________________________ 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

-- 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

Thank you all for an enlightening discussion around the use of diagrammatic approaches. This leads to some comments and followup questions: (1) What may have proceeded diagrams? I would think natural language descriptions, tables, and log books, as suggested. Without a diagram, the processes involved have to be gleaned in these more traditional formats. Creating a modern diagram is possible but only with a good deal of research. Apart from Babbage's remarkable diagram (and the 20th tradition of charting as described in this thread), the practice of "formalizing the process" (of human computing), even in pure natural language, seems not commonplace. (2) Brian: you quote Swade's article, which I found most informative, but I had a question. If one proceeds to http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030106.html and then looks at Illustration # 17 (Mechanical notation), there is a citation labeled 18. This citation is for this article: 18 Babbage, Charles. ‘On the Determination of the General Term of a New Class of Infinite Series.’ Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 2 (1826): 217-25. Reprinted in Works, Vol. 2, pp. 61-8. See p. 62. But if one goes to archive.org, and reads this article (pp. 217-25), the referenced illustration is not present. Here is the link: https://archive.org/details/transactionsofca02camb There are no figures in Babbage's paper. In the hope that I might find the paper in the appendix, I also searched there. Do you know where it is published? (3) Paul: I also like Richardson's book. Also, the quote that you include is a good example of how some, like Richardson, describe the human process in natural language without the use of tables, lists, diagrams, etc. (4) David H.: I also have that one but nothing earlier on the use of symbols or diagrams for human interaction for business or industrial processes. Do you know of other, earlier examples? Perhaps David G.'s suggestion of Leffingwell is a good place to begin. I'll do a search. (5) As for Pickering and the Harvard Computers, I believe I have enough from videos, scholarly publications, and online resources to fabricate an information workflow model consisting of (a) the act of an astronomer taking one of two types of plates: optical vs. spectral, (b) a cabinet where the glass plates were stored, (c) the explanations of the key women who made it all work, including the interesting task of overlaying plates to search for Cepheid variables. The information flows are all there in the historical ether, and only remain to be drawn. As to why I am doing all of this, it is in preparation for a short lecture on computing, and contextualizing computing within culture and history. By doing so, to illustrate computing as information science and management (human computing provides an excellent resource). -paul On Apr 19, 2015, at 12:35 PM, Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu> wrote:

Very interesting.

This calls to mind some period diagrams of computational flows in the pioneering weather forecasts run on the ENIAC. I often show these in talks because the flow included both pre- and post-processing phases done by human beings - e.g. “prepare punch card deck for step 4,” on p. 309 of Platzman, G. W. 1979. “The ENIAC Computations of 1950 — Gateway to Numerical Weather Prediction.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 60 (4): 302-12.

Another good flow diagram, this time for analysis of incoming weather data, is on p. 334 of Bedient, H. A., and G. P. Cressman. 1957. “An Experiment in Automatic Data Processing.” Monthly Weather Review 85 (10): 333-40.

Best,

Paul

...

On Apr 19, 2015, at 11:10 , Mark Priestley <m.priestley@gmail.com> wrote:

(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" 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>

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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

_______________________________________________ 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

-- 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

_______________________________________________ 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

___________________________

Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)

Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)

University of Michigan School of Information 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

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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 Lab Blog: creative-automata.com SIGSIM Blog: modelingforeveryone.com

Paul You can start with Ure. Most of his drawings are like patent drawing, which explain the operation of machines but he starts to abstract them to show how things operate. Brunell might also have some interesting things in his collection. He also relied on classical drawings and used lists to work out how machines operated but he might have had moved to something closer to block diagrams. Both would have been known to Babbage. David -------------------------------- David Alan Grier http://video.dagrier.net http://erranthashtag.dagrier.net Associate Professor, International Science & Technology Policy Elliott School of International Affairs George Washington University grier@gwu.edu

On Apr 20, 2015, at 6:38 AM, Brian Randell <brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi Paul:

Sorry - I don’t have an answer to your question.

I suggest you ask Doron Swade yourself. (You are welcome to say that I advised you to do this - I know Doron well.)

His email address is:

doron.swade@blueyonder.co.uk

Cheers

Brian

On 19 Apr 2015, at 21:27, Paul Fishwick <metaphorz@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Thank you all for an enlightening discussion around the use of diagrammatic approaches. This leads to some comments and followup questions:

(1) What may have proceeded diagrams? I would think natural language descriptions, tables, and log books, as suggested. Without a diagram, the processes involved have to be gleaned in these more traditional formats. Creating a modern diagram is possible but only with a good deal of research. Apart from Babbage's remarkable diagram (and the 20th tradition of charting as described in this thread), the practice of "formalizing the process" (of human computing), even in pure natural language, seems not commonplace.

(2) Brian: you quote Swade's article, which I found most informative, but I had a question. If one proceeds to http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030106.html and then looks at Illustration # 17 (Mechanical notation), there is a citation labeled 18. This citation is for this article:

18 Babbage, Charles. ‘On the Determination of the General Term of a New Class of Infinite Series.’ Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 2 (1826): 217-25. Reprinted in Works, Vol. 2, pp. 61-8. See p. 62.

But if one goes to archive.org, and reads this article (pp. 217-25), the referenced illustration is not present. Here is the link: https://archive.org/details/transactionsofca02camb There are no figures in Babbage's paper. In the hope that I might find the paper in the appendix, I also searched there. Do you know where it is published?

(3) Paul: I also like Richardson's book. Also, the quote that you include is a good example of how some, like Richardson, describe the human process in natural language without the use of tables, lists, diagrams, etc.

(4) David H.: I also have that one but nothing earlier on the use of symbols or diagrams for human interaction for business or industrial processes. Do you know of other, earlier examples? Perhaps David G.'s suggestion of Leffingwell is a good place to begin. I'll do a search.

(5) As for Pickering and the Harvard Computers, I believe I have enough from videos, scholarly publications, and online resources to fabricate an information workflow model consisting of (a) the act of an astronomer taking one of two types of plates: optical vs. spectral, (b) a cabinet where the glass plates were stored, (c) the explanations of the key women who made it all work, including the interesting task of overlaying plates to search for Cepheid variables. The information flows are all there in the historical ether, and only remain to be drawn.

As to why I am doing all of this, it is in preparation for a short lecture on computing, and contextualizing computing within culture and history. By doing so, to illustrate computing as information science and management (human computing provides an excellent resource).

-paul

On Apr 19, 2015, at 12:35 PM, Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu> wrote:

...

Very interesting.

This calls to mind some period diagrams of computational flows in the pioneering weather forecasts run on the ENIAC. I often show these in talks because the flow included both pre- and post-processing phases done by human beings - e.g. “prepare punch card deck for step 4,” on p. 309 of Platzman, G. W. 1979. “The ENIAC Computations of 1950 — Gateway to Numerical Weather Prediction.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 60 (4): 302-12.

Another good flow diagram, this time for analysis of incoming weather data, is on p. 334 of Bedient, H. A., and G. P. Cressman. 1957. “An Experiment in Automatic Data Processing.” Monthly Weather Review 85 (10): 333-40.

Best,

Paul

...

On Apr 19, 2015, at 11:10 , Mark Priestley <m.priestley@gmail.com> wrote:

(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" 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

_______________________________________________ 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

___________________________

Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)

Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)

University of Michigan School of Information 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

_______________________________________________ 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

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 Lab Blog: creative-automata.com SIGSIM Blog: modelingforeveryone.com

_______________________________________________ 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

-- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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Hi: I’ve just been alerted by a colleague to the paper: "Revisiting a Summer Vacation: Digital Restoration and Typesetter Forensics", available at http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf. (I don’t recall any prior mention of this on SIGCIS.) This paper strikes me as an excellent contribution to the history of computing, in particular to the history of computer typesetting and computer typography (at Bell Labs and Nottingham University), that contains a description, in wonderful detail, of the technical problems and techniques involved in the investigation. One of the authors, David Brailsford, has also produced some video accounts of this work - see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w&feature=youtu.be and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdModNEK_1U Cheers Brian Randell -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell