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Defining Relationships Among Computers, People, and Information

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Words and Power

Part of the book series: History of Computing ((HC))

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Abstract

This chapter describes how computer developers used existing documents, such as operation manuals and design proposals, to share information about innovations in computer design in the years immediately after World War II, before there were textbooks or formal curricula in a professional field of computer science. This documentary approach to information sharing was especially important for people working in the computer field that was being established in southern California to support the aircraft industry and guided missile development. Foundational documents are detailed: a 1945 report on relay computers written by George Stibitz for the US Army, John von Neumann’s 1946 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” Claude Shannon’s 1948 Bell Labs report entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and Warren Weaver’s 1949 elaboration on this work, and Edmund Berkeley’s 1949 Giant Brains or Machines that Think, which is often considered to be the first book on computers for popular audiences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 1948, the NBS had planned to “purchase two very large ‘Hurricane’ computers under development by Raytheon Corporation. One of these computers was to be installed in Washington, the other at the Bureau of Standards’ Institute for Numerical Analysis … Production of the Raytheon computers was proceeding quite slowly, and the Bureau of Standards decided to build its own interim computers, one in the East and one in the West” [28].

  2. 2.

    “Project RAND began at Douglas Aircraft in 1946. In 1948 The Rand Corporation, a private nonprofit research corporation, was formed. The arrangement with the Air Force is formalized in Air Force Regulation 20-9: to assist the Air Force in improving its efficiency and effectiveness; Project RAND represents a continuing investment by the Air Force in objective research and analysis” [36].

  3. 3.

    The Report on the ENIAC included an Operating Manual written by Harry Huskey and Arthur Burks; a Maintenance Manual written by Huskey, C. Chu, J. A. Cummings, J. H. Davis, T. K. Sharpless, and R. F. Shaw; and a Technical Manual written by Adele Goldstine.

  4. 4.

    See David Grier’s discussion of human computers [16].

  5. 5.

    About von Neumann referring to computer components as “organs,” David Rutland stated, “Much to the amusement of the engineers, he referred to the different sections of a computer as ‘organs’ and likened the computer circuits to be analogous to the workings of neurons. Modern research in physiology has shown that each neuron in the brain is many thousands of times more complicated than simple vacuum tube computer circuits” [29, p. 67].

  6. 6.

    Weaver defined Markoff process as it relates to Shannon’s theory of communication: “A system which produces a sequence of symbols (which may, of course, be letters or musical notes, say, rather than words) according to certain probabilities is called a stochastic process, and the special case of a stochastic process in which the probabilities depend on the previous events, is called a Markoff process or a Markoff chain” [37, p. 5].

  7. 7.

    See further discussion of politics and bias in technology design in Bijker [6], Ferrell [11], and Winner [39].

  8. 8.

    Also consider the definition of rhetoric that Aristotle introduced over 2000 years ago as a human-centered approach to decreasing the probability of confusion in an audience’s understanding of a message: An effective rhetorician has “the ability to see what is possibly persuasive in every given case” (Rhet. I.2, 1355b26f.) And further: “The systematical core of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the doctrine that there are three technical means of persuasion. The attribute ‘technical’ implies two characteristics: (i) Technical persuasion must rest on a method, and this, in turn, is to say that we must know the reason why some things are persuasive and some are not. Further, methodical persuasion must rest on a complete analysis of what it means to be persuasive. (ii) Technical means of persuasion must be provided by the speaker himself, whereas preexisting facts, such as oaths, witnesses, testimonies, etc. are non-technical, since they cannot be prepared by the speaker. … Technical means of persuasion are either (a) in the character of the speaker, or (b) in the emotional state of the hearer, or (c) in the argument (logos) itself” [26].

  9. 9.

    See Heims for background on this book: “After World War II Wiener took on the role of the independent, technologically knowledgeable, humane intellectual” [18, p. 331]. This “new role brought him a new and large audience: the educated public. His first book for this audience, Cybernetics (1948), turned out to be a best seller in spite of its partly technical and mathematical content. The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), with technical and mathematical language eliminated, was even more popular” [18, p. 335].

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  1. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Bernadette Longo

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Longo, B. (2021). Defining Relationships Among Computers, People, and Information. In: Words and Power. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70373-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70373-8_5

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