Week 6, 1930s

Assignments


Machines
Office equipment
601 punch
Differential Analyzer
Relay computers
Z1, Z2
Atanasoff-Berry

Technology
Relays
Vacuum Tubes

Theory
Incompletness theorems
Computable numbers
[]


People
IBM, Rand, Burroughs...
IBM
Vannevar Bush and others
George Stibitz
Konrad Zuse, Helmut Schreyer
John V. Atanasoff, Clifford Berry






Kurt Gödel
Alonzo Church
Alan M. Turing

Bibliography

William Aspray, ed., Computing Before Computers (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1990 ). Also available online at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/DocumentArchive/Documents/Books/Computing Before Computers/CBC.html (Computer History Museum, accessed 2004 Aug 11).

Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996).

Paul E. Ceruzzi, Reckoners, the Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). Also available online at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/DocumentArchive/Documents/Books/Reckoners/Reckoners.html (Computer History Museum, accessed 2003 Sep 27).

Herman Goldstine. The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton University Press, 1972).

John J. O'Conner and Edmund F. Robertson, "The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive," http://turnbull.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/ (School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, accessed 2004 Aug 25). This has biographies of several of the people of this period.

Brian Randell, ed., The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982). This has copies of many original works ranging from Charles Babbage writing about calculating engines in 1837 to Maurice Wilkes writing about the EDSAC in 1949.

Jean van Heijenoort, From Frege To Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press, 1967). This is a collection of original works from this period.

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