Week 7, 1940s

Assignments

Guest Lecture
A History of Numerical Analysis Ideas
Alan Kaylor Cline
Tuesday Oct 5

World War II (1,2)

Machines

IBM ASCC
Harvard Mark I, II, III
Selective Sequence Electronic Calc.
604 Calculating Punch
Card Programmed Electronic Calc.

Enigma
Turing Bombe
Colossus

ENIAC
BINAC
UNIVAC 1
EDVAC
IAS

SSEM
Manchester Mark I
Feranti Mark I
EDSAC

Whirlwind
Becomes IBM AN/FSQ-7

Z3, Z4

Theory
Boolean circuits

Technology
Stored programs
Moore School Lectures
Transistors

People

International Business Machines, U.S. Navy
Howard Aiken, Grace Hopper
International Business Machines




Alan M. Turing, Bletchley Park
Tommy Flowers

John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, U.S. Army
John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert

John von Neumann (Draft Report), U.S. Army
John von Neumann, Herman Goldstine, others

Tom Kilburn, F. C. Williams, G. C. Tootill
Alan M. Turing

Maurice Wilkes

Jay W. Forrester, ONR


Konrad Zuse


Claude E. Shannon


Zuse, Turing, ENIAC group
EDVAC group and many others
Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen
 

Notes

1. "World War Two," http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/index.shtml (BBC, accessed 2004 Dec 13). From David Cutherbertson 2004 Dec 2.

2. Steve Schoenherr, "World War II Timeline," http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/start.html (History Department, University of San Diego, accessed 2004 Sep 27).


Bibliography

"HyperWar: A Hypertext History of the Second World War," http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/ (Ibiblio.org, accessed 2005 Jan 8).

"National Cryptologic Museum," http://www.nsa.gov/museum/ (U. S. National Security Agency, accessed 2004 Oct 3).

"Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic Digital Computers" (Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1946 Jul 8 - Aug 31). Selections available online from Brian Napper at http://www.computer50.org/mark1/moore.school/ (Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, accessed 2004 Oct 2).

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, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

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).

David Kahn. The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing  (Scribner, 1996).

David Kahn. Seizing the Enigma  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).

Stephen J. Kelley. Big Machines (A Cryptographic Series)  (Aegean Park Press, 2001).

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).

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.

Tony Sale, "Codes and Ciphers in the Second World War," http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/index.htm (The Big Oxford Computer Company Limited, accessed 2004 Sep 24).

Simon Singh. The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking  (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1999).

Michael B. Stoff, Jonathan F. Fanton, and R. Hal Williams, The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age (McGraw-Hill, 1991). This is a collection of copies and transcriptions of original documents.

John von Neumann, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," (Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, U. S. Army Contract No. W-670-ORD-4926, 1945 Jun 30). Transcription by Michael Godfrey available online at http://qss.stanford.edu/~godfrey/vonNeumann/vnedvac.pdf (Information Systems Lab, Stanford University, accessed 2004 Sep 15).

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