Computer

A History of the Information Machine

Martin Campbell-Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975004
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Computer: A History of the Information Machine traces the history of the computer and shows how business and government were the first to explore its unlimited, information-processing potential. Old-fashioned entrepreneurship combined with scientific know-how inspired now famous computer engineers to create the technology that became IBM. Wartime needs drove the giant ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer. Later, the PC enabled modes of computing that liberated people from room-sized, mainframe computers.

This third edition provides updated analysis on software and computer networking, including new material on the programming profession, social networking, and mobile computing. It expands its focus on the IT industry with fresh discussion on the rise of Google and Facebook as well as how powerful applications are changing the way we work, consume, learn, and socialize. Computer is an insightful look at the pace of technological advancement and the seamless way computers are integrated into the modern world. Through comprehensive history and accessible writing, Computer is perfect for courses on computer history, technology history, and information and society, as well as a range of courses in the fields of computer science, communications, sociology, and management.

Part One

BEFORE THE COMPUTER

1

WHEN COMPUTERS WERE PEOPLE

THE WORD computer is a misleading name for the ubiquitous machine that sits on our desks. If we go back to the Victorian period, or even to the World War II era, the word meant an occupation, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “one who computes; a calculator, reckoner; specifically a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.”

In fact, although the modern computer can work with numbers, its main use is for storing and manipulating information—that is, for doing the kinds of jobs performed by a clerk, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “one employed in a subordinate position in a public or private office, shop, warehouse, etc., to make written entries, keep accounts, make fair copies of documents, do the mechanical work of correspondence and similar ‘clerkly’ work.”

The electronic computer can be said to combine the roles of the human computer and the human clerk.

LOGARITHMS AND MATHEMATICAL TABLES

The first attempt to organize information processing on a large scale using human computers was for the production of mathematical tables, such as logarithmic and trigonometric tables. Logarithmic tables revolutionized mathematical computation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by enabling time-consuming arithmetic operations, such as multiplication and division and the extraction of roots, to be performed using only the simple operations of addition and subtraction. Trigonometric tables enabled a similar speeding up of calculations of angles and areas in connection with surveying and astronomy. However, logarithmic and trigonometric tables were merely the best-known general-purpose tables. By the late eighteenth century, specialized tables were being produced for several different occupations: navigational tables for mariners, star tables for astronomers, life insurance tables for actuaries, civil engineering tables for architects, and so on. All these tables were produced by human computers, without any mechanical aid.

For a maritime nation such as Great Britain, and later the United States, the timely production of reliable navigation tables free of error was of major economic importance. In 1766 the British government sanctioned the astronomer royal, Nevil Maskelyne, to produce each year a set of navigational tables to be known as the Nautical Almanac. This was the first permanent table-making project to be established in the world. Often known as the Seaman’s Bible, the Nautical Almanac dramatically improved navigational accuracy. It has been published without a break every year since 1766.

The Nautical Almanac was not computed directly by the Royal Observatory, but by a number of freelance human computers dotted around Great Britain. The calculations were performed twice, independently, by two computers and checked by a third “comparator.” Many of these human computers were retired clerks or clergymen with a facility for figures and a reputation for reliability who worked from home. We know almost nothing of these anonymous drudges. Probably the only one to escape oblivion was the Reverend Malachy Hitchins, an eighteenth-century Cornish clergyman who was a computer and comparator for the Nautical Almanac for a period of forty years. A lifetime of computational dedication earned him a place in the Dictionary of National Biography. When Maskelyne died in 1811—Hitchins had died two years previously—the Nautical Almanac “fell on evil days for about 20 years, and even became notorious for its errors.”

CHARLES BABBAGE AND TABLE MAKING

During this period Charles Babbage became interested in the problem of table making and the elimination of errors in tables. Born in 1791, the son of a wealthy London banker, Babbage spent his childhood in Totnes, Devon, a country town in the west of England. He experienced indifferent schooling but succeeded in teaching himself mathematics to a considerable level. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1810, where he studied mathematics. Cambridge was the leading English university for mathematics, and Babbage was dismayed to discover that he already knew more than his tutors. Realizing that Cambridge (and England) had become a mathematical backwater compared to continental Europe, Babbage and two fellow students organized the Analytical Society, which succeeded in making major reforms of mathematics in Cambridge and eventually the whole of England. Even as a young man, Babbage was a talented propagandist.

Babbage left Cambridge in 1814, married, and settled in Regency London to lead the life of a gentleman philosopher. His researches were mainly mathematical, and in 1816 his achievements were recognized by his election to the Royal Society, the leading scientific organization in Britain. He was then twenty-five—an enfant terrible with a growing scientific reputation.

In 1819 Babbage made the first of several visits to Paris, where he met a number of the leading members of the French Scientific Academy, such as the mathematicians Pierre-Simon Laplace and Joseph Fourier, with whom he formed lasting friendships. It was probably during this visit that Babbage learned of the great French table-making project organized by Baron Gaspard de Prony. This project would show Babbage a vision that would determine the future course of his life.

De Prony began the project in 1790, shortly after the French Revolution. The new government planned to reform many of France’s ancient institutions and, in particular, to establish a fair system of property taxation. To achieve this, up-to-date maps of France were needed. De Prony was charged with this task and was appointed head of the Bureau du Cadastre, the French ordinance survey office. His task was made more complex by the fact that the government had simultaneously decided to reform the old imperial system of weights and measures by introducing the new rational metric system. This created within the bureau the job of making a complete new set of decimal tables, to be known as the tables du cadastre. It was by far the largest table-making project the world had ever known, and de Prony decided to organize it much as one would organize a factory.

De Prony took as his starting point the most famous economics text of his day, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. It was Smith who first advocated the principle of division of labor, which he illustrated by means of a pin-making factory. In this famous example, Smith explained how the making of a pin could be divided into several distinct operations: cutting the short lengths of wire to make the pins, forming the pin head, sharpening the points, polishing the pins, packing them, and so on. If a worker specialized in a single operation, the output would be vastly greater than if a single worker performed all the operations that went into making a pin. De Prony “conceived all of a sudden the idea of applying the same method to the immense work with which I had been burdened, and to manufacture logarithms as one manufactures pins.”

De Prony organized his table-making “factory” into three sections. The first section consisted of half a dozen eminent mathematicians, including Adrien-Marie Legendre and Lazare Carnot, who decided on the mathematical formulas to be used in the calculations. Beneath them was another small section—a kind of middle management—that, given the mathematical formulas to be used, organized the computations and compiled the results ready for printing. Finally, the third and largest section, which consisted of sixty to eighty human computers, did the actual computation. The computers used the “method of differences,” which required only the two basic operations of addition and subtraction, and not the more demanding operations of multiplication and division. Hence the computers were not, and did not need to be, educated beyond basic numeracy and literacy. In fact, most of them were hairdressers who had lost their jobs because “one of the most hated symbols of the ancient regime was the hairstyles of the aristocracy.”

Although the Bureau was producing mathematical tables, the operation was not itself mathematical. It was fundamentally the application of an organizational technology, probably for the first time outside a manufacturing or military context, to the production of information. Its like would not be seen again for another forty years.

The whole project lasted about a decade, and by 1801 the tables existed in manuscript form all ready for printing. Unfortunately, for the next several decades, France was wracked by one financial and political crisis after another, so that the large sum of money needed to print the tables was never found. Hence, when Babbage learned of the project in 1819, all there was to show of it was the manuscript tables in the library of the French Scientific Academy.

In 1820, back in England, Babbage gained some firsthand experience of table making while preparing a set of star tables for the Astronomical Society, a scientific society that he and a group of like-minded amateur scientists had established the same year. Babbage and his friend John Herschel were supervising the construction of the star tables, which were being computed in the manner of the Nautical Almanac by freelance computers. Babbage’s and Herschel’s roles were to check the accuracy of the calculations and to supervise the compilation and printing of the results. Babbage complained about the difficulty of table making, finding it error-prone and tedious; and if he found it tedious just supervising the table making, so much the worse for those who did the actual computing.

Babbage’s unique role in nineteenth-century information processing was due to the fact that he was in equal measure a mathematician and an economist. The mathematician in him recognized the need for reliable tables and knew how to make them, but it was the economist in him that saw the significance of de Prony’s organizational technology and had the ability to carry the idea further.

De Prony had devised his table-making operation using the principles of mass production at a time when factory organization involved manual labor using very simple tools. But in the thirty years since de Prony’s project, best practice in factories had itself moved on, and a new age of mass-production machinery was beginning to dawn. The laborers in Adam Smith’s pin-making factory would soon be replaced by a pin-making machine. Babbage decided that rather than emulate de Prony’s labor-intensive and expensive manual table-making organization, he would ride the wave of the emerging mass-production technology and invent a machine for making tables.

Babbage called his machine a Difference Engine because it would use the same method of differences that de Prony and others used in table making. Babbage knew, however, that most errors in tables came not from calculating them but from printing them, so he designed his engine to set the type ready for printing as well. Conceptually, the Difference Engine was very simple: it consisted of a set of adding mechanisms to do the calculations and a printing part.

Babbage applied his considerable skills as a publicist to promote the idea of the Difference Engine. He began his campaign by writing an open letter to the president of the Royal Society, Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1822, proposing that the government finance him to build the engine. Babbage argued that high-quality tables were essential for a maritime and industrial nation, and that his Difference Engine would be far cheaper than the nearly one hundred overseers and human computers in de Prony’s table-making project. He had the letter printed at his own expense and ensured that it got into the hands of people of influence. As a result, in 1823 he obtained government funding of £1,500 to build the Difference Engine, with the understanding that more money would be provided if necessary.

Babbage managed to rally much of the scientific community to support his project. His boosters invariably argued that the merit of his Difference Engine was that it would eliminate the possibility of errors in tables “through the unerring certainty of mechanism.” It was also darkly hinted that the errors in the Nautical Almanac and other tables might “render the navigator liable to be led into difficulties, if not danger.” Babbage’s friend Herschel went a step further, writing: “An undetected error in a logarithmic table is like a sunken rock at sea yet undiscovered, upon which it is impossible to say what wrecks may have taken place.” Gradually the danger of errors in tables grew into lurid tales that “navigational tables were full of errors which continually led to ships being wrecked.” Historians have found no evidence for this claim, although reliable tables certainly helped Britain’s maritime activity run smoothly.

Unfortunately, the engineering was more complicated than the conceptualization. Babbage completely underestimated the financial and technical resources he would need to build his engine. He was at the cutting edge of production technology, for although relatively crude machines such as steam engines and power looms were in widespread use, sophisticated devices such as pin-making machines were still a novelty. By the 1850s such machinery would be commonplace, and there would exist a mechanical-engineering infrastructure that made building them relatively easy. While building the Difference Engine in the 1820s was not in any sense impossible, Babbage was paying the price of being a first mover; it was rather like building the first computers in the mid-1940s: difficult and extremely expensive.

Babbage was now battling on two fronts: first, designing the Difference Engine and, second, developing the technology to build it. Although the Difference Engine was conceptually simple, its design was mechanically complex. In the London Science Museum today, one can see evidence of this complexity in hundreds of Babbage’s machine drawings for the engines and in thousands of pages of his notebooks. During the 1820s, Babbage scoured the factories of Europe seeking gadgets and technology that he could use in the Difference Engine. Not many of his discoveries found their way into the Difference Engine, but he succeeded in turning himself into the most knowledgeable economist of manufacturing of his day. In 1832 he published his most important book, an economics classic titled Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, which ran to four editions and was translated into five languages. In the history of economics, Babbage is a seminal figure who connects Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to the Scientific Management movement, founded in America by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s.

The government continued to advance Babbage money during the 1820s and early 1830s, eventually totaling £17,000; and Babbage claimed to have spent much the same again from his own pocket. These would be very large sums in today’s money. By 1833, Babbage had produced a beautifully engineered prototype Difference Engine that was too small for real table making and lacked a printing unit, but showed beyond any question the feasibility of his concept. (It is still on permanent exhibit in the London Science Museum, and it works as perfectly today as it did then.)

To develop a full-scale machine Babbage needed even more money, which he requested in a letter in 1834 to the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. Unfortunately, at that time, Babbage had an idea of such stunning originality that he just could not keep quiet about it: a new kind of engine that would do all the Difference Engine could do but much more—it would be capable of performing any calculation that a human could specify for it. This machine he called the Analytical Engine. In almost all important respects, it had the same logical organization as the modern electronic computer. In his letter to the Duke of Wellington, Babbage hinted that instead of completing the Difference Engine he should be allowed to build the Analytical Engine. Raising the specter of the Analytical Engine was the most spectacular political misjudgment of Babbage’s career; it fatally undermined the government’s confidence in his project, and he never obtained another penny. In fact, by this time, Babbage was so thoroughly immersed in his calculating-engine project that he had completely lost sight of the original objective: to make tables. The engines had become an end in themselves, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

CLEARING HOUSES AND TELEGRAPHS

While Babbage was struggling with his Difference Engine, the idea of large-scale information processing was highly unusual—whether it was organized manually or used machinery. The volume of activity in ordinary offices of the 1820s simply did not call for large clerical staffs. Nor was there any office machinery to be had; even adding machines were little more than a scientific novelty at this date, and the typewriter had yet to be invented. For example, the Equitable Society of London—then the largest life insurance office in the world—was entirely managed by an office staff of eight clerks, equipped with nothing more than quill pens and writing paper.

In the whole of England there was just one large-scale data-processing organization that had an organizational technology comparable with de Prony’s table-making project. This was the Bankers’ Clearing House in the City of London, and Babbage wrote the only contemporary published account of it.

The Bankers’ Clearing House was an organization that processed the rapidly increasing number of checks being used in commerce. When the use of checks became popular in the eighteenth century, a bank clerk physically had to take a check deposited by a customer to the bank that issued it to have it exchanged for cash. As the use of checks gained in popularity in the middle of the eighteenth century, each of the London banks employed a “walk clerk,” whose function was to make a tour of all the other banks in the City, the financial district of London, exchanging checks for cash. In the 1770s, this arrangement was simplified by having all the clerks meet at the same time in the Five Bells Public House on Lombard Street. There they performed all the exchanging of checks and cash in one “clearing room.” This obviously saved a lot of walking t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Introduction
• Part One: BEFORE THE COMPUTER
• Part Two: CREATING THE COMPUTER
• Part Three: INNOVATION AND EXPANSION
• Part Four: GETTING PERSONAL
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index