DEV Community: History Dev

A Very Brief History of Computing In Sweden

History Dev — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 10:01:39 +0000

Sweden isn’t a country one immediately thinks of when considering the development of computers. However, it has a rich history in the field of computing dating back to the 19th Century.

The Scheutz Family

The Georg and Edvard Scheutz father and son duo designed, built and sold the first Difference Engine which could print mathematical tables. The first version was completed in 1843 and it was based on the work of Charles Babbage. Unlike Babbage’s designs the Scheutz Difference Engine was much simpler. It had a wooden frame and only calculated three orders of difference, compared to Babbage’s proposal of seven.

They built two further engines with metal frames in 1853 and 1859. They managed to sell both of the engines but neither engine achieved the stated goal for the customers and no market for Difference Engines appeared. The Scheutz family, like Babbage, failed in their endeavour to automate the production of mathematical tables and sadly ended their lives bankrupt.

Martin Wiberg

Building on the work of Charles Babbage and the Scheutz family Martin Wiberg built a Difference Engine the size of a sewing machine in 1859–60. His engine was capable of printing mathematical tables and worked to four orders of difference. Again like his predecessors he was unable to turn his engine or the printed tables into a commercial success.

Wiberg was tragically similar to Babbage. They were both prolific inventors who found little to no commercial success. Wiberg even managed to invent a Pulse Jet Engine but nothing came of it.

BARK and BESK

Sweden’s first foray into electronic computers came after World War Two when the government realised their importance and the need to catch up. They created the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery (MMN) in 1947. The initial plan was to work with the Americans and import computer machinery. They sent engineers to study at IBM, Harvard and under John von Neumann but were unable to import any computers. So they decided to build their own.

The first computer produced was BARK which was an electromechanical computer which used telephone relays and was completed in 1950. BARK was developed by a team led by Conny Palm but was already outdated when it was finished. Engineers like Konrad Zuse had built similar machines a decade earlier. The MMN quickly moved forward and produced BESK in 1953. It was built using vacuum tubes and for a short period was the fastest computer in the World.

After BESK the MMN didn’t produce any more computers. Due to the growing adoption of computers in commercial and industrial enterprises the Government decided there was no further need for government funding. The MMN was closed down in 1963. However, BESK and many of the engineers who worked at MMN inspired the development of more computers in Sweden.

In 1956 Åtvidabergs Industrier hired 17 MMN and purchased the designs for BESK. They completed an upgraded version of BESK called FACIT EDB the following year. By 1963 FACIT EDB-3 was installed at the National Defense Radio Establishment.

Similarly, Lund University completed SMIL in 1956. The project was led by Carl-Erik Fröberg who was one of the young engineers sent to America to study in 1947. Fröberg had worked with John Von Neumann so SMIL was based on the IAS Architecture (Von Neumann Architecture). SMIL remained in operation until 1970 and in 1962 was fitted with an ALGOL 60 compiler.

Sweden has a long history of computing which this post only covers in the briefest detail. It began with some eccentric inventors in the 19th century who highlight the general interest Swedes had with machines, electronics and computers. An idea backed by the growth of the Ericsson company in the late 1800s.

Computing then exploded in the post-War period with a little help from the Swedish government, John von Neumann, American institutions and some brilliant Swedish engineers like Conny Palm and Carl-Erik Fröberg.

The Origins of Software: The Abstraction of Behaviour From the Machine

History Dev — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 07:36:43 +0000

Software is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century. It is what drives our society forward and makes new opportunities possible. Three of the four largest companies in the world (Alphabet, Microsoft & Amazon) began their ascent by writing software. While the largest company in the world Apple built hardware and wrote software.

In addition, those involved in the software industry are some of the best rewarded in society. They often earn two, three or even four times the average salary, which puts many of them on par with doctors. Put simply, software’s importance to the modern world cannot be understated.

Where though did software come from? And more broadly, what is it? Software is a catch-all term for code, data, algorithms, programming languages, operating systems and all the other aspects of a modern computer which don’t relate to the hardware.

Programming languages began to appear in the decades after Alan Turing set out his ideas for the Turing Machine and the General Purpose Computer in 1936. The person often credited with creating the first programming language is Konrad Zuse. He described the language Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945 and used it to design a Chess Game, the first known computer game. Sadly due to the War and the post-War restrictions Zuse’s work was stymied and Plankalkül wasn’t widely adopted.

During the 1950s other programming languages began to appear, in 1951 Heinz Rutishauser published a description of his language Superplan which was inspired by Zuse’s work. Rutishauser would go on to develop ALGOL 58 which was widely adopted in the late 50s and early 60s. Other languages which appeared included the Address Programming Language, developed in the Soviet Union in 1955 by Kateryna Yushchenko. Fortran also appeared in 1957, developed by John Backus at IBM.

The above work all relates to third-generation programming languages. These are regarded as higher-level programming languages which make it easier for software developers to programme computers. They rely though on the existence of machine code and assemblers, which are classified as first and second-generation programming languages respectively. Machine code is a set of binary commands, zeros and ones, which interact with a CPU directly. Whereas assemblers convert human-readable commands and higher-level programming languages into machine code.

The first three generations of programming languages all appeared at a similar time. The two people credited with creating Assembly Language and assemblers are Kathleen Booth and David Wheeler. While working on the ARC2 project at Birkbeck in 1947 Booth defined the theory and basic implementation of Assembly Language. A year later, in 1948, David Wheeler created the first assembler while working on the EDSAC project at Cambridge University. Assembly and assemblers are still used in modern computers to manage the relationship between higher-level programming languages and machine code.

In 1945 John Von Neumann and his colleagues proposed the Von Neumann Architecture based on their work on EDVAC. It outlined the architecture for a stored-programme computer. Essentially a computer with Random Access Memory that could store a programme and execute it. One of the first computers to implement this architecture was the Manchester Baby which went into operation in 1948. The computer scientist Tom Kilburn wrote the first 17-instruction algorithm in machine code and it was executed by the Baby on June 21st 1948. This was the first time a piece of software was stored and executed on a computer.

The history of software before Turing, Zuse, Booth and Kilburn is cloudy. However, very few of the ideas which appeared in the post-Turing age were original. For instance, Ada Lovelace is often cited as the first person to write a computer algorithm. This appeared in her 1843 paper “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” which was about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Both Lovelace and Babbage considered machines or computers in terms of symbol manipulation and software. Like Zuse, Babbage considered the idea of creating a chess game his Analytical Engine could run. He also designed a version of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) and considered the idea of creating the world’s first arcade where the public would pay to play his games.

As a diversion he dabbled in games-playing machines. He came to the conclusion that any game of skill could be played by an automaton. The Analytical Engine already had several of the necessary properties — memory, ‘foresight’ and the capacity to take alternative courses of action automatically, a feature computer scientists would now call conditional branching.

Babbage and Lovelace weren’t the only people to consider how to programme a machine or analogue computer. There were many engineers and scientists working on the idea of machines driven by binary commands long before Turing and the Manchester Baby. Herman Hollerith is often credited with creating binary punch cards to power his electromechanical tabulating machines in the 1880s.

However, machine programming powered by punch cards began long before Hollerith’s tabulating machines. Babbage had considered the idea in his various engine designs. Also, Jacquard Looms, which appeared in the early 1800s, worked off the same principle to manufacture textiles with complex patterns. They ran off a long chain of binary punched cards, but even Joseph Marie Jacquard’s work wasn’t original. The idea of programming looms with punched cards or tape can be traced back to the early 1700s.

Before the 1700s some of the only tenuous references we can make to software come from mathematics and astronomy. We derive the term algorithm from the 8th-9th century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who was the father of algebra. And the astrolabe is a 2,000-year-old programmable tool to aid navigation and timekeeping. It could be reprogrammed/configured using metal disks which stored astronomical data.

There are many examples of intricate machines and analogue computers before the 1700s, such as clocks and the Antikythera Mechanism. However, in all these cases the machine’s behaviour and the hardware are one. The behaviour is defined by the intricate configuration of springs, cogs and gears. Software, by contrast, is based on the principle that behaviour and hardware should be separate. In essence, it is the abstraction of behaviour from hardware.

As described above this process of abstraction begins in the 1700s with the introduction of looms driven by punched tape and cards. There are then two important developments in the 1800s which prove the value and scalability of the idea. In 1804 the Jacquard Loom revolutionises the textile industry. It dramatically lowers the cost of patterned textiles and by 1836 there were 7,000 Jacquard Looms in operation in Great Britain. Later in the 1880s, Herman Hollerith used a similar principle with Electromechanical Tabulating machines to revolutionise data processing and the US census. His machines were so successful that he’d go on to found the company which would become IBM.

It was clear by the end of the 19th century the abstraction of machine behaviour was an incredibly valuable idea. But it wasn't until Alan Turing’s work in the 1930s that the final step toward software and full abstraction began. His theoretical work on the Decision Problem led him to define the general purpose computer and many principles underlying modern software. This final step was completed by those working on the stored-programme computer in the 1940s. An idea developed by Von Neumann and his colleagues at Princeton, and implemented fully for the first time by Williams and Kilburn while working on the Manchester Baby.

The age of Software had begun, machine behaviour was fully abstracted and it enabled billions of machines to be programmed to complete almost any behaviour required. Over the past 70 years this has generated wealth on an unprecedented scale. Mega corporations have built whole industries based on millions of computers interacting with billions of people. And it was all achieved by a simple idea, that behaviour should be abstracted from the machine.

Useful Resources:

4 Facts About Big Data Pioneer Herman Hollerith

History Dev — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 11:51:48 +0000

One of the first, or most prominent people, to work on a Big Data problem was Herman Hollerith. In the 1880s the US Census Bureau was struggling to process census data in a timely fashion. It took eight years to process the 1880 census meaning data only became available just before the next census began.

In 1888 Hollerith’s Electromechanical Tabulating Machine won a competition to see who could count and process census data the fastest. His machine, which used punch cards, blew his competitors out of the water. In some of the tests it was nearly 10 times more efficient. As a result, Hollerith won the contract to help process the 1890 Census and patented his invention in 1889.

The 1890 Census was a great success it collected and processed far more data and delivered the results 18 months earlier than the 1880 Census. Electromechanical Tabulating Machines would be used to process census data until the 1950s when computers took over. They would also be used in many other industries.

Hollerith can be regarded as the father of the Data and Analytics Industry and the man who transformed early computers from novelty items into a business success. He was though, like many high achievers, a bit of an oddball and an outlier.

There are four facts, compiled from Hollerith’s life, that highlight both his interesting character and the impact he had on the computer and data industries.

Hollerith did not do well at school, he hated spelling so much he jumped out of a classroom window to avoid it. He had to be privately tutored from that point on and only just scraped into college.
In 1911 Hollerith helped form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Under the presidency of Thomas J Watson, a man Hollerith did not get on with, the company would be renamed IBM in 1924.
In 1966 FORTRAN 66 was released and it introduced the Hollerith Constant in honour of Herman Hollerith. The constant could be used to manipulate characters as FORTRAN contained no Character data type.
In 1921 Hollerith retired to his farm in the Chesapeake Bay to raise Guernsey cattle. Despite his incredible engineering accomplishments he stated “I have never been so intensely interested in anything as I have in Guernseys.”

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The Failure of Charles Babbage and the Good Enough Principle

History Dev — Mon, 23 May 2022 08:33:42 +0000

There are two important questions to ask about Charles Babbage, why did he fail to build his mechanical computers? And what can his failures teach computer scientists and businesses today? One of the reasons Babbage failed is because of his difficult, unstable personality. The breakdown of his relationship with his chief engineer, Joseph Clement, on the Difference Engine project is a well-documented example.

There are other important reasons he failed and these are linked to his ambitions and the complexity of the projects he undertook. Babbage can be described as ambitious, arrogant and resentful. He was despondent when his ambitions were not met and he didn’t receive the accolades he expected, as he wrote later in life.

When driven by exhausted means and injured health almost to despair of the achievement of his life’s great object — when the brain itself reels beneath the weight its own ambition has imposed, and the world’s neglect aggravates the throbbings of an overtasked frame.

…

The certainty that a future age will repair the injustice of the present, and the knowledge that the more distant the day of reparation, the more he has outstripped the efforts of his contemporaries, may well sustain him against the sneers of the ignorant, or the jealousy of rivals.

Babbage was convinced of his own brilliance despite failing to deliver a working and useful mechanical computer. He seemed determined to build a grand, mechanical computer of great complexity. A machine which would prove his genius and result in many honours and privileges.

Long since the 19th-century computer scientists have learnt valuable lessons about ambition and complexity, and how they can destroy projects. Generally, those who are too ambitious and overcomplicate things tend to fail, sometimes with terrible consequences.

One of the most important concepts in problem-solving is “satisficing” which was defined by the political scientist Herbert Simon. In very basic terms satisficing means searching for an acceptable solution when no optimal solution exists. The software developer and educator Robert L Glass describes Herbert Simon’s concept of satisficing as follows.

He [Simon] means a solution that works, one that is “good enough,” one that stops short of being an optimizing solution but will do the job in question.

Glass in his book Software Creativity extends this idea to the BIEGE principle, “Better is the Enemy of Good Enough”.

If you have a problem for which a satisficing solution will do, don’t keep working the problem trying to find the optimizing one.

What Glass means is that optimising or seeking perfection can easily become a time and money sink that leads to failure. It is wise therefore to avoid complexity and overambition as they often block the delivery of ‘business value’.

From a business perspective, it’s better to deliver a good enough solution than spend extra time gold-plating something. The reasons should be obvious, the quicker you release something the faster you receive feedback. This helps you discover the viability of a product and make adjustments to improve it. If you lose time gold-plating a solution you may fail to deliver what the market wants or fail to deliver at all.

The question is, did Babbage fall foul of the Good Enough principle? Did he fail to deliver due to overambition and complexity? The honest answer is yes, and there is plenty of evidence to support this argument. Babbage’s computers aimed to more accurately and efficiently produce mathematical tables. This is what we might describe as the ‘value proposition’.

However, people at the time were not convinced by Babbage’s value proposition. The Astronomer Royal, George Airy, was one of the people sceptical of the value of the Difference Engines. As Doron Swade describes in his book about Babbage and his Difference Engines.

Airy was not alone in his less than absolute commitment to the utility of the Engines. Others raised questions about whether the high precision offered by the machines in working to twenty, forty, fifty and even one hundred figures of accuracy could be justified when practical measurements could be made to only three or four figures.

Why produce a machine of such complexity when it wasn’t required for the problem it set out to solve? Glass would probably describe this as a prime example of gold-plating.

Babbage failed to deliver anything more than a few example pieces from his engine designs. In fact, it wasn’t until 1991 that the Science Museum built a working version of the Difference Engine No 2. Despite modern industrial practices and processes it still took them 6 years to complete the project, which should highlight the complexity involved.

In addition, several individuals around the time of Babbage built simpler Difference Engines or mechanical computers which actually worked. The most famous was built by Swedish father and son inventors Georg and Edvard Scheutz. Their Difference Engine was much simpler, working to only three orders of difference compared to Babbage’s proposal of six. The engine also had a functioning printing press which was critical for producing mathematical tables. Scheutz even managed to sell one of his engines.

The difference between the Scheutz and Babbage approach is described by Swade, and it provides more evidence that Babbage overcomplicated his engines.

Babbage had demanded the highest precision in the manufacture of parts for his Engine, and British technology, which was the most advanced anywhere, was stretched to its limits and beyond. Edvard’s machine has a rough wooden frame and was made using a simple lathe and hand tools by a young man with craft skills. A Swedish teenager had succeeded where the best of British had failed. The successful completion of the Swedish prototype raises questions about whether Babbage’s demand for the highest precision was warranted by the needs of the mechanisms.

Others also produced working mechanical engines or analogue computers. This included Johann Helfrich Von Müller during the 1780s, Martin Wiberg in 1859 and William Jevons in 1869. What links these mechanical analogue computers is none of them produced any real value beyond engineering novelty. In fact, both Georg and Edvard Scheutz ended their lives bankrupt, unable to create a business from their engines.

It wasn’t until the 1880s and 90s that Herman Hollerith achieved a real business breakthrough for computers with his electromechanical tabulating machines. His machines made census data processing much more efficient and their use expanded to other industries. Hollerith’s inventions and business would eventually help form the foundation of IBM.

It’s interesting to consider whether Babbage would have discovered the futility of mechanical computers if he’d been less ambitious and more efficient in his work. If he’d built simpler engines and tested his ideas faster would he have received the feedback required to pivot his work? We’ll never know, but he was a prolific inventor so he may have achieved far greater feats if he’d focused elsewhere. Then he may have received the accolades his ambition desired.

Computer scientists and businesses can learn a great deal from the story of Charles Babbage and his failure to deliver. Ambition is important but it shouldn’t cloud your judgement or be taken too far, never hold on to an idea or principle too tightly. Be realistic about what can be achieved by you or your business. Minimise complexity as it can result in failure, even if the idea is good, and always consider what the simplest step forward is. Test your ideas quickly, don’t waste time gold-plating an idea which isn’t proven. Ultimately it’s better to deliver a satisficing solution than nothing at all.

Sadly Charles Babbage failed to do any of this, and as Robert L Glass says.

One shouldn’t strive for perfection in a field where getting something that works is difficult enough.

Useful Resources:

The Incredible Struggle of Software Pioneer Kateryna Yushchenko

History Dev — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 07:27:51 +0000

Kateryna Yushchenko was born in Ukraine on the 8th of December 1919 just after the Russian Revolution. She studied Mathematics and in the 1950s became involved in the MESM project, the Soviet Union’s first computer.

As a result of this work, in 1955 Yushchenko created the Address Programming Language, one of World’s the first high-level programming languages. It was incredibly advanced for its time and contained features that wouldn’t be seen in other programming languages for nearly a decade.

Yushchenko’s story isn’t a simple one of genius meets opportunity though, like many great people, particularly great women, her path to success was one of struggle.

In 1937 her father was arrested for being a Ukrainian Nationalist. This led to the imprisonment of both Kateryna’s parents. They served ten years and were only released after Stalin’s death due to a lack of evidence.
At 17 Kateryna was expelled from Kyiv University, because of her parents ‘crimes’, and she had to move to Uzbekistan to complete her studies.
During World War Two she had to work in a factory producing scopes for tank guns.
She returned to Ukraine after the war and gained her PHD in 1950, 14 years after her studies began, she was 31.

Kateryna not only had to contend with being a woman in an age when feminism was in its infancy but also a World full of turmoil. Her story and her contribution to software development are incredible. She rightly deserves to be regarded as one of the most important people in the history of computer science.

Useful Resources:

http://en.uacomputing.com/persons/yushenko/

Ukraine’s Incredible Contributions to Computer Science

History Dev — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 13:15:26 +0000

On February 24th 2022 I was woken up at 6:13 am by a mobile phone call. It was my partner, she was pregnant and she’d been in hospital for a few days. She sounded panicked and said, “I need you here now! I’m in labour, the baby is coming!” Shocked and bewildered I got up very quickly and into the car. The radio was on as normal and as I sped to the hospital I heard the news, Russia had invaded Ukraine! My heart sank.

My second son was born at 7:46 am, a beautiful and overwhelming moment! Ever since my life has been turned upside down by a whirlwind of chaos. Two children is an exponential step up from one, it’s been a real challenge. But it’s been nothing compared to what the poor people of Ukraine have been put through. Particularly those who have also welcomed children into the world during this horrible war. I’ve donated to the Red Cross appeal for Ukraine and if you can I’d suggest you donate too. Or do whatever you can.

One of the great tragedies of any conflict is the damage it does to cultural and historical assets. We’ve seen this in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re now witnessing it in Ukraine. It is a country of significant cultural and historical importance, civilization in Ukraine stretches back over 6,000 years. It has played host to Greek, Roman and Viking settlements, and been part of Mongol, Ottoman, Polish, Lithuanian and Russian empires. It has also been independent at points and was the birthplace of the Cossacks, known as the adventurers or free men.

More recently, over the last 100 years, Ukraine has made a significant contribution to computer science. As we know, around the 1940s a lot of computer science work and research was carried out. In Britain and America, Turing and Von Neumann made huge contributions, and in continental Europe Konrad Zuse spent the 30s, 40s and 50s building computers. One other part of the world where work was also progressing was the USSR.

At the heart of this work in the USSR were Ukrainian institutions in Kyiv and Kharkiv such as the National Academy of Sciences, cities being attacked by Russian forces today. The scientists working at these institutions made numerous breakthroughs that drove computing forward in the Soviet Union. For instance, in 1941 Vadim Lashkaryov independently discovered p-n junctions, a building block for semiconductors and transistors. Two figures of great importance though, who we will focus on, are Sergey Lebedev and Kateryna Yushchenko. Linked by the work they carried out at the Academy of Sciences on computing during the 1950s they made huge breakthroughs in computer science and software.

Lebedev was a Russian computer scientist who did a great deal of his work at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Kyiv Electrotechnical Institute. Between 1946 and 1951 he was head of the Electrotechnical Institute, and it was here he made his greatest contribution to computer science in the USSR. In 1948 Lebedev learnt about the advances being made with computers in the West and decided to initiate a research project on the topic. This resulted in the creation of MESM in 1951, the first universally programmable computer in the USSR.

MESM had 6,000 vacuum tubes and was capable of executing 3,000 operations a minute. This was relatively small for the time, in comparison ENIAC could execute thousands of operations a second. This though was the USSR’s first step forward with electronic computers and it was achieved by a team of less than 30, whereas ENIAC had a staff of over 200. Computer development also progressed quickly from this point on and the Soviet Union soon caught up with the West.

MESM was in operation until 1959 when it was broken down and used for research. It was used to make numerous calculations and advance research in many areas.

In 1952, MESM was basically the only computer in the country, and was used for calculations for such diverse issues as thermonuclear processes, space flight and rocket science, long-distance power lines, mechanics, statistic quality control, etc.

The Ukrainians were very proud of their computer. To quote Ukrainian scientist and chairman of the Academy of Sciences Borys Paton.

We will always be proud that in Kyiv, in our Academy, the first computer in continental Europe was created.

It’s not quite true that MESM was the first computer in continental Europe, but it was the first in the USSR and they were right to be proud.

Kateryna Yushchenko was born in Chyhyryn, Ukraine in 1919. She began her studies in 1937 in Kyiv but they were tragically disrupted after her father was arrested for being a Ukrainian nationalist. She was forced to move to Uzbekistan to complete her undergraduate studies and it wasn’t until after the war that she returned to Ukraine. Yushchenko gained her PHD in 1950 from the Institute of Mathematics at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and took on a Senior Researcher role at the institution. In 1954 Yushchenko began to work on Sergey Lebedev’s MESM computer. This was after Lebedev’s laboratory and the MESM computer he developed were transferred to the Institute of Mathematics.

Yushchenko’s great contribution to computer science was the creation of one of the first high-level programming languages. Known as the Address Programming Language it was developed in 1955 to make programming MESM easier and more powerful. It was advanced for its time, including concepts such as Indirect Addressing which wouldn’t be seen in other languages until the 1960s. The Address Programming Language was used for over 20 years and ran on all the first and second-generation computers developed in the Soviet Union.

Yushchenko was lauded for her work and awarded several state prizes.

For pioneering work … Yushchenko was awarded two State Prizes of Ukraine and the Prize of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

Thanks to the work of Lebedev, Yushchenko and many others Ukraine was one of the main contributors to the development of computers, software and the modern world. A tragic irony of the MESM project is it highlights the successful collaboration between Russia and Ukraine to achieve incredible scientific feats. Something we’re not seeing today, and we can only pray people with power decide to change course.

Useful Resources:

Charles Babbage the Entertainer and Socialite

History Dev — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:23:59 +0000

It is well documented Charles Babbage was a difficult, belligerent and often quarrelsome man. He fell out spectacularly with Joseph Clement his lead engineer on the Difference Engine which meant it was never completed. In 1830 he published his famous attack on English science and the Royal Society entitled, Reflections on the Decline of Science and some of its Causes. It, of course, upset many members of the Royal Society. Also, as I’ve noted previously, by his death in 1871 he was mocked by the press and seen as a bit of a joke.

It is … more desirable that the leading labours of his life should be briefly recorded, that he may be remembered as something higher than a mere crusader against peripatetic musicians.

Humans though are complicated animals with different sides to their personalities, and Babbage is no exception. It is true he was a quarrelsome man, but Babbage also faced many difficulties in his life. He had a tumultuous relationship with his father which likely left psychological scars. In 1827 Babbage lost four members of his family, his wife, who he loved very much, two children and his father, it was his annus horribilis. In total, he had eight children and only three would outlive him, a heavy burden for a father to endure.

It’s difficult to judge how these events affected Babbage’s temperament and if they contributed to his negative behaviour and outbursts. They can’t though have been easy to cope with and it’s likely they affected his mental wellbeing. But despite all of this there is plenty of evidence to suggest Babbage had a much lighter side.

He was often charming and engaging and he had many loyal friends including the famous astronomer John Herschel. Babbage met Herschel at Cambridge University around 1810 and as Doron Swade suggests he had a great time.

At Cambridge he enjoyed student life to the full. He formed an enduring friendship with John Herschel, who had entered St John’s College in 1809, and relished the company of a wide circle of friends. He played chess, took part in all night sixpenny whist sessions, and bunked lectures and chapel to go sailing on the river with his chums.

Babbage was also capable of enthralling individuals and audiences. One of his contemporaries the scientist Lyon Playfair describes an afternoon spent with Babbage.

Another philosopher whom I frequently visited was Babbage... Babbage was full of information which he gave in an attractive way. I once went to breakfast with him at nine o’clock. He explained to me the working of his calculating machine, and afterwards his method of signalling by... lights. As I was engaged to lunch at one o’clock, I looked at my watch, which indicated the hour of four. This appeared obviously impossible so I went into the hall to look for the correct time, and to my astonishment that also gave the hour as four. The philosopher had in fact been so fascinating in his descriptions and conversation that neither he nor I had noticed the lapse of time.

As is shown, Babbage could be so engaging he could almost bewitch his audience. There are also many stories of parties that Babbage either hosted or attended. As for the ones he hosted they can be seen as the A-List parties of their day, only the great, the good and the beautiful attended. As Doron Swade describes in his wonderful book The Difference Engine.

Not everyone was preoccupied with the advancement of mind. The geologist Charles Lyell pressed Babbage to invite Colonel Codrington’s wife, whom Lyell had heard was ‘very pretty’. Lyell also urged Charles Darwin, returned from his five-year adventure on the Beagle in 1836, to attend Babbage’s where he would meet the fashionable intelligentsia and, more to the point, beautiful women. One Woronzow Greig asked for an Engine demonstration to impress two lady friends, a Miss Parker and a Miss Sandbath from Liverpool, 'very young and very pretty’. Babbage became a sought-after dinner guest. He was a celebrity, an engaging raconteur, full of wit and exuberant invention. To be able to say 'Mr. Babbage is coming to dinner' was the pleasure and delight of any hostess.

In many respects, Babbages’ humanity can be seen in the complexity of his character and personality. He is like all of us, made of many parts. But there is a great tension in his character with polar opposites juxtaposed. Babbage is a man who suffered many traumas and setbacks in his life while also leading a life of wealth and comfort. He was determined, belligerent, relentless, mean and unforgiving to the point of destruction. While at the same time he was a friend, a lover, a charmer, a socialite and a great entertainer.

Useful Sources:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1403028.The_Difference_Engine_

Turing, the Halting Problem and the Dawn of the Digital Age

History Dev — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 14:59:59 +0000

For over 2,000 years great engineers, mathematicians and scientists have produced various analogue computers. Ranging from the Antikythera Mechanism of antiquity to the Difference Engines of the Victorian period. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s though there was a great flurry of activity that transported us from the analogue age to the digital.

The period between 1930 and 1960 can be regarded as a dividing line in history. A 30 year period which turned more than 2,000 years of human history on its head. It started with the development of the electro-mechanical computer and ended with the development of the transistor-based digital computer. The world was changed completely, and one of the men regarded as responsible for this great change is Alan Turing.

In 1936 Turing published a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". The paper disproved David Hilbert and William Ackermann’s Decision Problem, a challenge that asked whether every problem was decidable. Or in other words, can be shown to be true or false. As Professor Melanie Mitchell describes it.

Is there always a definite procedure that can decide whether or not a statement is true?

To refute this claim Turing began with a theoretical, digital computer, now known as a Turing Machine. This computer ran on an infinite tape containing zeros, ones and blanks. A read and write head would read the input from the tape and based on some rules, the programme, would write some output back to the tape and either halt or move the head and repeat.

All problems can be encoded as zeros and ones (AKA binary code) and then a simple set of rules can be followed based on the zeros and ones which are read. In its simplest form, a human could read the zeros and ones from a tape and follow the rules, and this was Turing’s original thought. Despite its inefficiencies, this system could be used to compute any computable problem.

But to show not all problems were computable, and disprove the Decision Problem, Turing used a technique called “proof by contradiction”. He began by claiming it was possible to build a Turing Machine that could compute whether a programme given some input would halt or run forever. He would then show this machine could result in a contradiction so could not exist.

This idea which Turing had touched upon would later be referred to as the Halting Problem. Today software developers know it as the infinite loop and it’s a problem many of them run into when writing loops or recursive functions. An example of an infinite loop in C++ can be seen below, the while() ‘programme’ has been provided with the input true so will print out hello to the console forever.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
  while (true) {
    cout << "hello" << endl;
  }
}

Turing’s Halting Problem paradox showed if you built an infinite loop detecting machine a version could be created which when run on itself would result in the machine being in both a true and a false state. This contradiction showed it wasn’t possible to build an infinite loop detecting machine. It will take another article for me to describe the Halting Problem in detail, for now, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

This was groundbreaking work, for both mathematics and computers, as Mitchell states.

[Turing] rigorously defined the notion of “definite procedure.” Second, his definition, in the form of Turing machines, laid the groundwork for the invention of electronic programmable computers. Third, he showed what few people ever expected: there are limits to what can be computed.

The Turing Machine then led to the concept of Turing Completeness which became the benchmark for modern computers and programming languages. A Turing Complete machine is simply a machine or programme which can simulate the behaviour of any Turing Machine. In basic terms, this just means it can solve any computable problem. It’s not 100% clear when the first Turing Complete machine appeared. Some have claimed it was Konrad Zuse’s Z3 in 1941, others Tommy Flower’s Colossus in 1943, but everyone accepts ENIAC, completed by the Americans in 1945, was Turing Complete.

Turing laid down the bedrock for the digital computer in the 1930s by refuting the Decision Problem and describing the Turing Machine. By the end of the 1950s, his great insight on computation led to the modern digital computer we know today. Tragically Turing committed suicide in 1954 after he was persecuted based on his sexual orientation by the British State. Sadly he would never see the wonders of the modern world he played a pivotal role in creating.

Useful Resources:

The Death of Charles Babbage, a Sad Tale of Labour Misspent

History Dev — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 10:38:50 +0000

How do you wish to be remembered? It is a question we all consider at some point in our lives. A more talented member of society may wish to be remembered as a brilliant mind like Charles Babbage. A man who today is regarded as the father of modern computing. Interestingly though, Charles Babbage wasn’t remembered as fondly at the time of his death as he is today.

I found some evidence for this when I recently remembered a wonderful resource for researching history, the British Newspaper Archive. I used it for my dissertation on the General Strike nearly 20 years ago. At the time you had to go to the archive in North London and look at the microfilm, now it’s all online. The archive provides a great primary source and insight on how the people of the day interpreted issues.

Out of interest, I decided to look up the death of Charles Babbage, to see if it surfaced anything of interest, I wasn’t disappointed. I discovered a memoir by the Daily Telegraph, written after his death and republished in the West Somerset Free Press. It wouldn’t have been pleasant reading for the great man. It portrays Babbage as a disappointed, sad and tragic figure.

To begin it makes light of his fame.

He moved as one not belonging to the spheres he joined, for his associates had all one by one departed; and those who are now rising to scientific fame knew him but little or knew him not at all. It may be said of him more truly than it has lately been of others that he had outlived his fame;

It highlights how by the end of Babbage’s life he’d become better known for his criticism of working-class social norms, including organ grinders.

It is … more desirable that the leading labours of his life should be briefly recorded, that he may be remembered as something higher than a mere crusader against peripatetic musicians.

Babbage’s failure to finish his Difference Engine is described as a “sad tale of labour misspent.” And covers the “simple printer” from Sweden Georg Scheutz who successfully built a version of Babbage’s Difference Engine.

But this sad tale of labour misspent and hopes frustrated has a sequel that, if omitted, would render our brief memoir of Babbage incomplete. In 1834 or 1835, a simple printer in Stockholm, M. Scheutz, learnt through Dr. Lardner’s article in the Edinburgh Review of the existence of the Difference Engine. He was fascinated by the idea of it, and was impelled to attempt a machine for the same purpose. He devised one, and, with the assistance of his son, overcame all the difficulties, technical and fiscal, of its construction. Like Babbage’s in principle, it calculated tables by differences and printed the results; but in details it was widely different, so different that it could not have been copied in any part from the British machine, and it fulfilled the full hopes of its inventor. Before us, as we write, lies a Table of Logarithms calculated and printed by it, and specimens of other trigonometrical and astronomical tables similarly produced. And the book containing them is dedicated to Charles Babbage. The Briton had sown and the Swede had reapéd.

The memoir does finish on a positive note for Babbage. Pointing out he held no animosity towards Mr Scheutz who achieved what he hadn’t. In fact, Babbage even celebrated the achievement.

And was the sower angered at the success of the reaper? By no means. At one of the meetings of the Royal Society, when a gold medal was being awarded to a foreign savant for a brilliant investigation, Babbage rose and soundly rated the society’s council for not voting that medal to Scheutz for his machine, which then stood in an adjoining room. This act does not savour of that "malignity" which Babbage’s enemies said he festered on account of the abandoment of his scheme by the Government.

The above is only a single source representing a single opinion. But for a prestigious publication like the Daily Telegraph to share these views suggests Babbage wasn’t lauded unreservedly by his contemporaries. It implies some or many of his peers pitied him by his death. We might even describe Babbage as the Van Gogh of computing, a brilliant but sad and tragic man who only found respect and admiration after death.

Useful Sources:

3 Facts About Computer Pioneer Konrad Zuse

History Dev — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 11:22:51 +0000

Konrad Zuse is widely regarded as one of the creators of the modern computer. In 1942 he released the Z3 which was the first digital computer. After the war, he founded his own computer company and made significant contributions to both computing and software.

There are though three interesting facts about Zuse which highlight his ingenuity and influence.

In 1938 he completed his first computing machine, the Z1. At the time of its construction he had no money. So in true Jobs and Wozniak fashion he built it in his parents' living room.
Zuse created the first computer game, a simulation of Chess. This was based on the first programming language, Plankalkül, which Zuse created in 1945.
In 1950 Zuse founded his own computer company and built one of the first transistor-based computers. This company was taken over by Siemens in 1969, today Siemens turns over more than €50bn annually.

Zuse was a genius and an innovator, he made huge contributions to the academic, technical and business worlds. He can be regarded as the Jobs and Wozniak of his era. Or maybe Jobs and Wozniak should be regarded as the Zuse of theirs.

For more on the history of Konrad Zuse watch this video on the great man.

Useful Sources

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zuse/

The Origins of Computers: The Abacus and The Astrolabe

History Dev — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:39:51 +0000

It seems logical when considering the origins of computers to begin with the first computer. We could start our story with Colossus, influenced by Alan Turing and Max Newman, and built by Tommy Flowers in 1943. It was used to crack German radio encryption during the war and is generally regarded as the first digital computer. But is this a good place to start? And does it help us understand the origins of computers?

The answer sadly is no, for many reasons. To begin, Turing and Flowers weren’t the first people to consider the idea of a computer. And Colossus itself isn’t regarded as a general-purpose computer, or in technical terms Turing Complete.

Also, around the same time as Colossus, there were many other advanced calculating and computing tools. The Germans built the Z1, Z2 and Z3 between 1936 and 1941, along with their encryption tools. In 1938 the Polish built a Bomba to crack German encryption. This inspired Turing’s Bombe machine a few years later, which cracked Enigma. And the Americans built ABC in 1942 and then the more famous ENIAC in 1945. So Colossus didn’t occur in isolation and its difficult to classify it as the first computer.

The ideas which developed in the war period weren’t original either. We know over 100 years earlier Babbage and Lovelace had advanced ideas on computers. Babbage produced many detailed designs and even a prototype mechanical computer. What he called his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.

As touched on in my post on the Origins of Mathematics, ideas tend to emerge slowly from the fog of history. So we can’t be sure when ideas first appear. The computer is no different, particularly as it is just the implementation of an idea. An idea that has been developing over centuries and millennia.

Evidence for mathematics goes back about 6,000 years. By contrast, the evidence for computing tools goes back less than half this time. This doesn’t mean people were not using computing tools earlier, it just means we lack explicit evidence. Also, the evidence we do have should not be classified as first of its kind, it’s very unlikely that is the case either.

In terms of our definition, 'computing tool' simply means a tool that helped someone count, calculate, or compute something. Many like to use the term analogue computer, but this may be a little advanced for some of our purposes. Ultimately we’re looking for the tools people developed to achieve a behavioural goal, like computing the date of a religious event or conducting trade.

The first of these tools is the abacus, a tool that is still used to count and calculate. The original abacus was known as a counting board and wasn’t like the abacus we know today and children play with. They were made of wood or stone, they had grooves cut into them, and small stones or discs were placed in the groves and used to count. Some were even just small boxes of sand with lines drawn into them with a stylus.

The oldest example of a counting board is the Salamis Tablet. Made of marble, it was discovered on the Greek island of Salamis and dates back to around 300 BC. The Chinese were also known to be using the abacus around the 2nd century BC, and there is some evidence of much earlier use.

The abacus is important because it is one of the first examples of humans developing a calculation tool to help with everyday life. It was mainly used by merchants but it is a tool most people will have interacted with at a market or in a shop. The abacus also begins a long lineage of calculations tools.

Abaci evolved into electro-mechanical calculators, pocket slide-rules, electronic calculators and now abstract representations of calculators or simulations on smartphones.

Another interesting and more advanced tool is the astrolabe. It was made up of overlayed disks and rings, often of wood or metal. These disks and rings contained different astronomical information, such as important stars.

The astrolabe was used to calculate time, location and direction. It was also used widely in astrology to predict important religious events. And in the Islamic world it was used to calculate the direction of Mecca. It’s not precisely clear when the astrolabe first appeared, but evidence suggests some time between 200 BC and 500 AD.

The most interesting feature of the astrolabe is it was programmable. Each astrolabe came with a number of disks. These disks imputed different base information into the system dependent on the user’s latitude. The disks were usually associated with the night skies of the major cities of the period. This enabled the user to make calculations no matter where they were.

The astrolabe was significant, as Smithsonian Magazine described it.

“Imagine a device that can do everything: Give you the time, your location, your horoscope, and even help you make decisions—all with the swipe of a hand. It’s overpriced, customizable and comes with a variety of bells and whistles. No, this isn’t the iPhone 7. It’s the astrolabe.”

The final tool of interest, and the most advanced, is the Antikythera Mechanism. It is an orrery which is a mechanical model of the solar system. It could be used to predict the position of celestial bodies and eclipses years into the future. It is described as the first example of an analogue computer.

The mechanism was discovered in a Roman shipwreck in 1901, off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera by sponge divers. The device can be dated to somewhere between the 1st and 3rd century BC. It is incredibly advanced for the period and suggests human thought on computers had progressed significantly, as Professor Kyriakos Efstathiou says.

“All of our research has shown that our ancestors used their deep knowledge of astronomy and technology to construct such mechanisms, and based only on this conclusion, the history of technology should be re-written because it sets its start many centuries back.”

The overall point here is not to suggest the abacus, astrolabe or the Antikythera Mechanism represent the first computer in the way we understand computers today. It is to highlight how humanity had begun to think about computers, or at least tools to calculate and compute, a very long time ago.

As with mathematics there is no origin point for the computer, and we will never find one. But the tools mentioned do show over 2,000 years ago humans had already taken their first steps towards the computer. And this is an important point for modern computer scientists and software developers to grasp. Many great minds have made enormous strides over the last 100 years and put computers in our pockets. But there were some equally great minds who did incredible work 2,000 years ago. We should remember we are not unique in our genius, and our achievements rest on small steps taken thousands of years ago.

Useful Resources:

The Pythagorean Theorem and Empathy for the Past

History Dev — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 21:14:09 +0000

As software developers working in the 'modern' world it can be difficult for us to grasp how challenging previous generations found certain tasks. Even the problems faced by LEO programmers using punch tape in the 1950s are relatively meaningless to us today. So how do we understand the problems faced by those working more than 2,000 years ago? And why is this important?

It’s important because if we wish to understand the past, and even the present, we need to have empathy for previous generations. We need to grasp and grapple with the problems and challenges they faced. This will help us better understand their capabilities and achievements. As Jaqueline Stedall, a historian of mathematics, says.

The difficulty for the historian is usually not so much understanding the mathematics itself as entering into the mind and mathematical universe of someone from another era.

In my previous post on the Origins of Mathematics I touched upon Pythagoras' Theorem. Today known as the Pythagorean Theorem due to the lack of evidence to link it to Pythagoras. It also provides a good way for us to understand the challenges of the past. The theorem has been understood for a very long time. And while it is relatively simple, it opens the door to a lot of complexity.

The Pythagorean Theorem states that for a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse, the diagonal, equals the squares of the other two sides added together.

a² + b² = c²

It’s a useful theorem because it allows us to easily calculate the length of a hypotenuse. We just need to find the square root of the squares of a and b added together.

√a² + b² = c

In the real world this may help us calculate the length of a diagonal wall in a building. Which will enable us to order the right amount of bricks. But how easy is this to calculate?

The core of the Pythagorean Theorem is relatively simple. Just a multiplication and addition.

a² + b² or (a * a) + (b * b)

Even for large numbers we can do this sort of calculation with a pen and paper. The complexity creeps in when we introduce square roots, which we need to calculate the length of a hypotenuse.

√a² + b² = c

A square root is the opposite of a square. We can easily calculate the square root of 16 in our head, it’s 4 because 4 times 4 equals 16. But what about 289 or even 7? Not so easy.

Square roots aren’t a problem we worry about today. We have scientific calculators and programming languages have square root methods and hypotenuse methods built-in. For instance, C++ and PHP both provide a sqrt()and a hypot() method. As developers we don’t have to give these calculations any thought. We just call the method we need and as if by magic the result is returned.

The problem has been abstracted for us. We don’t worry about it in the same way early programmers or ancient mathematicians had to. So, how might we increase our empathy for ancient mathematicians and understand their challenges? Well, let’s consider how we might write an algorithm to solve a square root. It’s not an easy task.

To calculate a square root with pen and paper we need to use long division. A process which combines simplification with trial and error. And sounds similar to brute forcing a password with a dictionary attack. Which is also a form of simplification plus trial and error.

Our square root algorithm might therefore aim to simplify the problem and use a recursive trial and error process to find the answer. This wouldn’t be ideal or efficient, and it would need a lot of tests, but it might work. I’m not going to write the code now (I might come back to it in a later post). My aim is simply to highlight where our thinking might begin and the complexity involved.

Our thinking probably isn’t too far off the mark though. As it is well known square root algorithms aren’t very efficient. So maybe there is a recursive process involved. Also, we have a good example from the world of programming. The ID developers had to solve a square root efficiency problem in the game Quake III. They used a combination of hacks, clever maths, and approximation to get things working. It wasn’t simple and it wasn’t precise, but it worked. Clearly, square roots aren’t easy to solve.

When we delve into problems like this we quickly bump into complexity. And it highlights the challenges faced by previous generations dealing with these problems directly.

The Babylonians were aware of and using the Pythagorean Theorem, and solving square roots 4,000 years ago. And they did this challenging mathematics without computers or digital calculators. From which we can only conclude there were some very smart and capable people living in the second millennium BC.

It’s important to have empathy for previous generations. We live in a very advanced age, but our world is built on the hard work and genius of many generations. And when we analyse the past we’re often dealing with very capable human beings. Many of whom were a lot smarter than we are.

Useful Sources:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12896546-the-history-of-mathematics Jacqueline Stedall p90