Philosophy of Computer Science: Online Resources

Further Readings for Chapter 6:

Computers: A Brief History

Note 1: Many of these items are online; links are given where they are known. Other items may also be online; an internet search should help you find them.

Note 2: In general, works are listed in chronological order. (This makes it easier to follow the historical development of ideas.)

Ch. 6 epigraphs:

• An interesting commentary on the quotation from Aiken is provided on p. 155 of:
  Davis, Martin (2017), "Universality is Ubiquitous", in Juliet Floyd & Alisa Bokulich (eds.), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing: Turing 100 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer), Ch. 6, pp. 153–158.

  Davis suggests that Aiken did not fully understand the nature of the Universal Turing Machine as a computer that could both solve differential equations and handle department-store billing.

• Browse the linked websites at "A Very Brief History of Computers"

• A nice brief history of computers is in:
  • Ralston, A. (1971). Introduction to Programming and Computer Science. McGraw-Hill, New York, §1.3, pp. 7–12.

• Copeland, B. J. (2004). Computation. In Floridi, L., editor, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, pages 3–17. Blackwell, Malden, MA, esp. pp. 3–4. >
  • Discusses "The Birth of the Modern Computer".

• Haigh, T. (2014). Actually, Turing did not invent the computer. Communications of the ACM, 57(1):36–41.
  • Discusses the (ir)relevance of the mathematical history of computation to the engineering history.

• Mahoney, M. S. (2011). Histories of Computing. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Edited by Thomas Haigh.
  • Despite its title, it is not so much a history of computing or computers as a history of CS.
  • Chs. 10 and 11 are especially good on some of the recent mathematical history.

• Good sources of information on the engineering history include:
  • Goldstine, H. H. (1972). The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
    • Written by one of the early pioneers of computers

  • Arden 1980, pp. 10–13, §"A Brief History".

  • Chase, G. C. (1980). History of mechanical computing machinery. Annals of the History of Computing, 2(3):198–226.
    • An illustrated history of computers, with a useful introduction by the science historian I. Bernard Cohen

  • O'Regan, G. (2008). A Brief History of Computing. Springer

  • Campbell-Kelly, M. (2009, September). Origin of computing. Scientific American, pages 62–69.
    • See also "Readers Respond on the 'Origin of Computing' ", Scientific American (January 2010): 8.

  • Aspray, W., editor (1990). Computing before Computers. Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA.

• Useful websites include:

  • The Computer History Museum

  • Copeland, B. J. (2000). A brief history of computing.

  • Lee, J. (2002). The history of computing

  • Hoyle, M. A. (2006). The history of computing science.

  • Carlson, B., Burgess, A., and Miller, C. (2012). Timeline of computing history

  • Hitmill.com (2012). History of computers.

• Sloman, A. (2002). The irrelevance of Turing machines to AI. In Scheutz, M., editor, Computationalism: New Directions, pages 87–127. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, §2.
  • Argues that even the engineering history of computers has "two strands": the "development of machines for controlling physical mechanisms and [the] development of machines for performing abstract operations, e.g. on numbers."

• Husbands, P., Wheeler, M., and Owen, H. (2008). Introduction: The mechanical mind. In Husbands, P., Wheeler, M., and Owen, H., editors, The Mechanical Mind in History, pages 1–17. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
  • An overview of attempts to make mechanical minds.

• Freeth, T., et al. (2006, 30 November). Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Nature, 444:587–591.

• Wilford, J. N. (2006, 30 November). Early astronomical 'computer' found to be technically complex. New York Times

• Seabrook, J. (2007, 14 May). Fragmentary knowledge. The New Yorker, pages 94–102.
  • For a photo slideshow, see Seabrook, J. (2007). Pieces of history

• Wilford, J. N. (2008). A device that was high-tech in 100 B.C." New York Times, page A12.

• Freeth, T. (2009, December). Decoding an ancient computer. Scientific American, 301(6):76–83.

§6.4.2: Seventeenth-Century Calculating Machines

• On Leibniz's contributions, see:
  • Ross, G. M. (1984). Leibniz. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

  • Chaitin, G.J. (2009). Leibniz, complexity, and incompleteness. APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, 9(1):7‐10.

• For pictures of early calculating machines, including Pascal's and Leibniz's, see:
  • "Generations of Computers"

  • IBM "Antique Attic" (a three-"volume", illustrated exhibit of computing artifacts)

  • "Vintage Calculators Web Museum"

§6.4.3: Babbage's Machines

• On Charles Babbage:
  • Hyman, A. (1982). Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
    • A biography of Babbage
      (reviewed in O’Hanlon, R. (1982). A calculating man. New York Times Book Review, pages BR26–BR27).

  • Useful websites on Babbage include:
    • Charles Babbage Institute

    • Lee, J. (1994). Charles Babbage.

    • O'Connor, J. and Robertson, E. (1998). Charles Babbage. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

    • Greenemeier, L. (2008, 24 April). 150-year-old computer brought to life (slideshow). Scientific American

    • Sydell, L. (2009, 10 December). A 19th-century mathematician finally proves himself. NPR

    • Johnstone, A. (2014, 28 November). Babbage's language of thought. Plan 28 Blog.

  • Simon and Newell 1958, pp. 1–3, contains a brief history of Babbage's work.

• For the story of the Jacquard loom, see Keats, J. (2009, September). The mechanical loom. In "The Start of Everything". Scientific American, page 88.

• Another antecedent of a calculating machine that involved textiles was the "stocking frame" that automated the knitting of stockings (socks). A discussion of them and Leibniz's interest in them as analogues of his calculating machines (both of which were intended to eliminate tedious jobs) can be found in:
  • Friedman, Michael (2024), "Leibniz and the Stocking Frame: Computation, Weaving and Knitting in the 17th Century", Minds and Machines 34:S11–S28.

• On the division of labor, see:
  • Adam Smith, "On the Division of Labor" (Book I, Ch. I).

  • Smith's pin-factory story is reprinted in Lawson, R. (2004). Division of labour.

  • See also:
    • Stein, D. K. (1984). Lady Lovelace's notes: Technical text and cultural context. Victorian Studies, 28(1):33–67.

    • Pylyshyn 1992

  • Babbage was inspired by de Prony, who was inspired by Smith.
    Smith, in turn, may have been inspired by the Talmud — the 2500-year-old Jewish commentaries on the Torah:
    • Cowen, T. (2008, 10 May). Division of labor in the Babylonian Talmud. Marginal Revolution (blog).

    • Kennedy, G. (2008, 11 May). The Talmud on the division of labour. Adam Smith's Lost Legacy (blog).

  • The recursive nature of top-down design and stepwise refinement has been identified with the notion of scientific progress by Rosenblueth and Wiener 1945, p. 319:
    "Scientific progress consists in a progressive opening of … ["closed", i.e., "black"] boxes" and subdividing closed boxes into "several smaller shut compartments" some of which "may be … left closed, because they are considered only functionally, but not structurally important."

    

  • For a more recent take on Smith, Babbage, and de Prony in the age of large language models such as ChatGPT, see:
    • Tarnoff, Ben (2025), "The Labor Theory of AI", New York Review of Books 72(5) (27 March):30–32.
    

• On the Difference Engine, see:
  • Park, E. (1996). The object at hand. Smithsonian, 26(11):20–23.

  • Campbell-Kelly, M. (2010). Be careful what you wish for: Reflections on the decline of mathematical tables. Communications on the ACM, 53(4):25 26.

  • A partial physical model of the Difference Engine was finally built around 1991; see:
    • Swade, D. D. (1993, February). Redeeming Charles Babbage's mechanical computer. Scientific American, pages 86–91.

• On the Analytical Engine, see:
  • Gandy, R. (1988). The confluence of ideas in 1936. In Herken, R., editor, The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, Second Edition, pages 51–102. Springer-Verlag, Vienna, esp. pp. 53
    • Written by Turing's only PhD student
    • Notes that Babbage's Analytic Engine can be considered as a kind of register machine (see §§9.3.2, 11.9, and 13.3.3), in which case it is equivalent to a Turing Machine, and he considers Babbage's statement that "the whole of the development and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery" to be "Babbage's Thesis" (perhaps on a par with the Church-Turing Computability Thesis).

  • Efforts were underway to build a version of the Analytical Engine:
    • Markoff, J. (2011). It started digital wheels turning. New York Times, pages D1, D4.
      • Also contains a diagram of the Analytical Engine.

  • Green, C. D. (2005). Was Babbage's analytical engine intended to be a mechanical model of the mind? History of Psychology, 8(1):35–45.
    • The title's question is answered in the negative (at least from Babbage's point of view).

• On Ada Lovelace:
  • Her commentary can be found in her notes to her translation of a description of the Analytic Engine:
    • Menabrea, L. F. and Lovelace, A. A. (1843). English translation of Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage. In [Richard Taylor's] Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 3, pp. 666ff.

  • For more on Lovelace, see:
    • Stein 1984

    • Stein, D. K. (1985). Ada: A Life and a Legacy. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Kidder, T. (1985, 29 December). Less (and more) than meets the eye. New York Times Book Review, pages 6–7.

    • Kim, E. E. and Toole, B. A. (1999, May). Ada and the first computer. Scientific American, pages 76–81.

    • Holt, J. (2001, 5 March). The Ada perplex. The New Yorker, pages 88–93.

    • MacFarlane, A. (2013). Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). Philosophy Now, Vol. 96.

    • Regan, K.W. (2015, 17 February). Ada the amplifier. Göodel's Lost Letter and P=NP.

    • Uglow, J. (2018). Stepping out of Byron's shadow. New York Review of Books, 65(18):30–32.

• On the history of programming, see:
  • Randell, B. (1994). The origins of computer programming. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 16(4):6–14.

  • Campbell-Kelly, M. (2011). In praise of 'Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill'. Communications of the ACM, 54(9):25–27.
    • "Reflections on the first textbook on programming"

  • Ensmenger, N. (2011). Building castles in the air. Communications of the ACM, 54(4):28–30.
    • Contains "Reflections on recruiting and training programmers during the early period of computing."

§6.4.4: Electronic Computers

• For more on Colossus, see:
  • Sale, T. The Colossus rebuild project.

  • Wells, B. (2003). The architecture of Colossus, the first PC (abstract).

  • Copeland, B. J. and Flowers, T. (2010). Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. Oxford University Press, New York. Co-authored by 17 Bletchley Park Codebreakers.

  • Bruderer, Herbert (2024, 19 January), "The Colossus", Blog@ACM

• On the Enigma, see:
  • Kernan, M. (1990, May). The object at hand. Smithsonian, 21:22, 24, 26.

• Martin, D. (2013). Mavis Batey, 92, Allied code breaker in World War II. New York Times, page 32.
  • An obituary of Mavis Batey, a code breaker who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park.

• On Atanasoff, see:
  • Baranger, W. R. (1995). John V. Atanasoff, 91, dies; early computer researcher. New York Times, page 11.

• On Zuse, see:
  • Lee, J. (1994). Konrad Zuse. The History of Computing.

  • Hyman, P. (2012). Lost and found. Communications of the ACM, 55(7):21.

  • Winkler, J.F.H. (2012). Konrad Zuse and floating-point numbers. Communications of the ACM, 55(10):6–7. (Letter to the Editor).

• On the ENIAC, see:
  • Kennedy, Jr., T. (1946, 15 February). Electronic computer flashes answers, may speed engineering. New York Times, pages 1, 16.

  • Baranger, W.R. (1995). J. Presper Eckert, co-inventor of early computer, dies at 76. New York Times, page B12.

  • Levy, S. (2013, November). 101 objects that made America: The brief history of the ENIAC computer. Smithsonian, pages 62–64.

• On the ENIAC-ABC controversy, with a discussion of an attempt to replicate the ABC, see:
  • Wheeler, D.L. (1997). An ancient feud: Who invented the computer? Chronicle of Higher Education, page B2.

  • A useful summary of some of the issues involved can be found in:
    • Ensmenger, N. (2003). Bits of history: Review of A.R. Burks's Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle that Changed Computing History. In American Scientist, 91:467–468.
      • Ensmenger observes that identifying Atanasoff as " the inventor of the computer" (my phrasing and italics) is an "answer to what is fundamentally the wrong question" because "any particular claim to priority of invention must necessarily be heavily qualified: If you add enough adjectives, you can always claim your own favorite".

    • For another take on this kind of question, by a computer scientist, see:
      • Hamming, R. (1980). We would know what they thought when they did it. In Metropolis, N., Howlett, J., and Rota, G.-C., editors, A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Essays, pages 3‐9. Academic Press, New York.

• On von Neumann, see:
  • Halmos, P.R. (1973). The legend of John von Neumann. American Mathematical Monthly, pages 382–394.
    • A very readable, short biography of von Neumann, with a heavy emphasis on the humorous legends that have grown up around him.

  • The story of von Neumann's involvement in the development of computers can be found in:
    • Dyson, G. (2012). Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Pantheon, New York.
      • For commentaries on Dyson 2012, see:
        • Holt, J. (2012). How the computers exploded. New York Review of Books, pages 32–34.

        • Mauchly, B., Bernstein, J., Dowson, M., Adams, D. K., and Holt, J. (2012). Who gets credit for the computer?: An exchange. New York Review of Books, pages 96, 98.

    • See also Bacon 2010

  • The original document on the "von Neumann architecture" is:
    • von Neumann, J. (1945). First draft report on the EDVAC. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 15(4)(1993)):27–75. Michael D. Godfrey (ed.).

• For the history of personal computers, see:
  • Ryan, B. (1991). Dynabook revisited with Alan Kay. Byte, 16(2):203–204, 206–208.
    • Tries to predict the future of what are now known as laptop computers, asking "Is the reign of the desktop computer about to end?'

  • Press, L. (1993). Before the Altair: The history of personal computing. Communications of the ACM, 36(9):27–33.

  • Markoff, J. (2000). A tale of the tape from the days when it was still Micro Soft. New York Times, pages C1, C4. (on the history of Microsoft Basic)

  • Waldrop, M. M. (2001, December). The origins of personal computing. Scientific American, pages 84‐91.

  • Markoff, J. (2005). What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Viking, New York.

  • Lanier, J. (2005). Early computing's long, strange trip. American Scientist, 93(4):364–365.

  • Lohr, S. (2010). Inventor whose pioneer PC helped inspire Microsoft dies. New York Times, pages A1–A3.

• On precursors of the Internet and the Web:
  • For a 1909(!) version of the Internet, see:
    • Forster, E.M. (1909). The machine stops. In The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster, pages 144–197. Modern Library, 1968, New York.

  • Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers. Walker Publishing, New York.
    • Alden, J.R. (1999, January). Review of Standage 1998. Smithsonian, 29(10):126–127.

  • Wright, A. (2008). The Web time forgot. New York Times, pages F1, F4. (On a 1934(!) version of a World Wide Web).

• For more recent histories of the Internet and the Web, see:
  • Hayes, B. (1994, September-October). The World Wide Web. American Scientist, 82:416–420.

  • Hayes, B. (2000, May-June). The nerds have won. American Scientist, 88:200–204.

• For brief biographies of two computer pioneers — Grace Murray Hopper and Jean E. Sammet — see:
  • Markoff, J. (1992, 3 January). Rear Adm. Grace M. Hopper dies; innovator in computers was 85. New York Times.

  • Sammet, J.E. (1992). Farewell to Grace Hopper — end of an era! Communications of the ACM, 35(4):128–131.

  • Lohr, S. (2017, 4 June). Jean Sammet, co-designer of a pioneering computer language, dies at 89. New York Times.

• And for a history of computers as shown in cartoons, see:
  • Mathews, W.M. and Reifers, K. (1984). The computer in cartoons: A retrospective from The Saturday Review. In Communications of the ACM, 27(11):1114–1119.

• As for "higher purposes", see:
  • Hafner, K. (2002). Happy birthday :-) to you: A smiley face turns 20. New York Times, page G4.

  • this cartoon.

§6.5: The Scientific History:

• Martin Davis, one of the leading mathematicians in the field of theory of computation, has written extensively on the history of CS:
  • Davis, Martin D. (2012). The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing; Turing Centenary Edition. CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL.
    • This is the best overview of the scientific-logical history!

      • Originally published as Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000)
      • For reviews of the first edition (2000), see:
        • Papadimitriou, C.H. (2001, March-April). The sheer logic of IT. American Scientist, 89:168–171.
        • Dawson, J.W. (2001). Review of Davis 2012. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 7(1):65–66.
        • Johnson, M. (2002). Review of Davis 2012. MAA Reviews

  • Davis, M.D. (1995). Mathematical logic and the origin of modern computers. In Herken, R., editor, The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, Second Edition, pages 135–158. Springer-Verlag, Vienna.
    • An article-length version of the story told in his book.

  • Davis, M. D. (2000). Overheard in the park. American Scientist, 88:366–367.
    • A somewhat negative review of Berlinski, D. (2000). The Advent of the Algorithm. Harcourt, New York, correcting some of the historical errors in that book.

  • Davis, M. D. (2003). Paradoxes in paradise. American Scientist, 91:268–269.
    • A review of Giaquinto, M. (2002). The Search for Certainty: A Philosophical Account of Foundations of Mathematics. Oxford University Press.

  • Davis, M.D. (2004). The myth of hypercomputation. In Teuscher, C., editor, Alan Turing: The Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, pages 195–212. Springer, Berlin,
    • Early sections contain a good summary of the history of computation.

• On Leibniz:
  "The term 'Begriffsschrift' was used … of Leibniz's lingua characteristica, an artificial language in which structures of signs mirror structures of concepts they stand for in such [a] way that signs and concepts are systematically connected."
  
  — p.283 of Korte, Tapio (2010), "Frege's Begriffsschrift as a lingua characteristica", Synthese 174:283–294.

  By contrast, a calculus ratiocinator is a logic.

  See also: van Heijenoort, Jean (1967), "Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language", Synthese 17:324–330.

  (Note that van Heijenoort calls it a "lingua characterica".)

  Also see:

  • Corazzon, Raul, "Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium"

  • "Characteristica universalis" (Wikipedia)

  • "Calculus ratiocinator" (Wikipedia)
    

• An enjoyable graphic-novel treatment of the Russell-Frege story, with text by a well-known computer scientist, is:
  • Doxiadis, A., Papadimitriou, C. H., Papadatos, A., and Di Donna, A. (2009). Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. Bloomsbury USA, New York.

• For more on impossibility proofs, see:
  • Toussaint, G. (1993). A new look at Euclid's second proposition. The Mathematical Intelligencer, 15(3):12 23.

  • Stewart, I. (2000, January). Impossibility theorems. Scientific American, pages 98–99.

• Two excellent, brief overviews of the history of logic and the foundations of mathematics that led up to Turing's analysis can be found in:
  • Henkin, L. (1962). Are logic and mathematics identical? Science, 138(3542):788–794.

  • Williamson 2023

  See also:

  • Shapiro, Stewart (1983). Remarks on the development of computability. History and Philosophy of Logic, 4(1):203–220.

  • Sieg, W. (1994). Mechanical procedures and mathematical experience. In George, A., editor, Mathematics and Mind, pages 71–117. Oxford University Press, New York, §1.

  • Soare, R. I. (1999). The history and concept of computability. In Griffor, E., editor, Handbook of Computability Theory, pages 3–36. North-Holland, Amsterdam.

  • Chaitin, G. J. (2002). Computers, paradoxes and the foundations of mathematics. American Scientist, 90:164–171.

  • And especially Ch. 17 of:
    Soare, R. I. (2016). Turing Computability: Theory and Applications. Springer, Berlin.

  • For a very brief, 1-page summary, see:
    Vardi, Moshe (2023), "What Came First, Math or Computing?, Communications of the ACM 66(11) (November): 5
    

• For the logical history as written by one of its chief players, see:
  • Kleene, S C. (1981). Origins of recursive function theory. Annals of the History of Computing, 3(1):52–67.

• Robinson, J. A. (1994). Logic, computers, Turing, and von Neumann. In Furukawa, K., Michie, D., and Muggleton, S., editors, Machine Intelligence 13: Machine Intelligence and Inductive Learning, pages 1–35. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
  • A personal history of the development of computers and the related logical history, by the developer of the resolution method of automated theorem proving.

• On Church, see:
  • Manzano, M. (1997). Alonzo Church: His life, his work and some of his miracles. History and Philosophy of Logic, 18:211–232.

• For very elementary introductions to the lambda-calculus, see:
  • "PolR" (2009, 11 November). An explanation of computation theory for lawyers.

  • Alama, Jesse and Johannes Korbmacher, The Lambda Calculus, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

• On Post, see:
  • Stillwell, John (2004), "Emil Post and His Anticipation of Gödel and Turing", Mathematics Magazine 77(1) (February):3–14.
    

  • Davis, Martin; & Sieg, Wilfried (2015), "Conceptual Confluence in 1936: Post and Turing", in Giovanni Sommaruga & Thomas Strahm (eds.), Turing's Revolution: The Impact of His Ideas aboutComputability (Cham, Switzerland: Birkhäuser):3–27

• The role of philosophy in the history of computers is told in:
  • George, A. (1983). Philosophy and the birth of computer science. Robotics Age, pages 26–31.

• For a somewhat controversial take on the history of computing (and the notion of a stored-program computer), see a debate between computer scientist Moshe Vardi and philosopher B. Jack Copeland:
  • Vardi, M. Y. (2013). Who begat computing? Communications of the ACM, 56(1):5.

  • Copeland, B. J. (2013, 12 August). What Apple and Microsoft owe to Turing. Huff[ington] Post Tech/The Blog.

  • Vardi, M. Y. (2017). Would Turing have won the Turing Award? Communications of the ACM, 60(11):7.