Computers: A Brief History
Last Update: Thursday, 4 July 2024 |
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:
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.
§6.3: Two Histories of Computers
§6.4: The Engineering History:
§6.4.1: Ancient Greece
On the Antikythera Mechanism, see:
§6.4.2: Seventeenth-Century Calculating Machines
§6.4.3: Babbage's Machines
§6.4.4: Electronic Computers
§6.4.5: Modern Computers:
§6.5: The Scientific History:
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.
Also see:
See also:
(reviewed in
O’Hanlon, R. (1982). A calculating man. New York Times Book Review,
pages BR26–BR27).
Smith, in turn, may have been inspired by the Talmud — the 2500-year-old
Jewish commentaries on the Torah:
"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."
"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.
(Note that van Heijenoort calls it a "lingua characterica".)
Soare, R. I. (2016). Turing Computability: Theory and Applications.
Springer, Berlin.
Vardi, Moshe (2023),
"What Came First, Math or Computing?,
Communications of the ACM 66(11) (November): 5
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
Copyright © 2023–2024 by
William J. Rapaport
(rapaport@buffalo.edu)
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/OR/A0fr06.html-20240704