The Ultimate Revelation Of The Tripartite Nature Of Computing. Computer history part :-4
The Ultimate Revelation Of The Tripartite Nature Of Computing
 |
| The Ultimate Revelation Of The Tripartite Nature Of Computing |
The Ultimate Revelation Of The Tripartite Nature Of Computing
PART :- 4
ABOUT THIS PART : -
The Tripartite Nature Of Computing
analytical engine and George Boole's algebra of thought as if they were conceptually related by something other than 20th-century hindsight. Whatever Jothe "von Neumann architecture" that defines the computer for the period with which historians are properly concerned, it is really only in von Neumann's
collaboration with the ENIAC team that two quite separate historicalstrands came together: the effort to achie ve high-speed,
high-precision, automatic calculation and the effort to design a logic machine capable of significant reasoning.9
reflected in its dual origins: hardware in the sequence of devices that stretches from the Pascaline to the ENIAC, software in the series of investigations that reaches from Leibniz's combinatorics to Turing's abstract machines. Until the two strands come together in the computer, they belong to different histories, the electronic calculator to the history of
technology, the logic machine to the history of mathematics,10 and they can be unfolded separately without significant loss of fullness or texture. Though they come together in the computer, they do not unite. The computer remains an amalgam of technological device
and mathematical concept, which retain
separate identities despite their influence on one another.
Thus the computer in itself embodies
one of the central problems of the history of technology, namely the relation of science and technology.11 Computing as an enterprise deepens the problem. For not only are finite automata or denot ationa l semanticsi ndependent of integrated circuits, they are also linked in only the most tenuous and uncertain way to programs and programming, that is, to software and its production. Since
lies the programming that makes it
intellectually, economically, and socially
useful. Unlike the extremes, the middle
remains a craft, technical rather than
technological, mathematical only in
appearance. It poses the question of the
relation of science and technology in a very special form.
That tripartite structure shows up in
the three distinct disciplines that are concerned with the computer: electrical engineering, computer science, and software engineering. Of these, the first is the most well established, since it predates the computer, even though its
current focus on microelectronics reflects its basic orientation toward the device. Computer science began to take shape during the 1960s, as it brought together common concerns from mathematical logic (automata, proof theory,
recursive function theory), mathematical
linguistics, and numerical analysis (algorithms, computational complexity), adding to them questions of the organization of information (data structures) and the relation of computer
architecture to patterns of computation.
Software engineering, conceived as a
deliberately provocative term in 1967 (Naur and Randell 1969), has developed more as a set of techniques than as a body of learning. Except for a few university centers, such as Carnegie-Mellon University, University of North Carolina, Berkeley, and Oxford, it remains primarily a concern of military and
industrial R&D aimed at the design and
implementation of large, complex systems, and the driving forces are cost and reliabilityhn von Neumann's precise role in designing
In The Sciences of the Artificial Herbert Simon (1981; cf. Newell and Simon 1976) argues forcefully for the empirical nature of computer research th at underlies its mathematical trappings. The thinking of computer designers and programmers is embodied in the way their machines and programs work, and th e languages they use to specify how things are to work are themselves artifacts. The models they use are filled with images difficult or distractingly tedious to translate into words; cf. Bolter (1984).9 I do not make this claim in ignorance of Konrad Zuse's Z4 or Alan Turing's ACE, which realized roughly the same goals as von Neumann's along independent paths. Clearly the computer was "in the air" by the 1940s. But it was the 1940s, not the 1840s. 10I am including the history of mathematical logic in the history of mathematics
science as well, if only by giving special force to the
reciprocal influence of scientific theory and scientific instrumentation. But up to now at least it has not attracted the same attention. The computer may well change that as the shaping of scientific concepts and the pursuit of scientific inquiry come to depend on the state of computer technology.
Part :- 5
Next part (click now) :- see on part :- 5 5
The Tripartite Nature of Computing
PART :- 3
Privis part (click now) :- see on part 3 :-3