History of computing thought
D Eaves
6 points
* 2 hours per week
* Second semester
* Caulfield
Objectives At the completion of this subject students should know the driving forces behind the development of computing, philosophical, social, economic and technological; understand the long tradition of ideas behind contemporary computing; understand the place of computing in an historical perspective; and appreciate the contemporary computational environment in an historical perspective.
Synopsis Introductory overview. Computing and computing machinery through Pascal and Leibniz. Taxes. Sources of technology: clocks and navigation. Jacquard's loom, automata. Imperialism. Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace. The architecture of the analytic engine. The invention of programming. George Boole and `An Investigation of the Laws of Thought'. Analog computing through the Bush analyser. Turing and the Turing Machine. The intellectual foundations of modern computing. The development of ENIAC at the Moore School. The arrival of von Neumann. EDVAC and the specification of the von Neumann machine. British Enigma decrypting machines at Bletchley Park. British computing at Cambridge and Manchester to 1954. Turing's postwar work. The development of data storage techniques through magnetic core. The history of IBM from the census of 1890 to the release of S360 in 1965. Early computing in Australia. The development of programming languages: Assembler, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Lisp etc. Commercial and scientific computing, 1952-1964. Xerox PARC and the development of modern computing.
Assessment Written (5000 words): 100%
Prescribed texts
Cringley R Accidental empires Penguin, 1994
Goldstein H The computer from Pascal to von Neumann Princeton, 1972
Hodges A Alan Turing Vintage, 1983
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