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History Lessons


Mar03: Programming Paradigms

Michael is editor-at-large for DDJ. He can be contacted at [email protected].


This is a column about the history of the computer, but it starts with some self-referential throat clearing about my credentials, or lack of same, as a(n) historian, semirandom ruminations about historical reliability and the nature of truth, and something George Orwell once said about Sir Walter Raleigh. (I don't know about you, nor do I know what it says about the whimsicality of history, fame, or memory, but I can't hear the name Sir Walter Raleigh without hearing "He was such a stupid get." Thank you, John Lennon.)

My (non)credentials. Although I wrote a book on the history of the personal computer, I am not a(n) historian. My coauthor on Fire in the Valley (Paul Freiberger) does have a history degree, however, and it was his job to see to it that we did our research right, as it was mine to see that we got the technology right. How well we performed is up to the judgment of history.

It may be crossing your mind just now that letting history judge histories could be problematic—incestuous or recursive or something. I think that the very idea of history is a little recursive. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that you can't always believe history, right?

Who Writes History?

History is written by the winners, it's said. That being itself a(n) historical generalization, it must have been written by a winner. The winners, however, do not seem to have written down just which winner first said "history is written by the winners." Searching through no less than 500 Google links, I found this phrase, or such variations on it as "history is written by the victors," confidently attributed to Stalin, Churchill, Napoleon, George Orwell, Ben Franklin, Vojislav Stanimirovic, and Mario Van Peebles. Winners all.

My failure unambiguously to answer this question proves that I'm not a(n) historian. In the course of that 500-link search, though, I did come across an apt anecdote, related in 1944 by George Orwell, who was then depressed by his conclusion that lies had become historical fact in Franco's Spain:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London [possibly on that Stupid Get charge], he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about; whereupon...he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

Orwell's point, and the anecdote's point, is pretty much the point made in that familiar Henry Ford quote: "History is more or less bunk," which is usually misquoted as "History is bunk," which helps to prove that you can't trust history. Extra irony: Orwell didn't necessarily believe the anecdote he related, although he claimed to believe its point. "If the story is not true, it certainly ought to be," he said, showing a novelist's appreciation of the value of historical accuracy.

Nevertheless, Orwell's personal history (you'll trust me on this, surely?) shows that he didn't really even believe the point of the anecdote; he did believe that you can sometimes determine what happened and that history can be a truthful objective report of real events.

I wonder how Orwell would have judged the conflicting histories of the invention of the computer.

But before I get into that conflict, one more prefatory thought, a question that necessarily comes up in assessing the claims about who invented the computer: There is another meaning to the question "who writes history," and that is, "what credentials do you need to have to write history?" Can only degree-holding historians write history? Or does having lived the history count as a good credential for writing about it? Of course "those who lived it" really means "those who survived it," which is another way of saying "the winners." If Raleigh went to the surviving workman beneath his window for a first-hand account of events, he'd have been relying on the winner's history.

In the case of the invention of the computer, both degree-holding historians and those who lived it have taken a crack at telling the story. At this point, there are few survivors and no clear winners.

A Computer's View

More than half a century after the event, there is no consensus on the question of who invented the computer. It doesn't help the historians in their efforts to settle the controversy that several independent teams of inventors were working on the idea at the same time in more or less complete ignorance of one another because of World War II security. That is, nobody on the Allied side of the war knew about the work of Konrad Zuse in Germany, few Americans knew anything about the British work, and the Brits were mostly in the dark about American efforts. Certain American claimants, however, did know about each others' work, and questions of who knew what when are at the heart of the controversy about who gets the credit.

On the one side of the controversy are J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchley, the acknowledged inventors of ENIAC, a half-million-dollar government project to build a machine to help win the war.

On the other side is John V. Atanasoff, an Iowa State University math and physics professor, who, using $6500 in grant money, built a machine in 1941 that he never quite finished but that arguably (and boy does it get argued) met all the criteria for being a computer.

A case can also be made for Konrad Zuse in Germany, for Alan Turing in England, or for John Von Neumann in the U.S. Some of the claims are stronger than others, and candidates weave into or out of the list as you modify "computer" with different adjectives: automatic, digital, electronic, general-purpose, stored-program. But the most bitter controversy has been between the Eckert/Mauchley and Atanasoff camps.

Among those historians who have been trying to tell the story as they see it are Alice Rowe Burks and Arthur W. Burks. Arthur Burks was one of a handful of engineers whose contributions to ENIAC were exceeded only by Eckert's and Mauchley's. Like Eckert, Mauchley, Atanasoff, and many more of the people with first-hand knowledge of the significant events in the history of the computer, Burks is no longer around to answer our questions, but Alice Burks is alive and well and continues to tell her story in Who Invented the Computer: The Legal Battle that Changed Computing History (Prometheus Books, 2002; ISBN 1591020344). And she was there. Besides being married to Arthur, Alice Rowe Burks was one of those women who performed computations by hand or using a hand calculator during WWII. You know what these women were called, right? Right, computers. And who is more qualified to write about the history of the computer than a computer? Sorry.

Burks's book would probably have pleased George Orwell: full of verifiable facts, but also presenting a viewpoint and fighting hard for it. Burks's short answer to the question in the title is John V. Atanasoff. It's not the popularly accepted answer, but Burks builds a formidable case. Her case is even bolstered by the force of law. The question of who invented the computer was asked in a court of law in 1971, and the answer finally handed down (in 1973) gave precedence to Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff. But in the court of history, does a judge have standing?

Do Judges Write History?

There might have been no controversy if the individuals who were at the time (1971 and earlier) generally acknowledged as the inventors of the computer, and the company they were associated with, had not felt the need to take the issue to court. Other possible claimants, Atanasoff included, were making no very vocal claims, and history seemed willing to grant primacy to ENIAC and to ENIAC's creators, Eckert and Mauchley.

But Sperry Rand had seen a number of companies enter the market to produce computers, and it wanted to enforce its patents (or Eckert and Mauchley's—read the book for the legal complexities). These patents covered both component technologies and the computer itself. IBM had already paid Sperry Rand for the right to build computers, but Honeywell was balking and other manufacturers were watching with great interest to see what Honeywell could get away with.

Ultimately, Sperry Rand tried for it all: The company sought to have ENIAC acknowledged as the first automatic electronic digital computer. The patent claims were wide-ranging and detailed, and it would not have been surprising if some of them had been invalidated when the matter got to a court, as Sperry Rand knew it inevitably would.

Ultimately, and to the surprise of most observers, the judge went beyond the patent particulars and ruled that ENIAC was not the first computer, but was derived from an earlier computer invented by John V. Atanasoff. Sperry Rand lost the right to collect royalties from every other computer maker, but Eckert and Mauchley lost their place in history.

Or so it seemed. However, as Burks explains, many historians refused to accept the judge's conclusion and continued to acknowledge Eckert and Mauchley as the computer's inventors.

Burks' Verdict

The judge made it clear that he found Atanasoff a more credible witness than Mauchley, and it's not hard to see why. Mauchley repeatedly contradicted himself on the stand, and eventually acknowledged most of the key points of the other side's case. ENIAC was not a rip-off of Atanasoff's computer, but there was an influence, and Mauchley and Eckert denied the influence and tried to patent some innovations that were clearly Atanasoff's. On the other hand, Atanasoff's computer was never finished, was not completely electronic, and would never have been able to perform the computations eventually required of ENIAC.

Burks reports all that. Arthur and Alice Burks have been accused of being cheerleaders for Atanasoff, blind to opposing views. I can't see evidence of that in this book. Besides, Arthur worked on ENIAC; the Burks' self-interest would naturally lie with promoting the claim that ENIAC was the first computer, and playing down the Atanasoff claim. Their defense of Atanasoff over the years goes against simple self-interest. In the current book, Burks grants Eckert and Mauchley a lot, but she doesn't give them all that they wanted to claim. It is hard to fault her conclusion that they tried to claim more than they had a right to.

In the first half of the book, Burks mostly lets the facts—and the disputants—speak for themselves. But this controversy over who invented the computer has been going on for decades, and has its own history. In the second half of the book, Burks tells some of that history, and the story gets personal. She takes on the critics who have challenged her and her husband's view of history, and talks about the various forces that may have influenced people's opinions over who deserves credit for what. For example, Paul Ceruzzi, the Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, wrote a mixed review of a book by the Burks', and she points out several factual errors in the review, and other factual errors and inconsistencies in Ceruzzi's own writings. About a book by Eckert-Mauchley defender Scott McCartney she says, "the book has many errors of fact," and she details them.

I'll leave it to you (or history) to decide if Burks effectively defends her views against her critics. But I do have some independent experience regarding the accuracy of these two authors.

Paul Ceruzzi, in his well-reviewed and I think generally accurate book, A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1998; ISBN 0-262-03255-4), cites Fire in the Valley, Second Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2000; ISBN 0-07-135892-7) as one of the popular histories of computers (as opposed to serious histories, like his) and then gets the reference to the book wrong every blessed time he mentions it. Since this professional historian's research methods manage to write me out of the history of the writing of my own book, I guess I won't claim to have an unbiased view of Paul Ceruzzi's concern for historical accuracy.

Another book that I have on my shelves is Scott McCartney's ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer (Berkeley/Penguin, 1999; ISBN 0-425-17644-4), the one that Burks trashes. In looking through it in the process of reviewing Burks's book, I discovered that my copy had several underlined passages—errors that I had noted on a previous reading. Specifically, McCartney repeats discredited claims about Charles Babbage and confuses binary notation with BCD. If I had to choose between believing Burks or McCartney, I'd choose Burks.

One way in which the Burks ruffled feathers was by accusing the Smithsonian Institution of being influenced by corporate sponsors to bend history to the advantage of those sponsors. In the case of a Smithsonian exhibition on the history of the computer, the corporate sponsor in question was Unisys, the successor to Sperry Rand, and the alleged warping was the Smithsonian's plan to marginalize Atanasoff and vigorously play up Eckert and ENIAC in the exhibit. The Smithsonian staff, which included future Burks book reviewer Paul Ceruzzi, angrily denied any corporate influence (while thanking corporate sponsors for their input).

Interestingly, I have on my desk a book by Doron Swade, Associate Director and Head of Collections for the Science Museum in London, in which he paints a vivid picture of the pressures that could be placed on a museum in the greed-is-good 1980s:

The Science Museum, part of the public sector, was not immune [to Thatcherism]. "Visitors" became customers. The book-lines Fellows Room, a quiet sanctuary that was once the museum's library, became a prestigious venue for public hire.

"A venue for hire" is what Burks implies that the Smithsonian exhibit became.

But What About Babbage?

In Swade's book, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (Penguin Books, 2000; ISBN 0-14-20-0144-9), he tells of his (successful) effort to build, in 1991, Babbage's Difference Engine from the early 19th century plans using early nineteenth century materials and technology. Until a little over a decade ago, it was widely believed that "the plans for the Difference Engine exceeded the manufacturing capabilities of the nineteenth century" (to quote McCartney, who still believed it four years ago). But Swade wondered if it was true, and set out to learn the answer.

As his book engagingly tells, Babbage was right. His designs were sound, they were detailed enough for a competent engineer to carry out, and they were executable with the techniques and technology of the day. His machines could have been built.

Swade's achievement is a dazzling piece of proof-by-doing, and the resulting piece of machinery is itself literally dazzling, a joy to look at. But what he demonstrated by building the Difference Engine has bearing on the question that titles Burks's book.

Because there is also the Analytical Engine. Babbage's Analytical Engine was, by some definition, a true computer. Although it was much more ambitious than his Difference Engine, although there was no single set of plans for it, the successful building and operation of the Difference Engine lends strong credence to the belief that Babbage knew exactly what he was doing with the Analytical Engine, and that, had he been given sufficient financial support, he could have built a working computer in the first half of the 19th century. Had he done so, we wouldn't be fussing over the claims of all these 20th-century johnny-come-latelies.

DDJ


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