Assorted References

• development of functionalism
  • In analytic philosophy: Functionalism

applications

• astronomy
  • In telescope: Computers
• automation
  • In automation: Modern developments
• brain-computer interface
  • In neuroplasticity: Brain-computer interface
• business logistics
  • In logistics: Coordinating and managing logistics
• criminal investigation
  • In police: Computerization
• database manipulation
  • In database
• information science
  • In information science
• information systems
  • In information processing: Databases
• museum documentation systems
  • In museum: Documentation
• solar tracker installations
  • In solar tracker
• teaching
  • In pedagogy: Computer-based instruction

design and operation

• backup power source
  • In electronics: Using transistors
• computer science
  • In computer science
• relation to logic
  • In philosophy of logic: Technical disciplines

development by

• Hewlett-Packard Company
  • In Hewlett-Packard Company: Computer business
• Hitachi
  • In Hitachi, Ltd.
• IBM
  • In IBM
• NEC Corp.
  • In NEC Corporation

Computer design and technology

W. Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (1998), provides lucid informal explanations of the principles of computer hardware and software. Gerrit A. Blaauw and Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (1997), combines a discussion of the principles of computer design with a survey of historically important computer systems. David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, 2nd ed. (1998), is an introductory textbook with detailed descriptions of CPU and computer system design. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed. (2001), is a well-written introductory survey of this topic. Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 3rd ed. (1996), is a standard textbook.

Computer history

Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (1996), is a comprehensive history that begins with early computational devices and proceeds through the creation of the first computers. Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective, ed. by Glen Fleck (1973, reprinted 1990), is a pictorial record of the authors’ creation of a computer exhibition for IBM that covered developments from the 1890 U.S. Census up to the stored-program computer, 1890–1950. N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota (eds.), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980), collects essays by participants in the events described, with hard-to-find details on wartime computer work in England, early computer development in Europe and Japan, and ENIAC. Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors, updated ed. (1996), is a readable overview of the history of computers with anecdotes and personalities. Richard L. Wexelblat (ed.), History of Programming Languages (1981), presents an academic and anecdotal history of 10 significant early programming languages, including FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC. Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., and Richard G. Gibson, Jr. (eds.), History of Programming Languages II (1996), gives a mixture of academic research and anecdotal accounts from participants, covering the history of ALGOL, Pascal, and more modern languages through C and Smalltalk. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (1984), describes the nascent years of the personal computer industry and the growth that took place in Silicon Valley. Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe, Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (1997), contains essays by experts on the social, scientific, and economic impact of computers during the coming decades.

In 1945, with ENIAC nearing completion at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, planning began for ENIAC’s successor, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC). Much, if not all, of the electrical engineering foundation for EDVAC was developed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., the Moore School faculty responsible for initiating the ENIAC project, with various programming and logic design contributions from Herman Goldstine (the ENIAC project administrator), mathematician John von Neumann (on leave from the Institute for Advanced Studies [IAS], at Princeton University, New Jersey, U.S.), and others.

Von Neumann summarized planning for EDVAC in a 100-page draft memorandum that was circulated among project members and U.S. government sponsors in 1945. Although von Neumann’s memo focused on the abstract structure of a stored-program computer and its logical control rather than any detailed engineering description, it was soon widely disseminated and influenced computer research projects around the world.

But, as postwar commercial prospects became clearer, the University of Pennsylvania ordered their employees to sign over all patent rights; Eckert and Mauchly refused and resigned their positions in March 1946 to found their own company. There ensued an increasingly bitter controversy between, on one side, Goldstine and von Neumann, who claimed EDVAC was the work of many researchers, and, on the other side, Eckert and Mauchly, who claimed to be the sole substantive inventors of EDVAC. As it was, both sides delayed presenting their patent claims beyond the prescribed one-year deadline from publication of the innovation. In 1947 the U.S. Army, which held the rights to use any innovation that it had funded, ruled that von Neumann’s 1945 memo constituted publication and that all ideas contained in the memo were now in the public domain.

Following this ruling, von Neumann changed the patent policy at the IAS, assigning patents to the public domain rather than to individual engineers. He also retracted an earlier offer for Eckert to join a new IAS computer project as the chief engineer, and he insisted on restricting Eckert and Mauchly’s access to IAS research (and even pressured faculty at the University of Chicago to sever prepublication discussions with Eckert and Mauchly). Von Neumann must be credited as one of those who strengthened the anticommercial culture of intellectual freedom at academic computer research institutions.

The army’s ruling did not altogether end patent disputes on the design of the classical computer. In 1967 the Sperry Rand Corporation, which had acquired ENIAC’s patents along with Eckert and Mauchly’s company in 1950, filed a lawsuit against Honeywell, Inc., to protect its patents on electronic digital computers. During the trial Eckert testified that von Neumann’s memo had only “translated some of the ideas of Dr. Mauchly and myself into a sort of semi-mathematical logical notation of his own.” However, portions of the patent (which covered essentially all aspects of electronic digital computers) were shown in court to have derived from the Atanasoff-Berry Computer of the 1930s and from information imparted to Mauchly by John V. Atanasoff himself in the early 1940s. In 1973 Sperry Rand’s patent claim was ruled invalid by a federal court.