Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T14:37:27.404Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

31 - Computer Science and the Computer Revolution

from Part VI - Problems and Promises at the End of the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
William Aspray
Edited by
Mary Jo Nye
Mary Jo Nye
Affiliation:
Oregon State University
Get access

Summary

Until the mid-1950s, the word “computer” commonly referred to a woman employed in operating a calculating machine in a business office or a scientific calculating laboratory. With the invention in 1945 of the stored-program computer, several months after the Second World War ended, and with the publicity surrounding the introduction in 1952 of the first commercial computer (the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC), the word computer became associated with a machine, rather than a human.

This machine had three attributes that rendered prior calculating technologies obsolete in less than two decades. The electronic switching of its components eventually made the computer billions of times faster than its mechanical ancestors. The digital storage of information enhanced precision to practically unrestricted levels. The stored program capability, that is, the ability to store instructions as well as data inside the machine and to have the machine process those instructions during the course of a computation without human intervention, had two advantages: First, it enabled almost any computer to be used as a universal machine, in other words, to carry out virtually any computation possible by a machine. Second, stored programming was critical to the automation of the computational process, so that the overall speed of computation could reflect the electronic speed of the components.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 598 - 614
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anchordoguy, Marie, Computers Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aspray, William, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Aspray, William, Keil-Slawik, Reinhard, and Parnas, David L., The History of Software Engineering (Dagstuhl Seminar Report 153) (Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany: Inter nationales Begegnungs- und For schungs zentrum für Informatik, 1996).Google Scholar
Aspray, William, Williams, Bernard O., and Goldstein, Andrew, “The Social and Intellectual Shaping of a New Mathematical Discipline: The Role of the National Science Foundation in the Rise of Theoretical Computer Science and Engineering,” in Vita Mathematica: Historical Research and Integration with Teaching, ed. Calinger, Ronald (M.A.A. Notes Series) (Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1996)Google Scholar
Aspray, William and Williams, Bernard, “Arming American Scientists: The Role of the National Science Foundation in the Provision of Scientific Computing Facilities,” Annals of the History of Computing, 16, no. 4 (Winter 1994).Google Scholar
Aspray, William and Williams, Bernard, “Computing in Science and Engineering Education: The Programs of the National Science Foundation,” IEEE Electro /93 Proceedings (1993).Google Scholar
Aspray, William, “The Transformation of Numerical Analysis by the Computer,” in History of Modern Mathematics, vol. 2, ed. McCleary, John and Rowe, David (Boston: Academic Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Beniger, James R., The Control Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar
Billings, Charlene, Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Enslow Publishers, 1989).Google Scholar
Bromley, Allan G., “Analog Computing Devices” in Computing Before Computers, ed. Aspray, William (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Brooks, Frederick P. Jr., The Mythical Man-Month (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, “Large-Scale Data Processing in the Prudential, 1850–1930,” Accounting, Business, and Financial History, 2 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell-Kelly, Martin and Aspray, William, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996).Google Scholar
Campbell-Kelly, Martin, ICL: A Business and Technical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Ceruzzi, Paul E., Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935–1945 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).Google Scholar
Ceruzzi, Paul E., “When Computers Were Human,” Annals of the History of Computing, 13, no. 3 (1991).Google Scholar
Cortada, James W., Before the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
David, Paul A., “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” American Economic Review, 80 (May 1990).Google Scholar
Edwards, Paul N., The Closed World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Ende, Jan, The Turn of the Tide (Delft, Netherlands: Delft University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Fisher, Franklin M., McKie, James W., and Mancke, Richard B., IBM and the U.S. Data Processing Industry (New York: Praeger, 1983).Google Scholar
Galison, Peter, How Experiments End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Grier, David Alan, “Gertrude Blanch of the Mathematical Tables Project,” Annals of the History of Computing, 19, no. 4 (October–December 1997).Google Scholar
Horsburg, E. M., ed., Handbook of the Napier Tercentenary Celebration or Modern Instruments and Methods of Calculation (original ed., Edinburgh: G. Bell and Sons and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1914).Google Scholar
Iacano, Suzanne and Kling, Rob, “Changing Office Technologies and Transformations of Clerical Jobs: A Historical Perspective,” in Technology and the Transformation of White-Collar Work, ed. Kraut, E. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987).Google Scholar
Kidder, Tracy, Soul of a New Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).Google Scholar
Kidwell, Peggy A. and Ceruzzi, Paul E., Landmarks in Digital Computing (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Landauer, Thomas K., The Trouble with Computers (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Leslie, Stuart W., The Cold War and American Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Levy, Steven, Hackers (New York: Dell, 1984).Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Donald, “The Influence of the Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories on the Development of Super computing,” Annals of the History of Computing, 13 (1991).Google Scholar
Mahoney, Michael S., “Computer Science: The Search for a Mathematical Theory,” in Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. Krige, John and Pestre, Dominique (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), chap. 31.Google Scholar
Mahoney, Michael S., “The Roots of Software Engineering,” CWI Quarterly, 3, no. 4 (1990).Google Scholar
McCorduck, Pamela, Machines Who Think (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979).Google Scholar
Norberg, Arthur L. and O’Neill, Judy E., Transforming Computer Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Philips, E. R. (Washington, D.C. ed. “The Mathematical Reception of the Computer,” in Studies in the History of Mathematics, Mathematical Association of America, 1987).Google Scholar
Pugh, Emerson W., IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Redmond, Kent C. and Smith, Thomas M., Project Whirlwind (Boston: Digital Press, 1980).Google Scholar
Saxenian, Anna, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
Sichel, Daniel E., The Computer Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997)Google Scholar
Sprague, Richard, “A Western View,” Communications of the ACM, 15 (July 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, Nancy, From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers (Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Turkle, Sherry, The Second Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).Google Scholar
Wildes, Karl L. and Lindgren, Nilo A., A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882–1982 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Williams, Michael R., A History of Computing Technology, 2d ed. (Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997).Google Scholar
y, David Jay, Turing’s Man (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Yates, JoAnn, Control Through Communication (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
Zuboff, Shoshana, In the Age of the Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×