Turing, Navia and Schildt

[spinoza1111]

Gordon Brown on the BBC world service has apologized for the treatment
of Turing. I wrote a letter to Computerworld naming Turing as the
inventor of the computer in 1972. He was not so identified then but is
widely so today: that created the move to rehabilitate Turing's
reputation: he was chemically castrated by the authorities for being
gay.

Neither Navia nor Schildt are being named and shamed here for being
"gay", and they probably aren't "gay", nor am I (I'm just happy
sometimes). But, the grammar is isomorphic: the treatment of the
outsider is similar.

We can therefore take heart. Turing was unmentionable in polite
computing circles in 1972 because of his gayness and his contribution
was ignored, and his credit was stolen by us Americans. Others
credited von Neumann, wrongly. Even Zuse, who invented a computer for
Hitler, is credited by others. But Turing invented the concept of
software.

The mill of the gods grinds on...

 

[Nobody]

We can therefore take heart. Turing was unmentionable in polite
computing circles in 1972 because of his gayness

Turing wasn't "unmentionable", just unknown until the mid-1970s. The
reasons why Turing was largely unknown prior to that point are:

1. His pre-war work on computational theory was of little interest to
the general public (and even to many IT professionals).

2. His wartime work on codebreaking was unknown due to official secrecy
which only ended when (some of) the relevant records were made public 30
years later (public records are released "by default" after 30 years
although they may be released earlier or later by an explicit decision).

 

[Clive D. W. Feather]

In message

But Turing invented the concept of
software.

Nonsense. Ada Lovelace was writing software years before Turing wrote
his papers.

[Pointing out this fact does not denigrate the major contributions of
Alan Turing to both computing theory and practice.]

 

[spinoza1111]

In message



Nonsense. Ada Lovelace was writing software years before Turing wrote
his papers.

So were people wiring plugboards. To do software without knowing it is
like the British lady who learned, I believe, from Samuel Johnson that
she was speaking prose. Turing didn't have to be a programmer to
invent the computer.

[Pointing out this fact does not denigrate the major contributions of
Alan Turing to both computing theory and practice.]

 

[Clive D. W. Feather]

In message

So were people wiring plugboards. To do software without knowing it

[...]

If you read her writings on the stuff, it is clear she knew what she was
doing - only the word was missing.

 

[Chris H]

In message <[email protected]

I'm too young to say what happened in any "computing circles" in 1972,
polite or not, but in 1977 the professors at my university must have
been extremely impolite then to tell us about Turing machines, Turing
completeness and so on. van Neumann was only mentioned in Operations
Research (Linear Programming).

You also forget completely that all of Turing's work for the
government was classified for many years, and with very good reasons;
the use of the Enigma machine didn't stop after WWII. It just might
have given the Russians a little hint that their encryption
infrastructure was unsafe if Britain had celebrated Turing as the man
who cracked the Enigma.

It had nothing to do with the Russians. The UK government sold the
Enigma system to most of the commonwealth countries (and others) telling
them it was "unbreakable".....

 

[Frank]

In message

But Turing invented the concept of
software.
Nonsense. Ada Lovelace was writing software years before Turing
wrote his papers.
So were people wiring plugboards. To do software without knowing it [...]

If you read her writings on the stuff, it is clear she knew what she
was doing - only the word was missing.

Here is part of a note written by Ada Augusta Lovelace. It would not
have seemed terribly out of place in a 1960s tutorial guide for
budding mainframe programmers:

"These cards, however, have nothing to do with the regulation of the
particular numerical data. They merely determine the operations to be
effected, which operations may of course be performed on an infinite
variety of particular numerical values, and do not bring out any
definite numerical results unless the numerical data of the problem
have been impressed on the requisite portions of the train of
mechanism. In the above example, the first essential step towards an
arithmetical result would be the substitution of specific numbers for
n, and for the other primitive quantities which enter into the
function.

Again, let us suppose that for F we put two complete equations of the
fourth degree between x and y. We must then express on the cards the
law of elimination for such equations. The engine would follow out
those laws, and would ultimately give the equation of one variable
which results from such elimination."

That's a tiny snippet, of course. I would not like to cross
mathematical swords with this lady.

I want to write a screenplay about Turing. Ada would have to be one
of the characters. She would be attracted to him and they would have
this heady exchange. But it would never culminate into a romance.

It could be a little like A Beautiful Mind, except that it might be
good. For example, it would not whitewash the lead character's
sexuality.

My girlfriend has a role in a play that deals with the Matthew Shepard
murder in Wyoming. I think it's the tenth anniversary. I guess I
didn't know how persecuted this minority is.

 

[Frank]

In

Frank wrote:



I hope she's attracted to younger men. She's 97 years older than him.

Oh. Well that's the great thing about characters. A writer can put
her in the same room filled with whatever monstrous computer did the
punchcards back in 1960. Good mathematics is not easily dated, in the
pejorative sense.

The scene wouldn't be all that different from Russell Crowe and
Jennifer Connelly discussing manifolds.

Does her name have anything to do with the syntax?

 

[Nick Keighley]

Oh.  Well that's the great thing about characters.  A writer can put
her in the same room filled with whatever monstrous computer did the
punchcards back in 1960.  

they were *both* dead by 1960. This sounds ideal for Hollywood

Good mathematics is not easily dated, in the
pejorative sense.

The scene wouldn't be all that different from Russell Crowe and
Jennifer Connelly discussing manifolds.

Does her name have anything to do with the syntax?

The programming language Ada was named after Ada Lovelace.

 

[spinoza1111]

Turing wasn't "unmentionable", just unknown until the mid-1970s. The
reasons why Turing was largely unknown prior to that point are:

1. His pre-war work on computational theory was of little interest to
the general public (and even to many IT professionals).

No, it was just unknown although Turing did a large amount of cutting-
edge and useful work for the Pilot Ace in the UK, only to be
uncredited because he was gay. The pre-war work was not accessible to
entrepreneurs like Eckert and Mauchly who weren't intellectuals, more
shirtsleeves types in the Edison model.

2. His wartime work on codebreaking was unknown due to official secrecy
which only ended when (some of) the relevant records were made public 30
years later (public records are released "by default" after 30 years
although they may be released earlier or later by an explicit decision).

I got the paperback book on the enigma in the very early 1970s. Also,
the Turing machine was not a wartime secret, nor was the Enigma either
a general purpose computer or a Turing machine. It was a special
purpose machine so powerful as to be underused, since Churchill
realized that if its secrets were used to create Allied attacks, the
Germans would figure out that the British had broken the code and
would change the code.

 

[spinoza1111]

I'm too young to say what happened in any "computing circles" in 1972,
polite or not, but in 1977 the professors at my university must have
been extremely impolite then to tell us about Turing machines, Turing
completeness and so on. van Neumann was only mentioned in Operations
Research (Linear Programming).

The university was indeed teaching the Turing machine in the 1970s.
That's how I learned it, albeit not in class but in a textbook I read
outside of school.

However, the data processing corporate establishment at the time
credited Eckert and Mauchly. This has been disproved. The computer
emerged separately in different areas: in Britain as Babbage's
vaporware in the 1860s, in Turing's paperware in 1936, at Harvard in
the 1940s to be sure, at IBM, at the State University of Iowa, and in
Zuse's lab during the war. There's even a photo in a Taschen book of
Chinese scientists clustered around a device identified as a computer
in 1949, and it would be fascinating to know whether they made it, or,
where they got it, since in 1949, the Soviets were no longer helping
the Guomindang and were not supplying computers to the Maoists. I
wouldn't put it past them to have built the thing.

Since computers, even programmable, stored-program machines, don't
have to be either electronic or binary, archeologists may discover
computers in the records of ancient civilizations.

However, the claim of invention is important to ruling elites. It was
and is considered unseemly that the computer be invented by a drunken
college professor at a cow college or a Nazi.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> However, the data processing corporate establishment at the time
> credited Eckert and Mauchly. This has been disproved. The computer
> emerged separately in different areas: in Britain as Babbage's
> vaporware in the 1860s, in Turing's paperware in 1936, at Harvard in
> the 1940s to be sure, at IBM, at the State University of Iowa, and in
> Zuse's lab during the war.

I would not call 1938 during the war. The Z1, still all mechanical, but
the essentials where there. It was only the Z3 that was completely
functional (and shown to be Turing complete) that was completed in 1941.

> However, the claim of invention is important to ruling elites. It was
> and is considered unseemly that the computer be invented by a drunken
> college professor at a cow college or a Nazi.

Ah, is *that* the reason you bring it up?

 

[osmium]

However, the data processing corporate establishment at the time
credited Eckert and Mauchly. This has been disproved.

Is the proof that farcical lawsuit? The guy in Iowa who built the kludge
that didn't work? And Eckert dropped in on him on a vacation trip and had
coffee with the guy and picked his brains? And then ***one*** judge said,
Eckert was a brain picker and not an inventor? Is that the proof, Bunky?

I agree that Eckert and Mauchly have a pretty tenuous hold on the invention,
but despite that I don't think Atsanoff was the inventor either. I would
most likely credit von Neumann (not van Neumann - which would be Dutch);
Eckert and Mauchly were too busy making a computer like thing that did
something useful to get into the invention business at that time. There was
a war on, you know.

 

[spinoza1111]

...
 > However, the data processing corporate establishment at the time
 > credited Eckert and Mauchly. This has been disproved. The computer
 > emerged separately in different areas: in Britain as Babbage's
 > vaporware in the 1860s, in Turing's paperware in 1936, at Harvard in
 > the 1940s to be sure, at IBM, at the State University of Iowa, and in
 > Zuse's lab during the war.

I would not call 1938 during the war.  The Z1, still all mechanical, but
the essentials where there.  It was only the Z3 that was completely
functional (and shown to be Turing complete) that was completed in 1941.

Well, wasn't 1938 the year of the Czech crisis and Anschluss? I'm too
lazy to look it up, because Germany was well on its way to re-arming,
and you're making a silly quibble because like too many Europeans,
you're offended when Americans know more about your history than you,
or have to help you fix your problems, sometimes by dying in your
wars.

 > However, the claim of invention is important to ruling elites. It was
 > and is considered unseemly that the computer be invented by a drunken
 > college professor at a cow college or a Nazi.

Ah, is *that* the reason you bring it up?

No. I am neither a drunk professor nor a Nazi.

 

[Frank]

they were *both* dead by 1960. This sounds ideal for Hollywood




The programming language Ada was named after Ada Lovelace.

Ohmigod there's a bug under my computer.

There's nothing that makes me more like a hysterical, screaming drama
queen than bugs who defy my dexterity.

I thought I might read H&S V while working in Motenzuma, New Mexico,
but I just watched the sky instead. Freudenfunkengruven.

 

[Frank]

Is the proof that farcical lawsuit?  The guy in Iowa who built the kludge
that didn't work?  And Eckert dropped in on him on  a vacation trip and had
coffee with the guy and picked his brains?  And then ***one***  judge said,
Eckert was a brain picker and not an inventor?  Is that the proof, Bunky?

I agree that Eckert and Mauchly have a pretty tenuous hold on the invention,
but despite that I don't think Atsanoff was the inventor either.  I would
most likely credit von Neumann (not van Neumann - which would be Dutch);
Eckert and Mauchly were too busy making a computer like thing that did
something useful to get into the invention business at that time.  There was
a war on, you know.

dan@dan-desktop:~$ slrn anything
Usage: slrn [--inews] [--nntp ...] [--spool] OPTIONS
-a Use active file for getting new news.
-f newsrc-file Name of the newsrc file to use.
-C[-] [Do not] use colors.
-Dname Add 'name' to list of predefined preprocessing tokens.
-d Get new text descriptions of each group from server.
Note: This may take a LONG time to retrieve this
information.
The resulting file can be several hundred Kilobytes!
-i init-file Name of initialization file to use (default: .slrnrc)
-k Do not process score file.
-k0 Process score file but inhibit expensive scores.
-m Force XTerm mouse reporting
-n Do not check for new groups. This usually results in
a faster startup.
-w Wait for key before switching to full screen mode
-w0 Wait for key (only when warnings / errors occur)
--create Create a newsrc file by getting list of groups from
server.
--debug FILE Write debugging information to FILE
--help Print this usage.
--kill-log FILE Keep a log of all killed articles in FILE
--show-config Print configuration
--version Show version and supported features

NNTP mode has additional options; use "slrn --nntp --help" to display
them.


Anyone have any notions of what this is?

 

[Frank]

In message <[email protected]






It had nothing to do with the Russians.   The UK government sold the
Enigma system to most of the commonwealth countries (and others) telling
them it was "unbreakable".....

It certainly had a lot to do with Big Secrets. No man is
unbreakable. If I had to hack Heathfield's computer, I would stalk
him at his coffee-maker (not church) until I saw a physical means to
break the programmer.

 

[spinoza1111]

In message



Nonsense. Ada Lovelace was writing software years before Turing wrote
his papers.

Neither she nor Babbage came close to conceptualizing "universal"
computability. Therefore, Ada Lovelace was writing "software" only in
the sense of "machine set-up".

[Pointing out this fact does not denigrate the major contributions of
Alan Turing to both computing theory and practice.]

 

[spinoza1111]

In message

But Turing invented the concept of
software.
Nonsense. Ada Lovelace was writing software years before Turing
wrote his papers.
So were people wiring plugboards. To do software without knowing it [...]

If you read her writings on the stuff, it is clear she knew what she
was doing - only the word was missing.

Here is part of a note written by Ada Augusta Lovelace. It would not
have seemed terribly out of place in a 1960s tutorial guide for
budding mainframe programmers:

"These cards, however, have nothing to do with the regulation of the
particular numerical data. They merely determine the operations to be
effected, which operations may of course be performed on an infinite
variety of particular numerical values, and do not bring out any
definite numerical results unless the numerical data of the problem
have been impressed on the requisite portions of the train of
mechanism. In the above example, the first essential step towards an
arithmetical result would be the substitution of specific numbers for
n, and for the other primitive quantities which enter into the
function.

Again, let us suppose that for F we put two complete equations of the
fourth degree between x and y. We must then express on the cards the
law of elimination for such equations. The engine would follow out
those laws, and would ultimately give the equation of one variable
which results from such elimination."

That's a tiny snippet, of course. I would not like to cross
mathematical swords with this lady.

She thought math is all about numbers. She (like most machine tenders
in the "plugboard" era of computation prior to stored programming)
never realized the importance of self-reflexively having the machine
do the work for you: this was Grace Hopper. Turing realized the
importance of self-reflexivity as well. John von Neumann missed it: he
felt that "mere" programmers (as opposed to big shot anti-Communist
Hungarian aristocrats) were merely being lazy when they wrote software
tools. Lovelace and Babbage did not to my knowledge use the difference
engine to design the difference engine; indeed, their efforts failed
precisely because Victorian toolsmiths used non-quantitative methods
to build the parts, while the machine was easy to build today using
CNC machine tools.

Indeed, at the time, the use of self-reflexivity in technology (using
waste steam in steam engines, using the waste products of sugar cane
(bagasse) to power sugar refining, was almost always the work of
artisans who in some cases were accused of wasting time and resources.

 

[Nick Keighley]

She thought math is all about numbers.

If you'd actually read any of her stuff you wouldn't say that.

She (like most machine tenders
in the "plugboard" era of computation prior to stored programming)

she wasn't a machine tender as there was no machine. And Babagges
machines didn't have plug boards. They were mechanical!

never realized the importance of self-reflexively having the machine
do the work for you: this was Grace Hopper. Turing realized the
importance of self-reflexivity as well. John von Neumann missed it: he
felt that "mere" programmers <elide daft politics> were merely being lazy when they wrote software
tools. Lovelace and Babbage did not to my knowledge use the difference
engine to design the difference engine;

they didn't have a working machine. Did Grace hopper use the machine
to design the machine?

indeed, their efforts failed
precisely because Victorian toolsmiths used non-quantitative methods
to build the parts, while the machine was easy to build today using
CNC machine tools.

the London Science Museum demonstarted that the manufacture of the
parts was well within the capabilities of the available technology.
If anything they were a little over engineered.

Indeed, at the time, the use of self-reflexivity in technology (using
waste steam in steam engines, using the waste products of sugar cane
(bagasse) to power sugar refining, was almost always the work of
artisans who in some cases were accused of wasting time and resources.

it amazes me what you can drag your bizzare social theories into.