William Aspray

The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey

The article surveys the development of a scientific conceptualization of information during and in the decade following World War II. It examines the roots of information science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mathematical logic, physics, psychology, and electrical engineering, and then focuses on how Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener combined these diverse studies into a coherent discipline.

Arming American scientists: NSF and the provision of scientific computing facilities for universities, 1950-1973

This article discusses the role of the US National Science Foundation in the provision of scientific computing facilities for colleges and universities in the period 1950 to 1973. In this period, the NSF played a major role in establishing computing facilities on American campuses for the purposes of scientific research and science education. By the end of this period, most of these programs at NSF had been disbanded, and the foundation was concentrating its support for computing not on the service of other scientific disciplines, but instead on the establishment of a theoretically oriented discipline of computer science. The primary focus here is on NSF institutional history with only a few examples of the impact of NSF programs. But if is an important part of a larger story of the role of the federal government in establishing American hegemony in computing in this era.<<ETX>>

Was early entry a competitive advantage? US universities that entered computing in the 1940s

The author discusses whether early entry was a competitive advantage in academic computing. This is accomplished by examining the first three decades of computing at five universities - MIT, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Princeton - that initiated computing programs in the 1940s.

Command and control, documentation, and library science: the origins of information science at the University of Pittsburgh

This article describes the history of the first information science department formed in the United States-at the University of Pittsburgh-and the roles of two of its principal faculty members: Allen Kent and Anthony Debons. In particular, it looks at the origins of the program in command-and-control systems, documentation of scientific literature, and library automation.

History of Binary and Other Nondecimal Numeration

History of binary and other nondecimal numeration. Based on the authors thesis (Ph. D. — Temple University), presented under the title: History of modern numeration systems. who were kind enough to communicate their comments about the strengths and weaknesses of the original edition. The present revised edition is the better for it. A special thanks is also owed to John Wagner for his careful editorial work and to Adele Clark for her thorough preparation of the Index.

International Diffusion of Computer Technology, 1945-1955

The article surveys the international diffusion of computer technology between 1945 and 1955. It lists early computers and their sponsoring organizations, compares scientific and commercial styles of development, and describes the mechanisms for technology transfer across national boundaries. Suggestions are offered for further research on computing and international technology transfer in the twentieth century.

Marketing the Monster: Advertising Computer Technology

Interpreting the rich and striking blend of technical, intellectual, economic, social, and cultural information in advertisements of computer technology reveals how popular understanding and perceptions of the meaning of computers changed between 1950 and 1980. The studys findings contribute to the historical understanding of the social diffusion of the technology in society; its methodology illustrates the historiographic strengths and weaknesses of using advertisements as historical documents.

Software as labor process

For almost as long as there has been software, there has been a software crisis.1 Laments about the inability of software developers to produce products on time, within budget, and of acceptable quality and reliability have been a staple of industry literature from the early decades of commercial computing to the present. In an industry characterized by rapid change and innovation, the rhetoric of the crisis has proven remarkably persistent. The acute shortage of programmers that caused “software turmoil” in the early 1960s has reappeared as a “world-wide shortage of information technology workers”2 in the 1990s. Thirty years after the first NATO Conference on Software Engineering, advocates of an industrial approach to software development still complain that the “vast majority of computer code is still handcrafted from raw programming languages by artisans using techniques they neither measure nor are able to repeat consistently.”3 Corporate managers and government officials release ominous warnings about the desperate state of the software industry with almost ritualistic regularity. The Y2K crisis is only the most recent manifestation of the software industry’s apparent predilection for apocalyptic rhetoric.

Creating the computer industry

The major underlying factors that shaped the computer industry as it emerged, beginning in the mid-1940s, are the focus of this paper. Unlike many accounts that primarily discuss technological developments, this paper examines the interaction of three equally important elements: technology, customers and suppliers. The evolution of the computer industry is shown to have been driven initially by national-security customers, and later by cost-sensitive commercial customers. Technological advances made in response to these two customer types are identified, and the successes and failures of suppliers are analyzed in terms of changing customer requirements.

John von Neumann's Contributions to Computing and Computer Science

Aspray emphasizes von Neumanns critical role in the formation of modern computing and celebrates von Neumann as the scientific legitimizer of computing. He provides a survey of von Neumanns many important contributions to computer architecture, hardware, design and construction, programming, numerical analysis, scientific computation, and the theory of computing. Asprays essay stresses especially the importance of von Neumanns work to promote the development of logical design.