> From: Brent Hilpert
> I have wondered just how much influence the latent theory that was
> around influenced the practical implementors of calculating machinery
> ...
> My impression is the implementors at the time arrived at stored-program
> machines far more out of practical necessity than trying to enact, or
> even being much aware of, the theory.
I suspect we'll never know for sure, because there may have been subconcious
stuff going on that even the people themselves were not aware of.
E.g. it's common to hear that 'Babbage had no influence on modern computers'.
But... Aiken was well aware of Babbage's work, and it's reasonable to think
that he had it in the back of his mind when doing the SSEC. And Aiken and the
SSEC were well known to the early computing pioneers, so there's a path from
Babbage to modern computers. Similarly for Turing's work - Turing and von
Neuman knew each other (their paths crossed on numerous occastions, starting
at the IAS in the late 30's, when Turing went there), and there are numerous
people who say he was very familiar with Turing's work.
> When/what/who was the actual first assembler conceived or produced?
A very good question indeed! Does anyone know?
I have this bit set that one early computer assigned the opcodes to make
sense as single characters; e.g. the ADD instruction would have had opcode
'A' (not in hex, this was before that). Alas, I can't find which one it was -
it's not the Pilot ACE; I checked, and that was always programmed direcly in
binary (by punching the program onto cards in binary, manually).
> However even before the stored-program machines, the Colossus machines
> (WWII) were more logic/symbol processors than numerical.
Bit of both, really - they did statistical work on streams of characters.
> Shannon was consulted during the design of SIGSALY, IIRC
Turing was consulted, too - but I think more in a role of checking the work,
rather than doing any himself. See "Enigma", pp. 246-248.
> That whole era of Nyquist/Shannon looking at the nature of information,
> Turing looking at highly abstract theory of symbol manipulation, and
> the implementors of calculating machines, that all came together to
> produce the modern computing and informatics world can be fascinating.
There's an excellent book which covers some of this ground, "Turing's
Cathedral", by George Dyson (son of Freeman).
Noel
