Hacker News Reader

Until Turing became a poster child for the gay movement, few people outside computability theory or cryptanalysis had heard of him.

Oh come on.

The ACM started giving the Turing Award in 1966. 1966! Is your argument that the ACM did that because Turing was a poster child of the gay movement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

On the other hand George Dyson's book "Turing's Cathedral" makes a compelling case that the group at Princeton building the IAS Machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAS_machine), Von Neumann included, believed they were following Turing's paper quite directly.

p.152:

According to Bigelow, the forty-fold parallel architecture, despite its deviations, was descended directly from the pure-serial Turing Machine. “Turing’s machine does not sound much like a modern computer today, but nevertheless it was,” Bigelow explains. “It was the germinal idea. If you build an apparatus which will obey certain explicit orders in a certain explicit fashion, can you say anything about the kinds of computational or intellectual processes which it can or cannot do?” Bigelow and von Neumann had lengthy discussions about the implications of Gödel’s and Turing’s work. “Von Neumann understood this very deeply,” Bigelow confirms. “So when looking at ENIAC, or some of the early machines which were very inflexible, he saw better than any other man that this was just the first step, and that great improvement would come.”

p.259:

The war had scrambled the origins of new inventions as completely as a message passing through an Enigma machine. Radar, cryptanalysis, antiaircraft fire control, computers, and nuclear weapons were all secret wartime projects that, behind the security barriers, enjoyed the benefit of free exchange of ideas, without concern for individual authorship or peer review. Von Neumann served the role of messenger RNA, helping to convey the best of the ideas—including the powers of Turing’s Universal Machine. Among the bound volumes of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, on the shelves of the Institute for Advanced Study library, there is one volume whose binding is disintegrated from having been handled so many times: Volume 42, with Turing’s “On Computable Numbers,” on pages 230–65.

(Kindle-reported page numbers.)

Edit: Fixed author: George not Freeman.

I was was frustrated with that book, because I felt it did not emphasize the work by Eckert and Mauchly enough with the ENIAC. I attribute this bias due to George Dyson's proximity to the project as a child - his father, Freeman Dyson, has a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and George Dyson was with him during at least some of it.

A book review on Amazon captures a lot of how I felt when reading the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3R8T7JSHV506U/re...

And some reactions to the New York Review of Books review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/09/27/who-gets-credit-c...

For further reading, I recommend "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" by Scott McCartney.

Bullshit (to the claim that Turing was virtual unknown). I had no idea Turing was gay when the man became synonymous to Finite State Machines and was one of the household names in all low-level/hardware related subjects and most computing/algorythm related ones in my software engineering uni program.

If you were in a software engineering uni program, then you were around well after the timescale the OP is talking about, I believe; I think their claim is more to the often-promulgated idea that Turing was a major figure in the development of electronic computers as we know them who ought be heralded as "The Father of Computers", as he is now often portrayed in pop science.

My objections were to his idea that Turing was virtual unknown who somehow got recognition because he was gay. I was in SE uni program in the 90s, but "Turing-complete", "Turing test" and FSMs with references to him were there in theory textbooks written in the socialist 80s. For example, a friend's mom was a professor in medical school of my university, and a textbook from the same era in his house was pretty darn assured that homosexuality is a mental illness that needs to be treated in a mental institution together with alcoholism and drug additcion.

I've been reading Von Neumann's "Theory Of Self-Reproducing Automata" (freely available on Internet Archive and very much worth it!) and he constantly references and credits Turing. Nor have I ever heard anyone claim Turing's insights were sparked in a vacuum (or anyone's, for that matter ... the closest to a "lone genius" I can think of is Newton maybe? -- This is a good tangential question perhaps: who have made the most "out of thin air" discoveries in math or science?).

> The big name in early computer architecture was Von Neumann, who laid out the basic architecture of the stored-program binary digital computer, which is what we use today. (Read the report on the EDVAC; it's a classic on computer architecture. The one thing he missed was the need for index registers.)

This is incorrect. Von Neumann wrote the report, and it was circulated with only his name. As a result the architecture is attributed to him, despite the fact that Eckert and Mauchly came up with it and wrote about it a few years before Von Neumann was even part of the project.

> The reality of early computing was that electronic arithmetic was worked out well before WWII. James W. Bryce of IBM was working on an electronic multiplier in 1934, ...

Turing's famous paper was published in 1936. Calculation machinery should be attributed to Babbage, and Turings contribution went beyond simpler fixed function machines.

Here's Frankle's words on the topic:

"I know that in or about 1943 or '44 von Neumann was well aware of the fundamental importance of Turing's paper of 1936… Von Neumann introduced me to that paper and at his urging I studied it with care. Many people have acclaimed von Neumann as the "father of the computer" (in a modern sense of the term) but I am sure that he would never have made that mistake himself. He might well be called the midwife, perhaps, but he firmly emphasized to me, and to others I am sure, that the fundamental conception is owing to Turing— in so far as not anticipated by Babbage… Both Turing and von Neumann, of course, also made substantial contributions to the "reduction to practice" of these concepts but I would not regard these as comparable in importance with the introduction and explication of the concept of a computer able to store in its memory its program of activities and of modifying that program in the course of these activities."

Turing absolutely deserves the acclaim he receives, and it has nothing to do with him being "a poster child for the gay movement". I'll have to stop at this point to avoid crossing hnews policies re personally directed comments.

Yes! Turing didn't invent the computer. Turing is not the father of computers. Turing was a good mathematician, but only a minor figure in the historical invention of the electronic computer. Most of the people building most of the early computers had little awareness of Turing or his work.

The one major figure in the early development of computers who had more awareness of Turing was von Neumann (who had also started out as a mathematical logician). But if Turing were removed from history, it wouldn't make much difference to anything happening in the world of computers at that time.

People had been trying to build automated computing devices, even general-purpose programmable ones, since well before Turing; see Babbage, etc. The "computer" as we now use the term originated in developments in electrical engineering, not Turing's theory.

On the matter, Haigh's ACM article "Actually, Turing Did Not Invent the Computer" may be of interest to some. (see http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/1/170862-actually-turing-..., or on sci-hub at http://sci-hub.cc/10.1145/2542504).

What's usually forgotten is what IBM was doing. IBM was slowly grinding their way forward into computers, as cost-effective products. They built the IBM 601 (mechanical multiplier), the IBM 602 (mechanical multiplier and divider), the IBM 602A (a 602 that worked), the IBM 603 (a vacuum tube electronic multiplier and the first commercial electronic computing product), the IBM 604 (a plugboard programmed electronic computer), and the IBM Card Programmed Calculator (at last, programs on punched cards). The IBM 600 series continued through the IBM 650, which was a real digital computer with drum memory. Donald Knuth learned to program on one. These were all real products with real business customers.

IBM had also had their DoD business. There was the IBM Defense Calculator, called the IBM 701. There was a whole series of expensive small-quantity vacuum tube machines sold almost entirely to DoD and DoD contractors. These were much closer to modern computers, but they were really expensive and didn't sell well. That part of IBM was mostly separate from the commercial side. In 1943, Thomas J. Watson Sr said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." He was thinking of the monster vacuum tube machines.

What really changed the industry was the UNIVAC I and magnetic tape. Again, it was memory, not compute hardware, that mattered. Eckert and Mauchly formed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, and built and sold the UNIVAC I. This was the first business computer with fast I/O devices - many spinning tape drives, all going at once. At last, you could get business-type work done. At last, fast sorting!

A UNIVAC I could directly replace huge amounts of IBM's mechanical card equipment. Which is what happened with one of the first customers, the U.S. Bureau of the Census. They had acres of rented IBM punched card gear at Suitland, MD. At the time, IBM didn't sell machines; everything was rented by the month. Census bought two UNIVAC I machines in 1951, and moved much punched card work over to them.

One day, the IBM sales rep was called in, and told that Census was terminating the rental on most of the punched card gear. This was a huge shock to IBM. Suddenly, large electronic computers were a real threat to the company's core business. Until then, computers had been seen as an additional business, but not a threat to the existing one.

In the early days of computing, there were "business computers", usually with decimal arithmetic and good I/O, and "scientific computers", usually with binary arithmetic and less I/O power. Business computers had to be cost-effective. Scientific computers tended to have government funding of some kind. The two lines didn't really come together until the IBM System/360.

That's the early commercial history of computers. The compute part was figured out well before the storage devices. Development of new storage devices resulted in huge jumps in capability. This is all pre-transistor; once transistors came in, the first step was to re-implement the existing stuff with transistors (IBM 709 -> IBM 7090, etc.) and then things really started to move.

I think the following ( http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/09/27/who-gets-credit-c... ) gives voices to many of the competing claims, including Turing with ACE.

And Aiken (who made the Harvard Mark I) stated that he got "his education in computers" from Charles Babbage.

Hell, they even tried mercury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Mercury_dela...

Back then they used mercury for everything. It's kind of scary.

It was worse in the 19th century. Look at the original Michaelson-Morley experiment: a huge tank of mercury with a granite slab floating in it.[1] That was the only way to get a low-friction low-vibration bearing back then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

Not really:

"Quicksilver (liquid metallic mercury) is poorly absorbed by ingestion and skin contact. Its vapor is the most hazardous form. Animal data indicate less than 0.01% of ingested mercury is absorbed through the intact gastrointestinal tract, though it may not be true for individuals suffering from ileus. Cases of systemic toxicity from accidental swallowing are rare, and attempted suicide via intravenous injection does not appear to result in systemic toxicity,[25] though it still causes damage by physically blocking blood vessels both at the site of injection and the lungs. Though not studied quantitatively, the physical properties of liquid elemental mercury limit its absorption through intact skin and in light of its very low absorption rate from the gastrointestinal tract, skin absorption would not be high.[32] Some mercury vapor is absorbed dermally, but uptake by this route is only about 1% of that by inhalation.[33]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning

The issue is more to do with mercury as a persistent environmental toxin, or you know... if you happen to cure your hat's felt in it you'd be in real trouble. Honestly, if it were a more obvious and rapid killer/debilitator, it would have been less pernicious and abused over the years.

> if it were a more obvious and rapid killer/debilitator...

Not really. Back then people would drop dead for a myriad of combination of poorly understood reasons and incurable diseases.

Serious bacterial infection? You're dead. Cancer? You're dead. Anyeurism? Dead. Heart attack? Probably dead. Fought in a war? Dead. Spanish flu? Dead. Polio? Dead. Worked in a coal mine? Dead. Hazardous industrial job? Dead.

So things like mercury or radiation poisioning had to take a number.

Yeah, well, tell that to people living on mercury contaminated land, drinking mercury contaminated well-water, or who worked in factories that used mercury in their manufacturing process.

What he's saying is not that Hg is safe, just that acute exposure is less of an issue than chronic exposure. What you're describing are pretty much the dictionary definition of "chronic".

Working around a computer filled with mercury delay lines sounds to me like chronic. If there was ever a leak would you know? Even if one of them emits a small amount of vapour that could be pretty bad.

I would agree that the case of the memory system is definitely one of the "risky" ones, although it could be made safe with ventilation and isolation. Realistically though, some people involved in regular maintenance probably did suffer some level of exposure, given the time and the attitude to risk.

It's funny you mention memory because the Von Neumann bottleneck is a real thing.... and is a BIG problem...