Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:19:59 +0000
From: J V Field <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: The early history of electronic computing

The British Computer Society has now published the Proceedings of the
conference 'Alan Mathison Turing 2004: A celebration of his life and
achievements', held in Manchester (UK) on 5 June 2004.

See : <http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.9917>

Readers of this list may be particularly interested in the following
three contributions

David Anderson (Portsmouth) 'Was the Manchester "Baby" conceived at
Bletchley Park?'
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17134

Barry Cooper (Leeds) 'The Incomputable Alan Turing'
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17130>

Andrew Hodges (Oxford) 'Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis of
computing'
<http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17127>

Abstracts are appended.
                                        
                JVF

David Anderson (Portsmouth) 'Was the Manchester "Baby" conceived at
Bletchley Park?'

ABSTRACT:
Anderson examines the role played by a group of mathematicians and
former Bletchley Park code-breakers under the leadership of Max Newman
in the development of the world's first electronic digital
stored-program computer: "the Baby". The group comprised Newman himself,
Jack Good, David Rees and (latterly) Alan Turing. Based on an extensive
re-examination of the primary source material and archival recordings,
Anderson identifies and confronts a number of key myths underlying the
dominant historical account of the period.
He considers the extent to which there is evidence to support the
contention that the Manchester Baby actually owed a significant
intellectual debt to work carried out, under conditions of the strictest
secrecy during the Second World War, at Bletchley Park.
This leads him to reject the "Two project myth" the central claim of
which is that the Baby was developed, without significant outside
assistance, by the engineer F.C. Williams and his research student T.
Kilburn. Anderson argues that the notion that no significant financial
support for the building of the Baby was provided by Newman is a
"Financial myth" and provides evidence for the first time that despite
the general constraints of secrecy under which the Bletchley Park code
breakers had, in general, to operate, Newman was officially sanctioned
in transferring knowledge gained during the wartime development of the
Colossus machine from Bletchley Park into the civilian world thus
challenging the "Myth of secrecy". This opens the way to arguing that
Turing's insights on the theory of computation may, through Newman's
agency, have been more significant in the early development of British
computing than has generally been supposed.

FULL TEXT AT
http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper3.pdf


Barry Cooper (Leeds) 'The Incomputable Alan Turing'

ABSTRACT:
The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian
predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around
300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing's 1936 discovery (along with
Alonzo Church) of the existence of unsolvable problems. This paper
focuses on incomputability as a powerful theme in Turing's work and
personal life, and examines its role in his evolving concept of
machine intelligence. It also traces some of the ways in which
important new developments are anticipated by Turing's ideas in logic.

FULL TEXT AT
<http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper2.pdf>


Andrew Hodges (Oxford) 'Alan Turing: the logical and physical basis
of computing'

ABSTRACT:
Half a century after Alan Turing's death in 1954, we can ask whether
computing can go beyond the framework of computability that he set
out in his classic 1936 paper On
computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.
We shall do so in the light of what Turing himself did, starting with
his work in 1936.

FULL TEXT AT
<http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_tur04_paper1.pdf>


--
J. V. Field
Honorary Visiting Research Fellow
School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
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tel/fax +44.20.7736.9198
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/staff/researchstaff/JVField