Today in 1936, Alan Turing delivered to the London Mathematical Society his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”
In the paper, Turing described the Universal Machine, later to be known as the Turing Machine, an idealized computing device that is capable of performing any mathematical computation that can be represented as an algorithm.
In “Actually, Turing Did Not Invent the Computer” (Communications of the ACM, January 2014), historian Thomas Haigh challenged the increasingly-popular claim that with this paper Turing has “invented the modern computer” by stating “very short version: it is wrong.” Haigh’s longer version includes the following:
Our urge to believe the computer projects of the late 1940s were driven by a desire to implement universal Turing machines is part of a broader predisposition to see theoretical computer science driving computing as a whole. If Turing invented computer science, which is itself something of an oversimplification, then surely he must have invented the computer. The computer is, in this view, just a working through of the fundamental theoretical ideas represented by a universal Turing machine in that it is universal and stores data and instructions interchangeably…
To focus on historical computers primarily as embodiments of logical ideas, ignoring the trade-offs their creators made when faced with limited resources and unproven technologies, is to abstract away from the information needed to understand their history and development. Progress in electronic engineering, particularly in memory technologies, created the circumstances in which it began to make sense to think about high-speed digital computers in which instructions were stored electronically. In turn, ideas about the best way to design these machines drove further progress in component technologies and engineering methods.
The universal Turing Machine has appealed to theorists from the 1950s onward precisely because it abstracts away from the complexity of real computer architectures and decouples questions of computability from those of design and engineering. This has been enormously useful for computing theorists, both technically and sociologically. Yet, paradoxically, the world seems increasingly eager to locate the origin of the computer in a mathematical abstraction adopted precisely because it hid all the messy issues of architecture and engineering needed to make any real computer function. Hardware and software are interchangeable to the theorist, but not to the historian.
The eagerness to locate the origin or to attribute the success of technological innovations to “science” rather than “engineering” goes beyond preference for abstractions over messiness. It has everything do to with the prestige of science and its higher social standing as opposed to engineering. Which is why we have “computer science” instead of the more accurate “computer engineering.”
In 1915, to celebrate the first transcontinental telephone call, made possible by the invention of the three-element high-vacuum tube, American Telephone and Telegraph took out ads proclaiming “The Triumph of Science.” Actually, it was the triumph of engineering.