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Dates: Tuesday, March 3rd OR Thursday, March 5th
Location: Online! See e-mail for the link
Website: https://www.thenmusa.org/
computing
computing
This week we are talking with the National Museum of the United States Army for a talk in ‘The Accomplishment of the ENIAC and the Women Computing Pioneers’. A group of female mathematicians laid the groundwork for the field of computer programming. Our reading this week will cover, in timeline format, the origins of computing and some great resources to learn more about the amazing women who paved the way.
We are living in the Digital Age (or Information Age) and we have access to more human knowledge available at our fingertips than at any other time in our history. There is no doubt that digital devices and information are an integral part of daily life for the vast majority of people. We rely on technology to run our homes, help us get where we need to go, and do many of our jobs. When Ford conceived of the assembly line, he built it around people doing the labor. Now, people build machines to perform those same assembly lines. But how did we get here so fast? How did we leap from the graphite pencil to the hand held supercomputer? Read on to see!
We have all heard about the Industrial Revolution; the industrial spark that set the social, economic, and political world alight. We moved from largely agrarian societies to industrial ones. People left the fields and entered the factories, weaving fabric for clothes they would never wear and producing food that someone else would eat. The Industrial Revolution made mass production possible and streamlined the transformation of raw material to finished goods. From this age sprang the drive to produce things better, faster, more efficiently, often as a way of maximizing cost. But even as the Eli Whitneys and Henry Fords of the world were developing ways to mass produce and manufacture goods, the underpinnings of our modern digital age had been germinating for some time. Here’s a quick timeline on the march of digitization:
1679 – The modern binary system
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed the modern binary system and published a book outlining it in 1703.
1847 – Boolean Algebra
George Boole introduces Boolean algebra, creating the field of mathematical logic. This math would eventually lead to universal computation. (The term ‘Boolean search’ comes from this logic.)
1837 - The first Tabulating Machine invented
Swiss lawyer and inventor Per Georg Scheutz created the first full-scale difference engine, a mechanical machine to tabulate polynomial functions. The machines were later bought by an Observatory in New York and the British government.
1858 - Transatlantic Cable is completed
The completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 was a cause for much celebration on both sides of the Atlantic. Tiffany & Company of New York purchased the cable remaining on board the USS Niagara after the successful completion of the cable and sold 4-inch sections as souvenirs.
1890 - Census collection competition
The 1880 US census had taken 7 years to complete since all processing had been done by hand from journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census, data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census—so a competition was held to find a better method. It was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith, who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, later to become IBM. He invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine.
1914 - Panama Canal Opened
The world was desperate to get to the West Coast of North America after the discovery of gold in California in 1848 without sailing around the tip of South America. The United States encouraged Panama’s independence from Columbia and built the Panama Canal, which opened to sea traffic in 1914.
1917 - The US declares war on Germany
The United States declared war on Germany and its allies, but recognized its need for greater communication that adversaries could not understand. Things like the Zimmerman Telegraph also illustrated the value of coded intelligence. To read more about the significance of the Zimmerman Telegram, click here: https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/zimmermann-telegram
A new group was created, known as the Cipher Bureau, under the direction of Herbert O. Yardley. Headquartered in Washington D.C., the code and cypher description unit was part of the war effort under the Executive, lacking Congressional authorization or oversight. After the war ended in 1919, Yardley’s Bureau was moved to New York City, as a joint venture between the Army and the State Department. Known as The Black Chamber, it was disguised as a New York City commercial code company. The Black Chamber did sell commercial codes, but it also devoted time to breaking the communication codes of other nations.
1928 - IBM punch cards
IBM standardizes on punched cards with 80 columns of data and rectangular holes. Widely known as IBM Cards, they dominated the data processing industry for almost half a century.
1928 - First television broadcast
From 1939 to 1941, about 7,000 television sets were sold. This new technology was out of reach for most Americans as sets ranged from $200 to $600. Television broadcasts were limited to a few large cities such as New York and Los Angeles; they became available across the country only after World War II.
1929 - Black Chamber disbanded
Secretary of State Henry Stimson made the decision to disband the organization. He, and others, were uncomfortable with the level of surveillance, especially as the Bureau had deals with Western Union and other telegraph companies to get access to messages coming in and out of the United States. President Hoover also didn’t see the need for peacetime surveillance, so the Bureau was shut down. Yardley was left unemployed and angry that his work was dismissed by the administration. In response, Yardley published a book, The American Black Chamber, about the surveillance conducted by the Cipher Bureau. Excerpts featured in The Saturday Evening Post shocked not only the United States, but countries that had been spied upon.
Though Yardley revealed a shocking amount of intelligence, other organizations were developing intelligence Bureaus of their own. In 1929, the U.S. Army formed the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). Throughout the 1930s, the SIS opened bases and kept an eye on the Japanese Empire. Their intelligence gathering would prove vital in the American response to the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor and throughout the war in the Pacific Theater.
1939- Hewlett-Packard founded
David Packard and Bill Hewlett found their company in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product, the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, rapidly became a popular piece of test equipment for engineers.
Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to test recording equipment and speaker systems for the 12 specially equipped theatres that showed the movie “Fantasia” in 1940.
1941 - The First Bombe completed
Built as an electro-mechanical means of decrypting Nazi ENIGMA-based military communications during World War II, the British Bombe is conceived of by computer pioneer Alan Turing and Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. Hundreds of allied bombes were built in order to determine the daily rotor start positions of Enigma cipher machines, which in turn allowed the Allies to decrypt German messages. The basic idea for bombes came from Polish code-breaker Marian Rejewski's 1938 "Bomba."
1943 – The SIGSALY secure speech system makes the first digital voice transmission – used by the Allies for communication during WWII.
1944 - Harvard Mark 1 completed
Conceived by Harvard physics professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark 1 is a room-sized, relay-based calculator.
The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft running the length of the machine that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts and used 3,500 relays. The Mark 1 produced mathematical tables but was soon superseded by electronic stored-program computers.
From then to now: looking ahead to the internet
From then to now: looking ahead to the internet
Increasingly, most of the digital devices we own, including computers, are connected to the world wide web. More and more jobs are demanding digital and computer skills to perform job tasks. So just how big is the internet? Just how many people are surfing the web?
- In 2023, the internet had 5.1 Billion users - which is about 64% of the world population! It took until 2005 to read 1 billion users, but then almost a billion people have joined the internet every 5 years!
- Every second, approximately 99,000 Google searches take place around the world, which means that there are more than 8.5 billion searches a day!
- As of October 2018, there were more than 1.9 billion websites on the internet.
- More than 5 million blog posts are published every single day.
- 95 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day.
- Facebook has 2.23 billion users, which is 30% of the world’s population. Statistics suggest that around 50% of internet users are on Facebook.
- 250 billion e-mails are sent out everyday – but 81% of these are spam and sent out automatically.
- 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
- 60% of internet use is mobile! With smartwatches, tablets, e-readers, many of us access the world wide web on the go. How many of you are reading this on a smartphone?
Women and Eniac day
Women and Eniac day
Tune in this week to learn more about the women who helped us pioneer computer programming to help win the war. For more information about these women, click here:
At the link above you can also listen to the podcast “Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda” about the women who programmed the ENIAC!
You can also check out this TEDx talk about the creation of modern computing and the amazing women behind it here:
Tune in this week to learn more! Can’t wait!
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