History of Computer Science

1. INTENTIONS OF THIS HISTORY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Although we live in the information society, where computers and microprocessor are the basis of prosperity and everyone's daily companions, we do not have a picture of the history of computer science as a whole. Many books and other documents were published on specific historical aspects of computer science.7 Researchers and inventors told their lives and explained their achievements.8 9 10 11 A free collection "Computer Science Bibliographies" is available in the Internet.12 There is no integrated documentation of the development of computer science, customer's needs and legal solutions, applications and the mathematical and logical foundations. "The history of technology in general is not well documented. In fact, it is hardly documented at all."13

A book outlining a 70-year timeline of ideas around computers - technological, mathematical, organizational, financial and legal - that shaped society will undoubtedly provide a lot of insight. Information and Communication technology are either the reason for transformation or a catalyst. When the veterinarians found out that the mating of animals according to pre-calculated strategies based on some algorithms (using animal characteristics) improves food supply, European politicians passed a law introducing animal registers. Soon other continents, like the U.S.A., followed. Robots, e.g. for medical hip operations, improved the health systems worldwide. "Just-in-time" logistics revolutionized industry. These are only a few examples that demonstrate the power of computing based transformations. Where are we going? What transformations come next? How can we foresee and manage them? These are vital questions. One answer results from an extrapolation of the history of computing.

THINK is the slogan of IBM since 1924. Charles Flint integrated three little companies June 16, 1911, and Thomas Watson Sr. joined him in 1914. Howard Aiken built the first calculator Harvard Mark I for IBM, a non-binary but programmable calculator. The commercial success of IBM began with the IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier. Later IBM proved to be particularly successful with its mainframes using for decades the same basic code and instruction set architecture. IBM set quality standards with its architectures (like e.g. System Network Architecture SNA, System Application Architecture SAA, with several cryptographic architectures). IBM's PC operating system OS/2 had important advantages over DOS / Windows for the computing environments of big customers. IBM was the first company that invented "computing on demand" which it developed to cloud computing. IBM is still a leading technology provider, research company and an important service provider e.g. with the Smarter Planet Concept. (Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm, Jeffrey M.O'Brien, Im Dienst der Welt, IBM Press - Pearson Plc, 2011)

We decided to try to fill that gap in library shelves of the history books. For the author, it was a pleasure to compose it. If someday others will, under the same objective, write another book and highlight other aspects, we could get further help to understand ICT history. To further advance computer science it is helpful to look back. Many ideas, we might feel being new, were already drawn up by others.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716) considered clear human thinking as a kind of calculation. God - he thought - calculated with his more powerful means the world. Therefore, he invented a suitable language and algebra (called characteristica universalis ) with many other concepts like e.g. binary digits. He built a calculation machine (supra hominem, "better than mankind"), based on the decimal system, in 1673 and demonstrated it at the Royal Society in London.14 From today's point of view, Leibniz abilities stayed much behind his expectations. A long row of similar bold and far thinking personalities worked together, some developing methods, others developing devices and hardware, and some extremely industrious and intelligent people coded millions of lines. The history of computing science is not only a history of technology but also a history of motivation, tenacity and industry.

Industry indeed was necessary, because Kurt Gödel disappointed in 1931 philosophers and mathematicians by establishing that the correctness of models and theories cannot be proved. Error-free computer systems and theories are impossible to be built, except for trivial and simple situations. So students of computer science learned that the absence of errors can never be proved. A lot of time has to be spent to find the obvious errors with elaborated testing for hours, day and night. Students of law schools learned that computer users have to pay providers of software and computer systems to get information about the errors and deficiencies of products. Such legal constructs are not possible for "conventional" products like cars, buildings or dish washers. Normally, guarantees, that come with the products, allow us to give malfunctioning merchandise back to those who produced or sold it. As computer systems are never faultless, computer and software manufacturers provide guarantees only through costly maintenance. Maintenance costs of much of modern commercial software are currently about 20% per year of the price of the original licence, in Europe.

Gödels findings about the extremely limited possibilities of mathematicians to prove a theorem still hold today. We are never sure if a set of axioms of practical importance is really non-contradictory and non-redundant. What mathematicians find even more difficult to prove is the existence of the objects they defined with their axioms. But scientists are working hard to find automated provers. Several methods were found and are currently applied. Computers proved mathematical theorems, first in the 1960s. The hope is that they could check mathematical proofs of 100 pages or more. In 2012/2013 experts from all over the world met in Princeton, NJ, and discussed the current state of the art. Many theorems could already be proved with computers and new insight was found. But the state of the art in 2014 would best be described by: "Although automation is an exciting and ambitious goal, there is little realistic hope of having automated provers routinely prove assertions with real mathematical depth."15 Writing software could be seen as creating a mathematical theory on the application area of this software. Automatic provers for mathematical theories could test large software systems. The pessimistic result of the mathematicians working in this filed is an important reason why software quality is restricted and will be restricted for the next decades.

The thinking of Leibniz and Abu Dscha'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Chwarizmi (780 B.C. - 850 B.C.), whose name is the origin of the word "algorithm", lead to the idea of a calculation, which is done in a sequential and step-by-step approach. Parallel computing or associative computing was not seriously investigated at that time. Alan Turing formalized that concept with his Turing Machine. Its calculation steps were thought to be on a tape illustrating in that way a sequential processing mode. When Johann Neumann (John von Neumann) looked at the problem from an engineering point of view he envisaged the computer as a device with data and instructions being in one single memory.16 17 This single memory was structured in cells numbered from 0 to any integer which looked technologically feasible and realistic at the time. Thus the machine architecture, as we still know it, was drawn up.

We here use the concept of pseudo code to demonstrate the concept. The integrated circuit had still to be invented, and the microprocessor was not yet on the market:

These ideas may look rather simple, like many ideas in Computer Science. However, Computer Science proofs from the beginning that considerable theoretical efforts are necessary to achieve small practical success. At a time when technicians were still experimenting with mechanical solutions, with slow tubes, practically no memory and poor quality, the software engineers and scientists produced visionary concepts. The following table shows some milestones18: