Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Claude Shannon's Masterpiece on Cryptology, 1949

JF Ptak Science Books 

Shannon,  Claude:  Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems;  NYC:  ATT,  1949.    Published in The Bell System Technical Journal, vol 27, October 1949, No. 4    8vo.  Offered in its original printed wrappers, and in fine condition. .     This is the  great standard and first classic modern paper on computers and cryptology. $800.00

 

This is a very nice copy of this work, with only a short tear at the top of the spine and some slight fading around the wrapper edges. (The rich and dark blue wrappers used by Bell for this publication just didn't stand up to the test of time--here, even not exposed to any light or use for years, the wrappers still have started to fade. I make this to be a standard condition for a nice, acceptable copy coming from this journal.  There is a rubber stamped date on the front wrapper (Nov 30 1949). 

Computer Requirements at Fort Detrick, 1957

JF Ptak Science Books  

 

I've found an unusual, informal document; a rough, manuscript outline for a consideration on the computing capacities at Fort Detrick, in Frederick Maryland.  Fort Detrick is a Medical Command, and was the seat of research for the  United States' biological weapons program (1943–69), and which is today a large facility (on 1,200 acres) devoted to biomedical research, the "U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), with its bio-defense agency, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)", as well as  medical materiel management and global medical communications.

The 5-page document:  $300.00

 

The document ("Computer Requirements/Statistics Branch/Fort Detrick Maryland")  is handwritten by the former chief statistician around 1957, and in five tight pages outlines the basic necessities for the needs of computing facilities at the fort.  The document mentions two machines in particular, the "409-2" (with is the Remington Rand 409-2, an ENIAC style machine, produced in 1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (which is a release of the 409-2, done in 1953).

The UNIVAC 120:  "The Remington Rand 409 control panel programmed punched card calculator, designed in 1949, was sold in two models: the UNIVAC 60 (1952) and the UNIVAC 120 (1953). The model number referred to the number of decimal digits of vacuum tube memory storage provided for data.".-- Universal Automatic Computer Model 120 A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems Report No. 1115, March 1961 by Martin H. Weik (engl.)

Enjoy the rest of the previously unpublished document, below:

Early and Rare Automatic Coding Work

JF Ptak Science Books

Jones, John L.  A Survey of Automatic Coding Techniques for Digital Computers.  MS dissertation at MIT, May, 1954.  This is evidently a photographic negative of the work by Jones done so for the Remington Rand Company, bound in their ring-hole-punch soft-cover binding, for use--we suspect--at the U.S. Census Bureau for auto coding of the UNIVAC I. 

Fine condition. Rare.  $450  

Looking Backwards: How Far Back in Time is 1954 (in Computer Years)?

JF Ptak Science Books    ref Post 1603

12 pieces of ephemera, as displayed below, all from the Association for Computing Machinery, 1953 and 1954.   $250.00

How far back is "way back", or "waaay back", in terms of history?  As I've written earlier in this blog, about going deep into history in various disciplines, but perhaps in no discipline is time so compacted than in the computer sciences.   Mr. Peabody (above, with his boy, Sherman) would agree, and would hardly have to go "way back" in his "way back machine" to get chronologically deep in computer history. 

1954 is extremely deep in the history of electronic calculation--it is three years before Backus et alia created FORTRAN, five years before the integrated circuit was created, eight years before the first compsci department is established at Purdue, eleven years before the first Ph.D. is awarded in computer sci from a computer science department, and fourteen years before the first woman (Liskov) earned a Ph.D.(whose dissertation was A Program to Play Chess Endgames) in the field.  All of which sounds like ancient history, but almost all of which takes place during my own lifetime, which doesn't make it sound so terribly "ancient".

But looking at this ephemera on membership and dues and voting on the Constitution for the Association for Computing Machinery certainly makes it seem as though so--the voting and bylaws ballot is a few mimeographed pages long and is hand-stapled at the top, the announcenments for meetings fits on one sheet of paper, and Edmund C Berkeley is hand signing his initials on pleas for new subscribers to his Computers and Automation journal.  Everything looks so fresh and new and uncomplicated--and that's because it was, relative to what we experience now.  In 1954 there weren't 10,000 people working in the field of computing; 57 years later the growth in involvement of people working in the field is at least three orders of magnitude, and quite possibly four--the growth in the sheer volume of printed and digitally-circulated material is probably somewhere on the order of the differences between post-Gutenberg European printing and the printing industry in the year 1990.  The changes are spectacular, and they seem to be so much more appreciable when one looks at the foundation efforts from the early years.