Curry, Haskel. On Composition of Programs for Automatic Computing. Internal document, Naval Ordnance Lab, 1949. 11x8 inches. Very good condition. Early photographic reproduction process of an unclassified, rare document for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (Naval Ordnance Laboratory Memorandum 9805), 26 January 1949. First sheet is detached from the staple, the rest are intact. Very good condition. $1250
52pp, including one figure.
“A Study…of the planning of computations with a view to shortening the process and to systematizing it so that more work can be done by less technically trained personnel or by machines”.
Ex-library, Library of Congress. Rare.
"In 1943 John W. Mauchly and Prespert J. Eckert were contracted to build
the ENIAC, the first U.S. electronic digital and (basically)
general-purpose computer. A ``Computations Committee'' was assembled in
1945 to prepare for utilizing the machine after its completion. The
Committee consisted of the number theorist D.H. Lehmer, the logician H.B.
Curry, the astronomer L.B. Cunningham and the statistician F.L. Alt. Each
developed their own test program to be run on the ENIAC after it was first
presented to the public at Penn University February 15, 1946. The early
(declassified) test programs are unique instances of ``programming'' a
machine that had not the kind of logical design we know nowadays as the
von Neumann architecture. Any kind of programming language was totally
absent.For each new problem, the ENIAC had to be programmed directly and
locally, setting the switches on each individual unit, laying the cables
to interconnect these units and control the timing and sequencing of the
units' operations. In this sense, programming the ENIAC in its original
configuration thus came down to ``the design and development of a
special-purpose computer out of ENIAC component parts.'' (B. Fritz) The
reconstruction of the early test programs demonstrates the difficulties
involved with adapting computations made to human measure for a machine.
They show the need for an intermediary language between man and machine.
The current reconstruction of D.H. Lehmer's ENIAC program not only
discloses the various problems involved with early programming but is
furthermore a rare example of programming the non-rewired parallel ENIAC
--ABSTRACT: "Haskell before Haskell: Curry's Contribution to Programming (1946-1950)"
Liesbeth de Mol, (joint work with M. Bullynck) in Colloquium on the History of Computing, here,
and full text here.
"Haskell Curry was educated at Harvard and received a doctorate from Göttingen in 1930 for a thesis, supervised by Hilbert, entitled Grundlagen der kombinatorischen Logik. He taught at Harvard, Princeton, then for 35 years at Pennsylvania State University. During World War II Curry researched in applied physics at Johns Hopkins University. In 1966 he accepted the chair of mathematics at Amsterdam. Curry's main work was in mathematical logic with particular interest in the theory of formal systems and processes. He formulated a logical calculus using inferential rules. His works include Combinatory Logic (1958) (with Robert Feys) and Foundations of Mathematical Logic (1963).
From the Penn State Site: “Penn State's first contribution to electronic computing was the work of Haskell Curry, an expert on symbolic logic. Curry worked on the first electronic computer, called ENIAC, while on leave from Penn State during World War II. Curry's research in the 1950s into the foundations of combinatory logic was applied in 1986 in the Mitre Corporation's Curry Chip, an innovative piece of computer hardware based on Curry's concept of "combinators."
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