JF Ptak Science Books Post 2714
The history of computing, at its inception, could have its fluidity measured in decades, beginning, say with Babbage; by the time of the earliest large machines (1945-1955) computer time could be measured by less than a decade, and probably half of that. In the 1960s the computer year could be measured, finally, in single years. After that, after microminiaturization, and the personal computer, the year of currency started to be measured in months. And then, of course, the year really sped up--I'm not sure if there is only a week or two in the year, now; maybe the year of progress in 1955 is today measured in days, or hours. I suspect that this will all continue to get faster, as it has been only 70 years or so that the computer world started to bulk up; I imagine that the changes that will come in 2087 will have us looking at least as "quaint" as 1947 looks to us.
And how far back is "way back", or "waaay back", in terms of (computer) history? 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 would probably agree (though he wasn't a very agreeable person), finding that in terms of other big leaps into the past that to go "way back" in his "way back machine" to get chronologically deep in computer history wouldn't take very much at all.
Anyway, some of these senses of time and how only 50 years ago seems like much longer can be seen in the bits and pieces of computer science ephemera. Looking into the "archives" here I found a document from the beginning of the first tweaks of mass professionalism in sompsci. This draft of the constitution and bylaws of the Association for Computing Machinery (the ACM) was complete in only four pages, including the data on the establishment of its members, officers, executive committee, meetings, bylaws, meetings--the whole deal, in four pages.
The document is undated, but as far as I can determine, I believe that this document was printed in 1953, soon after the ACM dropped the "Eastern" that used to appear as the first word in the title of the organization, and after it moved to 2 East 63rd St
Its quite a quietly, unspectacular spectacular thing, seeing what would become a vast organization be summed up in its infancy on two sheets of folded paper.
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 (Wexelblatt), 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 announcements 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; 63 years later the growth in involvement of people working in the field is at least three orders of magnitude more, 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 tremendous, and they seem to be so much more appreciable when one looks at the foundation efforts from the early years.
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