Luddites and Luminaries - Part 2

Engines

We left off in part one with the story of the Jacquard Loom and its punched card programs. I said there was a thread from the Jacquard loom to modern digital computers. So lets continue to follow the thread.

At the same time as the Jacquard process and punch cards was coming into use, the mathematician Charles Babbage was, ahead of his time, already working on the concept of the programable computer.

As a reminder, we are still talking about events of the 19th Century here. The 20th century is the century of the information revolution, but its origins are in the century before.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine was the first conceptual general purpose computer. The analytical engine design contained components analogous to the components of a computer recognisable today. It had a CPU with an internal instruction set, it had memory and it’s assembly language equivalent was Turing Complete meaning it could technically run any conceivable computer program.

Hold that thought. A computer, born during of the industrial revolution in the 19th century would have been capable of running any computer program. In fact, could it have held a thought?

Why is the Analytical Engine a step in our story? Well.. How did you program it? Punched cards! Babbage got the idea directly from Jacquard and his loom.

Unfulfilled Potential

Sadly the analytical engine, or in fact any of the large scale designs for other machines, were never completed during Babbage’s lifetime. The Analytical Engine design was vast. It would have been the the size of a locomotive and powered by steam. All to provide a whopping memory capacity of 1kb.

While the punch card driven Analytical Engine was never built there is an example of another Babbage machine: The Difference Engine No 2. which was built to his specifications by a team at the Science Museum in London during the 1990’s. It is a fantastic example of mechanical computing machinery on a grand scale.

There is a chance we will see a real Analytical Engine some day. A group of clever folk are working on an ongoing project to build a working example. I personally hope they pull it off.

Punching

Continuing our journey following the punch card revolution we arrive at the late 19th century. Where a chap called Herman Hollerith developed a tabulating machine for use tabulating data from the US Census in 1890. Hollerith’s machine of course borrowed the idea of using punch cards from Babbage and the Jacquard loom. Census data was transposed to punch cards to store data to be tabulated.

The effectiveness of Hollerith’s machines in tabulating the census led to massive success. The machine was used by many countries for census counts and tabulation as well as commercially by businesses the world over requiring large scale data processing.

Automated data processing swung into action in the twentieth century and Herman Hollerith’s ‘Computing and Tabulating Recording Company’ produced the machines at the center of it. In 1924 the company was renamed. It became International Business Machines or… IBM. IBM went on to produce many machines that used punched cards right into the 1980’s and become one of, if not, the most successful computer company in the world.

80 Column Legacy

We haven’t escaped the punched card even today. If you open a terminal program on your Mac, PC or Linux machine its very likely to open in a window configuration that is 80 columns wide. Why? Well because 80 columns is the width of punch cards used originally by IBM computers. When terminals replaced punch cards as an input mechanism IBM made them 80 columns wide to maintain compatibility with existing software. The convention has stuck. It’s an interesting thought that terminals on today’s computers share some ancestry with the Jacquard Loom.

Bombes

One famous and important use of Hollerith Machines in our story was at Bletchley Park during World War II.

At it’s height, Bletchley Park collected reams and reams of data primarily via signals intelligence. This data needed to be collated, recorded and analysed. To do this the incredible consortium of minds at Bletchley created the modern ‘Intelligence Factory’. Data processing and intelligence handling on an industrial scale.

To achieve this Bletchley park needed to mechanise the process. So they enlisted the help of the British Tabulating Machine Company(BTM). BTM had the license to sell Hollerith machines in the UK and they were used extensively at as part of the codebreaking and intelligence gathering process at Bletchley.

BTM were also contracted to build the famous Welchman-Turing Bombe machines used in part to recover the keys for the German Enigma cipher.

A machine designed in part by Alan Turing. The father of artificial intelligence.

The necessity to break more complex codes quickly led to building yet more machines. It led to the building of the worlds first digital stored program computer: Colossus.

Despite the existence of Colossus and the Bombe being kept secret well into the later half of the twentieth century, their impact can be felt in post war work done by many of the engineers and codebreakers. Not the least by Alan Turing.

Convergence

We have got from the loom to the modern digital computer via punch cards. We have reached a converged at Bletchley Park of punch cards, the birth of computers and artificial intelligence. Connected via the luminary responsible for defining the parameters of both: Alan Turing.

From here we jump head first into the philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence. A field as old as computers are.

Are machines capable of thought? What does it even mean ’to think’?

In part three, we’ll get to the first AI revolution, beginning in the late 1940’s.

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