Media,Technology and Society by Brian Winston

Author:Brian Winston [Winston, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781134766321
Google: T8YLfMsaAXAC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-09-11T03:38:02+00:00

NO LANGUAGES

Take accessibility. By 1953 it was possible to state:

The difficulty of programming has become the main difficulty in the use of machines. Aitken has expressed the opinion that the solution of this difficulty may be sought by building a coding machine…. However it has been remarked that there is no need to build a special machine for coding, since the computer itself, being general purpose, should be used.

(Knuth and Pardo 1980:228)

The debate about programming in the early 1950s speaks to a crucial constraint in computing development. Specifically the slow emergence of programming languages was definitely an obstacle, and an unnecessary one, to the diffusion of computers. The debate begun in these years still echoes in contemporary design philosophies which continue to favour the machine rather than its user and which therefore constitute a constant element in suppressing the device’s radical potential.

In its first appearance, the argument was between those who favoured using some of the expanding capacity of the machines to produce decimal numeration and others, the purists, who felt that, if one could not read binary rows of noughts and ones, one should get out of computing. Of course, this latter group was engaged in the time-honoured pursuit of protecting its mysterium, the secrets of its guild.

This feeling is noted in an article in the 1954 ONR (Office of Naval Research) symposium: ‘Many “professional” machine users strongly opposed the use of decimal numbers…to this group, the process of machine instruction was one that could not be turned over to the uninitiated’. This attitude cooled the impetus for sophisticated programming aids. The priesthood wanted and got simple mechanical aids for the clerical drudgery which burdened them, but they regarded with hostility and derision more ambitious plans to make programming accessible to larger populations…. Thus they were unalterably opposed to those mad revolutionaries who wanted to make programming so easy that anyone could do it.

(Backus 1980:128)

Were the mad revolutionaries possessed of anything more than dreams? Indeed they were and had been for some years. The German electro-mechanical calculator engineer, Konrad Zuse, was contracted after the war by IBM and eventually set up in business in West Germany by Rand; but, during his enforced idleness on the top of the mountain at war’s end, unable to work in the metal, he could only think. What he thought of was the Plankalkul, the program calculus, the first high-level computer programming language. It antedates the first electronic computer by three years.

Before laying this project aside, Zuse had completed an extensive manuscript containing programs far more complex than anything written before. Among other things there were algorithms for sorting; for testing the connectivity of a graph represented as a list of edges; for integer arithmetic (including square roots) in binary notation; and for floating-point arithmetic…. To top things off, he also included forty-nine pages of algorithms for playing chess.

(Knuth and Pardo 1980:203)

The high-level language is the key to the computer. As Zuse wrote: ‘The first principle of the Plankalkul is: data processing begins with the bit….

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