The First Computers: History and Architectures (review)

The First Computers: History and Architectures. Edited by Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xii+457. $39.95.

The papers collected in this book were originally delivered at the 1998 International Conference on the History of Computing at the Heinz Nizdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany. Part of MIT Press's Series in the History of Computing, The First Computers is divided into five sections that cover, in turn: history, reconstructions, architecture; the American, German, and British scenes; and early Japanese computers.

The introduction, by Michael Williams, focuses on simultaneity of invention. Rather than trying to determine the "winner" in contests of invention--a shallow interpretive perspective that tends to foster a cult of champions--Williams notes that the early pioneers, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, all knew one another; thus, the historian who takes a legalistic, "patent office" approach is missing the boat. Priority battles still rage, of course, and a few essays in The First Computers still hint at such agendas. The careful reader needs to be on guard.

Part 1 starts with an intellectual history of the agendas and metalevel structures of computer science by Michael Mahoney. This is followed by an essay by Robert Seidel on historical reconstructions, a topic of great current interest in science museums and to the blossoming e-community of individuals seeking to recreate, or at least emulate, ancient hardware. Harry Huskey, who worked with both John von Neumann and Alan Turing, elucidates how the components available in the 1940s determined (I use this term deliberately) the architecture of the earliest machines.

The most historically thoughtful essays appear in part 2, which includes contributions by Bernard Cohen, Bill Aspray, and Paul Ceruzzi. Particularly interesting, and a good way to understand the ENIAC architecture from a modern-day standpoint, is van der Spiegel's piece on the University of Pennsylvania's fiftieth-anniversary tribute to this machine--placing the entire 18,000-tube, room-sized behemoth on a single VLSI chip.

Four of the seven essays in part 3 focus on the work of Konrad Zuse, a German pioneer working in near complete isolation throughout the 1930s and 1940s on a variety of remarkable machines. Another article on an early tabulator by the German DEHOMAG company (a precursor to IBM Germany), and one on the machines of Göttingen, show early adoption and development of such equipment in Germany. The final article, titled "Helmut Hoelzer--Inventor of the Electronic Analog Computer," reads like a chapter from a second-year electrical engineering course in control systems and will therefore be tough to follow by people trained in the humanities. As noted earlier, its title alone should raise an eyebrow about its historical knowledge claims, even if the lack of any American or British references to parallel work does not.

Part 4 covers early British machines ranging from the Colossus codebreaking machines at Bletchley Park (including a reconstruction by former MI5 agent Tony Sale) to the remarkable Manchester machines and the Atlas. Martin Campbell-Kelly describes his EDSAC simulator, software that emulates the look and functionality of Maurice Wilkes's 1949 Cambridge machine; such simulators are an increasingly important means of recapturing lost history.

Finally, part 5 has two articles, one showcasing machines built at various Japanese companies and research institutions in the 1950s, the other a look at Paramatron logic, a competent case study though lacking in historical perspective.

The First Computers reflects the diversity in disciplinary formation of the people writing computer history today. This makes it rather unsuitable as a text for course work in which purely historical issues are the area of interest. The varying cogency of the essays illustrates how demanding are the interdisciplinary skills (both technical and humanistic) required to write effective histories accessible to a wider audience than either camp can offer alone. For the most part, the historians here seem to have a better grasp of the technical...