20
votes
Accepted
What happened to analog computers?
Rutherford journal gives a nice chronology of analog computing up to 1970, when they went out of mass use. "The demise of the analogue computer was a gradual process. Apart from reductions in size and ...
- 70k
16
votes
Accepted
Did Turing know of Babbage's work?
See:
Alan Turing, Collected works: Mathematical Logic (R.O. Gandy & C.E.M. Yates editors, 2001).
[page 10, regarding Turing's paper On computable numbers... (1937)] It should be remarked that ...
- 13.9k
16
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A case from this year is that of Aubrey de Grey.
Aubrey de Grey, a biologist known for his claims that people alive today will live to the age of 1,000, posted a paper to the scientific preprint site ...
- 601
15
votes
Accepted
Is anything known about part II of John McCarthy's Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine Part II?
In "History of Programming Languages" by Richard L. Wexelblat page 178:
Part II was never written but was intended to contain applications to computing with algebraic expressions.
Note that this ...
- 455
11
votes
What happened to analog computers?
The USS Iowa has mechanical analog computers for firing that survived the 1980-refit of the ship.
An analog computer of everyday use in the XXIst century are the flight computers used on a wide range ...
- 1,866
11
votes
Accepted
Why would Margaret Hamilton and her team at NASA print the code on paper?
This is how computer programming was done in those days. There was no such thing as a modern
terminal with a screen, and no keyboards.
A programmer would write her code first on paper (handwritten), ...
10
votes
Accepted
Does Blum's speedup theorem have any conceptual predecessors?
The resemblance is not superficial. There is a precise relation between computer programs and formal proofs known as the Curry–Howard correspondence that took shape in 1960s. And Godel's results on ...
- 70k
9
votes
When was the first command-line interface developed?
According to a wikibook Operating System Design: "A command line interface or CLI is a method of interacting with a computer by giving it lines of textual commands (that is, a sequence of characters) ...
- 70k
9
votes
Accepted
What is the first historical reference to the binary search algorithm?
In "The Art of Computer Programming, Vol 3, second edition, p422", it is said:
Binary search was first first mentioned by John Mauchly, in what was perhaps the first published discussion of ...
- 455
9
votes
Why did Norbert Wiener break off relations with Walter Pitts?
Amanda Gefter's recent article in Nautilus takes a very unambiguous position on the question:
There was just one person who wasn’t happy about the reunion: Wiener’s wife.
Margaret Wiener was, by ...
- 91
9
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
A well-known example is the work of Marjorie Rice on pentagonal tilings of the plane.
Wikipeidia:
In December 1975, Rice came across a Scientific American article on tessellations. Despite having ...
- 9,445
9
votes
Accepted
How did Lenna become the most used image in image processing?
Speaking as someone who worked in imaging tech and related fields from '79 to whenever, I can offer a little more. This image does contain a wide range of spatial frequencies as well as intensity ...
- 2,535
9
votes
Accepted
What is the first reference to a nondeterministic Turing machine?
According to SEP, non-determinism was introduced by Rabin and Scott in Finite Automata and their Decision Problems (IBM Journal of Research and Development, 3(2) 114–125, 1959). Their main result was ...
- 70k
8
votes
What is the first historical reference to the binary search algorithm?
In Jataka, there's a story about Losaka
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j1/j1044.htm
So in time it came to pass that the people fell into a wretched plight. Reflecting that such had not been their ...
8
votes
Who created Agile programming and why?
A tiny bit of research is all it takes to find who and when. Agile was conceived between February 11-13, 2001 by Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward Cunningham, Martin ...
- 1,697
7
votes
Was the computer invented through the influence of the printing press or through the influence of the calculator?
I am immediately reminded of a great 2010 documentary called Top Secret Rosies: The Female 'Computers' of WWII.
The word "computer" has had a definition since at least the 17th century. In the ...
- 1,258
7
votes
Accepted
Was Charles Sanders Peirce aware of Charles Babbage's difference engine?
Not only was Peirce aware of the difference engine, he was also aware of the analytic engine, that was never built, of Jevons's 1870 machine, and was later personally involved with designing its ...
- 70k
7
votes
Accepted
How did von Neumann come up with his merge sort algorithm?
Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) Vol. 3 "Sorting and Searching" gives a detailed account on the history of ideas, including the sorting by merging, in Chapter 5.5. ...
- 320
6
votes
The origin of logic gate symbols
The "distinctive shapes" specified in IEEE Std 91/91a-1991 derive from MIL-STD-806 Graphical Symbols for Logic Diagrams, which was originally a US Air Force standard. This in turn was based on a 1960 ...
- 1,154
6
votes
Accepted
Why was the 'differential entropy' from information theory so named?
There is a curious discrepancy between the Russian and the English pages of Wikipedia on "differential entropy". The English page is rather vague on the origin, but the Russian page states ...
- 70k
6
votes
Why so hard to find references to pictures of Raymond Boyce?
I think the answer to the main question is clear from his Wikipedia biography: Boyce died in 1974 aged 27, the same year SQL was released. He was a young researcher working for IBM in a pre-digital ...
- 1,154
5
votes
What was the first programming language that implemented hash maps / dictionaries as a base type?
Not sure if there is a definitive answer but Smalltalk certainly had dictionaries (hash maps) built into the language (as such it can be given an OO language) and Smalltalk predates Perl.
- 1,079
5
votes
Who coined the term “machine learning”?
The earliest reference appears to be:
... it is easy to see how a machine could be programmed so that it appeared
to learn... whether it would in principle be possible to construct a generalized ...
- 400
5
votes
Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
There was a peculiar case when an anonymous forum commenter made significant progress on a problem. They could well have had substantial formal training (reading their posts I think this is likely).
...
- 601
5
votes
When was the first appearance of the abbreviation RSA?
Nor does it appear in A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems (Communications of the ACM Volume 21 Issue 2, Feb. 1978 Pages 120-126), which was Rivest-Shamir-Adleman's ...
- 70k
5
votes
Accepted
What technologies were used before JavaScript?
Javascript is older than Flash and ActiveX.
Originally, it was developed by the Netscape, as the "small cousine" of the Java.
The "World Wide Web" was originally developed only for ...
- 909
5
votes
Accepted
Can you provide pages 7, 8, 25 of the 1969 edition of the Art of Computer Programming?
If you search for the book here, you will be able to find the libraries near you that have this edition. You may be able to arrange an interlibrary loan if it is too far to travel.
I also checked a ...
- 66
4
votes
Accepted
Did Albert Einstein write a computer program?
No. Very few people had written computer programs at the time of his death, 1955, and most had backgrounds in numerical analysis, and computational techniques. Programs were written in machine code in ...
- 680
4
votes
Who said “Either you speak maths or you speak nonsense?”
Googling around, I have found this quote somewhere on facebook:
John McCarthy:
Those who don't speak math are doomed to speak nonsense.
However, this apparently ...
- 141
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible