• About the class
  • Assignments
  • Bibliography
  • Extra Credit
  • Syllabus and Schedule

The Evolution of Computing and its Impact on History

The Evolution of Computing and its Impact on History

Category Archives: News

Reading Summary: Nov. 4, 1952: Univac Gets Election Right, But CBS Balks

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by Austin Valeske in News, Reading Summary

≈ 1 Comment

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/11/dayintech_1104

In the summer of 1952, Remington Rand, the manufacturer of he Univac, approached CBS News with the idea of using Univac to predict the results of the election that fall. Sig Mickelson and Walter Cronkite, the news chief and anchor, respectively, thought it would be interesting and “at least be entertaining to use an ‘electronic brain'” in their analysis of the election. When election time came, however, they disregarded Univac’s predictions of the election’s outcome.

To prepare for the election, Eckert and Mauchly worked with a former colleague from Penn college to write a program that compared the results from previous elections to the results of the 1952 election as they came in. Interestingly, they had to work at Mauchly’s house because he wasn’t allowed to work at the company anymore, due to his blacklisting as pro-Communist. The plan was to connect Univac technicians to the CBS studios via teletype machine, and as the results came in the data would be transferred to Univac by copying the data onto paper tape.

Polls conducted before the election had indicated that the Democrat, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, would be anywhere between a landslide and barely ahead of the Republican, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Because of this, Mickelson scoffed when Univac predicted that Eisenhower would win with 438 electoral votes and a 100-1 chance that Eisenhower would gain the 266 electoral votes needed win. He actually refused to air the results. A second calculation with more data backed up this prediction, after a short miscalculation involving an extra zero in Stevenson’s totals.

The final results of the election? An Eisenhower landslide: 442 to 89 votes, only 1 percent off of Univac’s prediction. After the final results, CBS confessed that Univac had made an accurate prediction hours earlier that they hadn’t aired. In the 1956 election, the three major networks all used computer analysis in their results in their newscasts.

What if the Difference Engine existed in the 1800’s?

24 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by Kiri Wagstaff in Alternate History, News

≈ Comments Off on What if the Difference Engine existed in the 1800’s?

The second assignment for this class focused on speculating about alternate history.

What if Charles Babbage had completed his Difference Engine in the 1830’s, and the engines were then mass-produced, spreading outward into all areas of calculation?

Students each selected a key event from the period 1830 to 1880 and discussed how it might have been altered by the availability of Difference Engine technology. These events included political, scientific, technological, and financial happenings that together provide an eclectic view of the time period:

  • Charles Darwin’s journey on the HMS Beagle (1831)
  • The Kowloon Incident and China’s Opium Wars (1839)
  • The discovery of Neptune (1846)
  • Italian revolutions from Austrian control; Austrian hot-air balloon attacks (1848)
  • The collision of the S.S. Arctic and the Vesta (1854)
  • The use of cryptography in the American Civil War (1860’s)
  • The recovery of Lee’s Special Order 191 in the American Civil War (1862)
  • Building the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad (1863-1869)
  • William Shanks’s calculation of pi to 707 digits (1873)
  • The Vienna Stock Exchange collapse (1873)

The alternate histories make for fascinating readings. Links are provided above to submissions the students have shared publicly. Read on!

Ada Lovelace Day

10 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by Kiri Wagstaff in Ada Lovelace Day, News

≈ Comments Off on Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day took place on Friday, October 7. The theme this year is “heroines”:

So share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today.

You can read others’ stories or even contribute your own (it’s not too late!).

Setting the stage

19 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by Kiri Wagstaff in News

≈ 5 Comments

This course covers the origins and evolution of computing, beginning with early manual computation and going through today (when we even have computers on Mars!). It follows the series of innovations and discoveries that led to the modern computer, the Internet, the Web, and new computing devices such as tablet computers and smart phones. Along the way we will meet several luminaries of the field, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Grace Hopper, John von Neumann, and others. We will discuss the role of computers in issues such as privacy, communication, job automation, warfare, artificial intelligence, and more.  

Students registered for the class will be actively posting and discussing relevant topics here. Everyone else is also welcome to join in!

The first class meeting will be Monday, September 26. Stay tuned!

♣ Topics

  • Ada Lovelace Day
  • Alternate History
  • Class Summary
  • News
  • People
  • Personal History
  • Reading Summary
  • The Future
  • War is in the air

♣ Archives

  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011

♣ Recent Comments

  • Randy orton on RIP Steve Jobs
  • Kevin on Computers can be hacked and so should life
  • Kiri Wagstaff on Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
  • Sarah Fine on Class Summary: 11/21/11
  • Sarah Fine on Class summary: 11/16

♣ Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.