COMPUTERS

Algorithms

There is an argument that computer algorithms can be traced back to Francis Galton s work in the 1880s. He applied the work of his cousin Charles Darwin to socio-political material. He believed that the process could direct the development of society in a desirable direction. This could be done by eugenics, the breeding of people. Because of the Non-Conformist character of the college, the idea was taken up by many people who were progressive in their outlook. Galton founded a chair in eugenics. The first person to hold this was his former student, the theoretical biostatistician Karl Pearson (1857-1936). In order to advance eugenics Pearson and the psychologist Spearman (1863-1945) sought to quantify and categorise people. To enable big data to be simplified they created the statistical algorithms.

Location: University College, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (purple, red)

Automata

Euphonia

Joseph Faber (1786-1850) was an Austrian mathematician. He built created Euphonia, a machine that sought to replicate human speech. It was operated by a piano-like keyboard. In 1846 it was displayed in the Egyptian Hall. It was able to sing God Save The Queen. People tended to speak to it directly rather than to its operator.

Location: 170-173 Piccadilly, W1J 9EJ (purple, turquoise)

Merlin's Mechanical Museum

John Joseph Merlin (1735-1803).

As a child Babbage visited Merlin's Mechanical Museum. There he was particularly struck by an animatronic dancer. Over the years that followed he contemplated how it might be developed further.

Knowledge of museum's items is derived from a pamphlet that stated its contents.

Ultimately, Babbage bought a dancer.

The Amazing Mechanical Swan in Bowes Museum is a survivor from Merlin's work. It was exhibited in Cox's Mechanical Museum. It is barely mentioned, which may indicate that other items were more sophisticated.

Location: 11 Princes Street, W1B 2LJ (red, yellow)

Birkbeck College

Andrew Booth (1918-2009) did a Ph.D. in crystallography. In 1946 he was appointed a lecturer in physics at Birkbeck. J.D. Bernal appreciated that computers might be able to speed up the calculation and research that research in crystallography required. He sent Booth to the United States to study the new technology.

Booth realised that data storage had to be developed if computers were to become viable. He concluded that magnetism had potential. He built a rotating memory drum that demonstrated the viability of the technology. He also devised the Booth multiplier algorithm, as well as building one of the first electronic computers.

Booth set up Birkbeck's Electronic Computation Research Laboratory. In 1957 the Laboratory metamorphosed into being the Department of Numerical Automation, which was the first university department in Britain to be dedicated to computing.

Location: Malet Street, WC1E 7HX (orange, red)

The Computer Conservation Society

The Computer Conservation Society was set up within the British Computer Society in 1989.

Website: www.computerconservationsociety.org

I.B.M

Think or

I.B.M. starteed using Think as a corporate slogan in 1911. Herbert Chappell (1934-2019), a University of Oxford graduate, attended a job interview with the company. During it, a placard on the wall that declared Think was pointed out to him. He was then asked to consider what it might mean. He replied Think or swim? He was not hired. He went on to become a successful conductor, composer, and producer of music.

Location: 20 York Road, SE1 7ND

Website: www.ibm.com/uk-en

Ada Countess of Lovelace

Ada Countess of Lovelace (d.1852) was a gifted mathematician, who, through her association with Charles Babbage, played an important figure in the early history of computing. She was also the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Ada Lovelace's tutors included Augustus de Morgan and Mary de Somerville. The latter introduced her to Charles Babbage.

Menabrea had written a paper about Bernoulli Numbers. Lovelace translated from Italian into English. She saw its potential and, with Babbage s encouragement, added a series of notes to it. The paper's length was tripled. Babbage envisaged the (unbuilt) analytic engine as being capable of generating sophisticated but ultimately self-contained numerically tables. In her additions she set out how symbolic logic could be used to convert a sequence into formula that could be coded to run on the engine. Algorithms could be used to produce results that had not been specifically programmed to produce

In her final years she developed a highly mathematical gambling system and engaged in its potential. She drew together a group of admiring wealthy men to form a syndicate. She was still placing bets while she lay dying.

By the mid-20^thC Lovelace had long been an obscure figure. However, Alan Turing encountered her work and soon appreciated her achievement. His discovery led to her becoming a celebrated figure.

Location: 12 St James's Square, SW1Y 4LB (orange, yellow)

Mousey, Mousey

Doug Engelbart's creation of the mouse was in large part derived from the tracker ball, a device that was invented by Ralph Benjamin (1922-2019), an Admiralty scientist. It enabled a cursor to be moved on radar screens.

People Above Their Station

A senior B.B.C. producer concluded that microelectronics was going to be important to future life in Britain. One lunchtime, he noticed David Allen, one of his underlings, having a pint in the B.B.C. Club (it was the 1970s). He went over to him and asked him to draw a proposal. Allen was a member of the Corporation's Continuing Education Unit, which had had a major success with its Moving On adult literacy programme. As a result, two million adults with literacy had sought either to learn to read or to improve their reading skills. Initially Allen and his colleagues assumed that they going to develop a show about do-it-yourself electronics with time they came they realised it should be focused on computer use, which at the time implied learning a level of programming. They concluded that BASIC was the best language but soon appreciated that it was not one language but a series of dialects that soon became mutually exclusive. Therefore, they asked the companies that were active in the field for a form that work across all the versions. They were cold-shouldered. Therefore, they decided that the show should be centred on a simple computer that viewers could program with a particular version. The contract to build the B.B.C. Micro was awarded to Acorn; the company was told that it should not expect to sell more 12,000 machines. The Computer Programme launched in 1982 as a computer literacy programme for adults. However, it soon became popular and developed a momentum of its owned. Sales for the B.B.C. Micro soared, some of them being bought by schools that were acquiring a computer for the first time. The programme's audience included numerous teachers and teenagers. The Ministry of Education became aware of the phenomenon and announced a programme that sought to place a computer in every school, the schools being left free to choose which one they bought. Overwhelmingly, they opted for a B.B.C. Micro. Over 1,000,000 were sold.

Location: Ealing Underground Station, Ealing Broadway, W5 2NU. The Unit was based in an office that was above the station.

The Post Office Research Station

Lorenz developed Tunny, a more sophisticated development of Enigma. The Allies did not capture a machine and therefore had to rely solely upon thought. Tommy Flowers (d.1998) was a telephone engineer who worked at Dollis Hill. In 1943 he visited Bletchley and saw the Heath Robinson machines that the codebreakers were using. His deep knowledge of in the Post Office s telephone system meant that he appreciated that vacuum tubes could be used to develop a machine that might be to address the problem much more efficiently. In part, he had to finance this work himself. His prototype had 1500 tubes. The components were taken to Bletchley, where they were used to assemble Colossus. The machine was able to use binary logic to do large calculations. The machine had no internal memory and therefore had to be reprogrammed for each run

The 2400 valve Colossus Mark II had been built by D-Day. By the end of the war there were eleven machines in operation. Two of these were taken first to Eastcote and then to Cheltenham, where G.C.H.Q. had moved. Stalin knew that the British had broken the Enigma code but he was unaware that they had had a means of deciphering Lorenz as well. Churchill ordered the other eleven machines to be destroyed along with the plans that had been used to build them. The Cheltenham machines are believed to have continued to be used until 1958, after which time they were dismantled.

During the early 1970s Brian Randell, a computer scientist at Newcastle University, mounted a campaign to try to induce the government to admit that the Bletchley Park code-breaking operation had existed.

Tony Sale (1931-2011) had had a varied working life that was largely focused on computers. He spent a period working in Marconi's Great Baddow research laboratories in Chelmsford. There his boss was one Peter Wright, who was recruited by M.I.5 to work on radio interception and placing bugging devices. Mr Sale followed him into the service, rising to become a principal scientific officer. In 1993 he was a senior curator at the Science Museum, where he ran its Computer Restoration Project. There he became convinced that he could rebuild Colossus. All the evidence that he had available were eight wartime photographs.

Mr Sale was given top-level security clearance and then embarked upon a major programme of interviewing the surviving project engineers, including Flowers. One had a notebook that contained ten fragments of circuit diagram. In large part, they had used standard telephone exchange gear. In the 1990s the UK's telecommunications infrastructure was being updated so Mr Sale was able to pick it up as scrap . The major breakthrough in 1995 when a technical description, that had been written by a visiting American scientist, was unearthed by means of the United States Freedom of Information Act.

Mr Sale founded the National Museum of Computing, which is based in Bletchley Park. In 2007 it became the home of his recreated Colossus. It proved to be able to crack a Lorenz-encrypted message.

Location: Chartwell Court, Dollis Hill, 151 Brook Road, Dollis Hill, NW2 7DW

See Also: DOLLIS HILL's FINEST

Website https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/collection/cp38152/post-office-engineering-research-station

ERNIE

The size of the government debt prompted the Treasury to devise the Premium Bonds scheme. This involved people buying bonds that they could cash in for the same value. The government extracted the benefit of the interest that the cash could generate between when people purchased their bonds and when they sold. To attract people, it was decided to exploit the fact that all of the bonds were numbered individually to have the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill create a machine that could winners by generating random. A team that included Tommy Flowers and Sidney Broadlands was asked whether they could build such a machine. They were asked whether would object to facilitate something that some people regarded as gambling. The group was happy that people could retrieve their initial money and concluded that it was no worse than the stock market. They savoured the fact that they had only nine months in which to build the machine.

It generated random numbers by means of random noise generated in a neon cold-cathode tube.

The Science Museum

The Science Museum has a collection of historic computers.

Website: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/thinking-machines-stories-history-computing

David Backhouse 2024