4 ms·

One interesting question (which is very hard to answer) is how many of the ideas were passed down vs. re-invented, and how much theory influenced practice: - I

• dboreham 3y ago
  Most written history is "bunk" in that it's a long-after interpretation of events in the context of what we know today. That's why Turing features heavily -- because he's a colorful character about which many books have been written and movies made that people watch today. But Tommy Flowers is never mentioned. The computer wasn't really invented at all. It evolved from earlier things in a step-wise manner. There were computing machines for decades prior. E.g. before WW1 there were sophisticated gunnery computers that could fire shells taking account the vector velocity of a ship, wind, distance measured optically, movement of the attacking ship. Boolean logic was used in telephone switching systems. Boolean circuits already existed both in electromechanical form (relays) and electronics (vacuum tubes|valves). So when Turing decided he needed a machine to do so and so calculations on some kind of data, Flowers didn't need to invent Boolean logic nor design Boolean circuits -- those already existed off the shelf. Teleprinters existed. Paper tape existed.
  • chubot 3y ago
    Yeah definitely agree, Taleb has warned us about such teleological explanations. As far as I remember, Woz's biography is good evidence that you don't need the idea of "boolean logic" to design circuits. That did come after the fact -- the way it's taught, not the way it was invented I think he just said he figured it all out himself essentially, and often did a lot better than the pros. Some of his claims were suspect to me, but I do think his claimed ignorance of prior work is genuine :) Shannon did come decades earlier though, so the designs of somebody who was influenced by Shannon probably influenced Woz. It's hard to tease apart, but I agree with "evolution" and "tinkering" as the main explanations. The entertaining explanations are the ones that tend to stick in our minds, but they're not necessarily true --- The other example I think of is when I look at Debian -- a lot of it is not at all what the Unix inventors had in mind. Debian/Linux basically looked at an artifact and then came up with their own divergent ideas around them Likewise Woz probably looked at a lot of computers, but he didn't have much of an idea what the creators were thinking -- just the artifacts themselves