Title: Cross Polinated

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 12 March 2016 14:34:58 +00:00 or Sat, 12 March 2016 14:34:58 +00:00

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I don’t think it’s controversial to say that we, as computer programmers, work in a young industry. By most estimates, it all kicked off in the 1940s, mostly in response to the need for a way of reading encrypted messages faster than doing it with a pencil and paper. The theoretical basis and history of the first attempts at programmable computers is probably familiar to most of us, with Alan Turing publishing a paper about a ‘Universal Turing Machine’ in 1937, Tommy Flowers’ Colossus clattering to life at Bletchley Park in 1943, all making way for IBM to stamp out most commercial competition in the 1950s.

Many illustrious names litter this history of programming. Charles Babbage’s mechanical Difference Engine in the 1820s was a precursor to the Analytical Engine, which gives us the first programmer – the Countess Ada Lovelace. The design of the Engine is significant by itself, too, given the striking similarities to the architecture proposed by John von Neumann for general purpose computers in the 1940s, and used in most (all?) computers until the 1980s, and beyond. Countess Lovelace herself was depending on 9th century work by the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who gives his name to the term ‘algorithm’.

Despite being uncomfortably aware that the names I have already mentioned contain that of but one woman, I will press on with my story of another man. In 1866, the first single cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean between the UK and the US. It marks, arguably, the beginning of the modern Internet. There was only one ship capable of carrying the enormous weight of cable required: the SS Great Eastern, the largest ship ever built (a record held until 1901), was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Computer programming itself is certainly a young industry, at a commercial level, but it depends a great deal on the progress made by some unlikely people. I would naturally love to hear about your favourites, at the usual address.

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