Title: |
The History of ENIAC in three Programs |
Speaker: |
Mark Priestley |
Date: |
Tue 21st March 2017 |
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Wed 11th May 2016 |
Time: |
17:00 for 17:30 |
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14:30 |
Location: |
Conference room of the Royal Northern College of Music, Booth St East M13 9RD |
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BCS, 5 Southampton St, London WC2E 7HA |
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ENIAC
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About the seminar
ENIAC was a milestone in the history of electronic computer technology,
but its idiosyncratic approach to programming has often been viewed
as something of a dead end.
In this talk I will challenge that assumption, and argue that ENIAC’s
contribution to the development of software was, if anything,
more significant than its contribution to hardware.
Drawing on little-known archival material, I will describe how a
“paper program” written in 1943 profoundly shaped the
design of ENIAC's hardware, how it was set up to interpret programs
written in an EDVAC-style order code, and how that code was
then used to program the Monte Carlo neutron diffusion simulations run in 1948.
It will emerge that ENIAC not only laid the groundwork for the development
of the principles of modern coding, but also supported the first
implementation of the new approach.
About the speaker
Mark Priestley has worked as a programmer and a lecturer in software engineering.
He is now an independent researcher into the history and philosophy of computing, currently
focusing on programming practices in the 1940s.
His latest book “ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer”,
co-authored with Thomas Haigh and Crispin Rope, was published by MIT Press in early 2016.
See http://eniacinaction.com/ and
http://markpriestley.net/ for more details.
Click
to see a podcast of this event.
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