Writing & research on the history of computing

Articles 

“A Compelling Image: The Tower of Babel and the Proliferation of Programming Languages during the 1960s”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (accepted) [publisher's link] [post-print] 

In 1961 and in 1969 two towers of Babel of programming languages were published. The first one appeared on the cover  of the Communications of the ACM. The second one appeared on Jean E. Sammet’s Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. These two towers have come to symbolize the fragmentation that plagued the development of programming as a result of the multiplicity of notations. I will argue that contrary to this common view the tower on the cover of the Communications should be understood as a proud display of the research that profoundly transformed computer programming during the late 1950s. The tower of Sammet’s book reflected instead the book’s goal of bringing order into the field of programming languages. Symbolically Sammet’s book marked the end of a decade that witnessed the emergence of a logico-linguistic approach to the study of programming notations, a decade which also spurred Sammet’s fascination with Babel.

“'Content Is Meaningless, and Structure Is All-important': Defining the Nature of Computer Science in the Age of High Modernism, c. 1950 - c. 1965”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 45, 2 (April-June 2023): 29-42  [publisher's link]  [post-print]

This article explores the characteristic ambiguity of computer science towards the computer, which has its roots in the response of university computer centers to the commercialization of computing in the mid-1950s. University computing experts developed an understanding of the activity of computing disentangled from the computer itself, a conceptual shift that went together with a parallel process of dematerialization of the notion of computer. These transformations were triggered and facilitated by the ascendance of a high modernist agenda in the sciences in the United States. University computing experts embraced the high modernist abtractionist agenda and developed analogies across programs, notations, and a notion of the computer now understood as a model of computation. This conflation of notations, programs, and non-physical representations of the machine, would become one of the core tenets of computer science.

“The Politics of Early Programming Languages: IBM and the Algol Project”, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2021) 51 (3): 379–413  [publisher's link]  [pdf]   

On the Cold War politics and international economic competition of programming languages. The article explores how the strong research-oriented agenda of the Algol project increased IBM’s doubts about a project that the firm already felt little urge to support. Eventually, the US Department of Defense’s endorsement of Cobol and the rising popularity of Algol in Europe convinced IBM to push for the use of its own programming language Fortran in Western Europe in order to protect the domestic market.

“Managing the Technological Edge: the UNESCO International Computation Centre and the Limits to the Transfer of Computer Technology, 1946-61”, Annals of Science, 71, 3 (2014): 410-31 [publisher's link]  [pdf]  

On US foreign science policy operating as (stealth) industrial policy to secure technological advantage in computing. At the center of the article lies the ill-fated establishment of the UNESCO International Computation Centre, which became a prize sought by Western European countries like the Netherlands and Italy seeking to speed up their national research programs. The US government, however, managed to restrict considerably the research function of the future center, which resulted in the withdrawal of European support for the project.