My "Connections" are going to start in an unusual place for a Science & Technology talk.
I thought we should begin and end with a bit of culture.
This handsome gentleman was one of England's finest and much loved poets. Here he is
in Albanian dress in 1813. He wrote such masterpieces as "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage",
"Don Juan", "The Prisoner of Chillon", "The Destruction of Sennacherib" and "She Walks
in Beauty". This is Lord Byron.
He was very popular with the ladies and had numerous affairs, one of which was with
Lady Caroline Lamb, who gave Byron what became his lasting epitaph when she
famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". In spite of his
womanising, he married Anne Isabella Noel in 1814. Anne, known as Annabella, was a
highly educated and strictly religious woman, so the marriage was pretty well doomed
to failure.
Byron was by then in extreme financial distress. He was having difficulty selling his
estates to clear his debt. During the summer of 1815, he began to unleash his anger and
hostility on his wife, who was now pregnant. His moods were dark and he began to
drink heavily. Later in the year he began an affair with Susan Boyce, a London chorus
girl. Annabella feared Byron might be going mad and Byron's sister Augusta agreed
with her. After the birth of her daughter, Annabella left Byron and went to live with her
parents. Annabella and Byron separated in March 1816, never to see one another again.
Now Annabella was determined that her daughter, Augusta Ada Byron, would not
follow in her father's footsteps and would not be mad, bad or dangerous, so she decided
to supervise a very strict education for the girl. And when the child developed a
penchant for mathematics and logic, Annabella was delighted.
In June 1833, her tutor introduced her to Charles Babbage and Babbage invited her to
see the prototype for his Difference Engine. On 14 June 1822, Charles Babbage had
proposed the use of such a machine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society,
entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and
mathematical tables". Mathematical tables such as logarithms were calculated by
humans and were not error-free so there was a lot of interest in the machine. It was
designed to use the decimal number system and to be powered by cranking a handle.
Unfortunately, it was never built during Babbage's lifetime (although there is one in the
Science Museum in London which was constructed in 2002 from Babbage's design).
In 1837, Babbage began work on a new machine, the Analytical Engine and its logical
structure was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the
electronic era. Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines
due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until the
1940s that the first general-purpose computers were actually built, more than onehundred years after Babbage had proposed the Analytical Engine. Augusta Ada Byron,
now married to William Lord King, translated a memoir on the machine from the Italian
and added some explanatory notes. Explaining the Analytical Engine's function was a
difficult task, as even other scientists did not really grasp the concept and the British
establishment was uninterested in it. Her notes even had to explain how the Engine
differed from the original Difference Engine and her writings were well received at the
time by the scientific establishment. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and
include, in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers
with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine been built.
Based on this work, Lady King is now widely considered the first computer
programmer and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.
Note - If the Analytical Engine had been built, it would have been digital, programmable and Turingcomplete. It would, however, have been very slow. Lady King reported in her notes on the Analytical
Engine: "Mr. Babbage believes he can, by his engine, form the product of two numbers, each containing
twenty figures, in three minutes". By comparison the Harvard Mark One could perform the same task in
just six seconds. A modern PC can do the same thing in well under a millionth of a second. It should be
noted however, that the Analytical Machine was described by Babbage more than one hundred years
before any of the aforementioned computational devices and therefore, it is no surprise that it was much
slower.
In 1838, our heroine's husband, William Lord King, received a new title, that of the Earl
of Lovelace, and she was now known as Augusta Ada Lovelace.
Ada died in 1852, aged 36, the same age as her father had been when he died. We could
argue that if Byron had not been "mad bad and dangerous to know", Ada's mother
would not have encouraged her mathematical abilities and the first computer program
would have been written much later.
Not only was she able to write the program and to devise algorithms for complicated
numerical calculations, she also developed a rare vision of the capability of computers
to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching. She asked questions about the
Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society relate
to technology as a collaborative tool.
Let us now jump forward 120 years. In the 1970s, the US Department of Defence (DoD)
was concerned by the number of different programming languages being used for its
computer projects. In 1975, a working group, the High Order Language Working Group
was formed with the intent to reduce this number by finding or creating a
programming language generally suitable for the department's and UK Ministry of
Defence requirements. In May 1979, one of the proposals, designed by Jean Ichbiah at
Honeywell was chosen and given the name Ada — after Augusta Ada, Countess of
Lovelace. Because of Ada's safety-critical support features, it is now used not only for
military applications, but also in commercial projects where a software bug can have
severe consequences, e.g., avionics and air traffic control, commercial rockets (e.g.,
Ariane 4 and 5), satellites and other space systems, railway transport and banking. For
example, the fly-by-wire system software in the Boeing 777 was written in Ada. Ada is
also used in other air traffic systems, e.g., the UK’s next-generation Interim Future Area
Control Tools Support (iFACTS) air traffic control system is designed and implemented
using SPARK Ada. It is also used in the French TVM in-cab signalling system on the TGV
high-speed rail system, and the metro suburban trains in Paris, London, Hong Kong and
New York City.
When we were talking about the computing speed of the Analytical Engine, we
mentioned the Harvard Mark One. It was a general purpose computer that was used in
the war effort during the last part of World War II. The original concept was presented
to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937.
Howard Aiken had started to look for a company to design and build his calculator in
early 1937. After two rejections, he was shown a demonstration set that Charles
Babbage’s son had given to Harvard university 50 years earlier. This led him to study
Babbage and to add references of the Analytical Engine to his proposal; the resulting
machine “brought Babbage’s principles of the Analytical Engine almost to full
realization, while adding important new features.”
One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John
von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan project at the time, and needed to
determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that
would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables,
which was Charles Babbage’s initial goal for his analytical engine.
The first programmers of the Mark I were computing pioneers Richard Milton Bloch,
Robert Campbell, and Grace Hopper.
The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal
digits long. It could do three additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took six seconds, a
division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute.
The Mark I read its instructions from a 24-channel punched paper tape and executed the current instruction
and then read in the next one. It had no conditional branch instruction. This meant that complex programs
had to be physically long. A loop was accomplished by joining the end of the paper tape containing the
program back to the beginning of the tape (literally creating a loop).
Now Grace Hopper's story is as inspiring as that of Ada Lovelace. She was born Grace
Brewster Murray in 1906. She was an American computer scientist and United States
Navy rear admiral. As well as being one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I
computer, she invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and
was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming
languages which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level
programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for
fixing computer glitches (in one instance, removing a moth from a computer). Owing to
her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing
Grace".
Grace was curious as a child, a lifelong trait; at the age of seven she decided to
determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her
mother realized what she was doing (she was then limited to one clock). In 1934, she
earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. She began teaching mathematics at Vassar in
1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941.
In 1943, during World War II, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was
sworn into the United States Navy Reserve, one of many women to volunteer to serve in
the WAVES. She graduated first in her training class in 1944, and was assigned to the
Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior
grade. She served on the Harvard Mark I computer programming staff and co-authored
three papers on the Mark I. At the end of the war she remained at the Harvard
Computation Lab until 1949, turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favour of
working as a research fellow under a Navy contract at Harvard.
In 1949, Hopper joined the team developing the UNIVAC I computer. In the early 1950s,
her original compiler work was done. In 1952 she was the first person to have an
operational compiler working. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running
compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do
arithmetic." A "compiler" takes human instructions and turns them into computer code,
so writing a program to do this was no mean feat.
In the spring of 1959, there was a two-day conference on programming languages.
Hopper served as a technical consultant to the committee which was tasked with
defining a new language. It built upon Hopper's previous programming work. She
believed that programs should be written in a language that was close to English
(rather than in machine code or in languages close to machine code, such as assembly
languages) and this led to the new business language, COBOL.
Hopper developed the validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a
COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy. COBOL went on to be the most
ubiquitous business language to date.
She was then hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, a position
she retained until her death in 1992, aged 85.
Her primary activity in this capacity was as a goodwill ambassador, lecturing widely on
the early days of computers, her career, and on efforts that computer vendors could
take to make life easier for their users. She visited a large fraction of Digital's
engineering facilities, where she generally received a standing ovation at the conclusion
of her remarks. Many people such as admirals and generals would ask her why satellite
communication would take so long. So during many of her lectures, she illustrated a
nanosecond using salvaged obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11.8
inch (30 cm) lengths, the distance that light travels in one nanosecond, and handed out
the individual wires to her listeners. Later, while giving these lectures while working
for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper, calling the individual grains of ground
pepper picoseconds.
"The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is
training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, 'Do you think we can do
this?' I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get
older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances.
While she was working on a computer at a US Navy research lab in Virginia in 1947, her
associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay, which had brought the program to a halt,
whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term bug
had been in use for many years in engineering to refer to small glitches and inexplicable
problems, Admiral Hopper did bring the term into popularity. The remains of the moth
can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum
of American History in Washington, D.C. In 2013, Google made the Google Doodle for
Hopper's 107th birthday an animation of her sitting at a computer, using COBOL to
print out her age. At the end of the animation, a moth flies out of the computer.
All this time, her rise through the navy ranks continued and at the time of her
retirement in 1986, she was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United
States Navy and had reached the rank of rear admiral. Hopper died on 1st January,
1992.
So, I promised you a bit of culture this morning and I have succeeded - we started with
the poetry of Byron and ended with Amazing Grace and, of course, along the way we
met two truly inspirational women.