Part 2

While we envision such far-reaching applications, let’s not lose sight of the possibilities for computer use closer to home—right in our homes, as a matter of fact. Just as early inventors of mechanical power devices did not foresee the day when electric drills and saws for hobbyist would be commonplace and the gasoline engine would do such everyday chores as cutting the grass in our yards, the makers of computers today cannot predict how far the computer will go in this direction. Perhaps we may one day buy a “Little Dandy Electro-Brain” and plug it into the wall socket for solving many of the everyday problems we now often guess wrong on.

[Illustration:

_Royal McBee Corp._

Students at Staples High School, Westport, Connecticut, attend a summer session to learn the techniques of programming and operating an electronic computer. ]

[Illustration:

_The Saturday Evening Post_

“Herbert’s been replaced by an electronic brain—one of the simpler types.” ]

Some years ago a group of experts predicted that by 1967 the world champion chess player would be an electronic computer. No one has yet claimed that we would have a president of metal and wire, but some interesting signposts are being put up. Computers are now used widely to predict the result of elections. Computers count the votes, and some have suggested that computers could make it possible for us to vote at home. The government is investigating the effectiveness of a decision-making computer as a stand-by aid for the President in this complex age we are moving into. No man has the ability to weigh every factor and to make decisions affecting the world. Perhaps a computer can serve in an advisory capacity to a president or to a World Council; perhaps—

It is comforting to remember that men will always tell the computer what it is supposed to do. No computer will ever run the world any more than the cotton gin or the steam engine or television runs the world. And in an emergency, we can always pull out the wallplug, can’t we?

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“_History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy._”

—James A. Garfield

2: The Computer’s Past

Although it seemed to burst upon us suddenly, the jet airplane can trace its beginnings back through the fabric wings of the Wrights to the wax wings of Icarus and Daedalus, and the steam aerophile of Hero in ancient Greece. The same thing is true of the computer, the “thinking machine” we are just now becoming uncomfortably aware of. No brash upstart, it has a long and honorable history.

Naturalists tell us that man is not the only animal that counts. Birds, particularly, also have an idea of numbers. Birds, incidentally, use tools too. We seem to have done more with the discoveries than our feathered friends; at least no one has yet observed a robin with a slide rule or a snowy egret punching the controls of an electronic digital computer. However, the very notion of mere birds being tool and number users does give us an idea of the antiquity and lengthy heritage of the computer.

The computer was inevitable when man first began to make his own problems. When he lived as an animal, life was far simpler, and all he had to worry about was finding game and plants to eat, and keeping from being eaten or otherwise killed himself. But when he began to dabble in agriculture and the raising of flocks, when he began to think consciously and to reflect about things, man needed help.

First came the hand tools that made him more powerful, the spears and bows and arrows and clubs that killed game and enemies. Then came the tools to aid his waking brain. Some 25,000 years ago, man began to count. This was no mean achievement, the dim, foggy dawning of the concept of number, perhaps in the caves in Europe where the walls have been found marked with realistic drawings of bison. Some budding mathematical genius in a skin garment only slightly shaggier than his mop of hair stared blinking at the drawings of two animals and then dropped his gaze to his two hands. A crude, tentative connection jelled in his inchoate gray matter and he shook his head as if it hurt. It was enough to hurt, this discovery of “number,” and perhaps this particular pioneer never again put two and two together. But others did; if not that year, the next.

Armed with his grasp of numbers, man didn’t need to draw two mastodons, or sheep, or whatever. Two pebbles would do, or two leaves or two sticks. He could count his children on his fingers—we retain the expression “a handful” to this day, though often our children are another sort of handful. Of course, the caveman did not of a sudden do sums and multiplications. When he began to write, perhaps 5,000 years later, he had formed the concept of “one,” “two,” “several,” and “many.”

Besides counting his flock and his children, and the number of the enemy, man had need for counting in another way. There were the seasons of the year, and a farmer or breeder had to have a way of reckoning the approach of new life. His calendar may well have been the first mathematical device sophisticated enough to be called a computer.

It was natural that numbers be associated with sex. The calendar was related to the seasons and the bearing of young. The number three, for example, took on mystic and potent connotation, representing as it did man’s genitals. Indeed, numbers themselves came quaintly to have sex. One, three, and the other odd numbers were male; the symmetrical, even numbers logically were female.

The notion that man used the decimal system because of his ten fingers and toes is general, but it was some time before this refinement took place. Some early peoples clung to a simpler system with a base of only two; and interestingly a tribe of Australian aborigines counts today thus: _enea_ (1), _petchaval_ (2), _enea petchaval_ (3), _petchaval petchaval_ (4). Before we look down our noses at this naïve system, let us consider that high-speed electronic computers use only two values, 1 and 0.

But slowly symbols evolved for more and more numbers, numbers that at first were fingers, and then perhaps knots tied in a strip of hide. This crude counting aid persists today, and cowboys sometimes keep rough tallies of a herd by knotting a string for every five that pass. Somehow numbers took on other meanings, like those that figure in courtship in certain Nigerian tribes. In their language, the number six also means “I love you.” If the African belle is of a mind when her boyfriend tenderly murmurs the magic number, she replies in like tone, “Eight!”, which means “I feel the same way!”

From the dawn of history there have apparently been two classes of us human beings, the “haves” and the “have nots.” Nowadays we get bills or statements from our creditors; in early days, when a slate or clay tablet was the document, a forerunner of the carbon copy or duplicate paper developed. Tallies were marked for the amount of the debt, the clay tablet was broken across the marks, and creditor and debtor each took half. No chance for cheating, since a broken half would fit only the proper mate!

Numbers at first applied only to discrete, or distinctly separate, things. The scratches on a calendar, the tallies signifying the count of a flock; these were more easily reckoned. The idea of another kind of number inspired the first clocks. Here was a monumental breakthrough in mathematics. Nature provided the sunrise that clearly marked the beginning of each day; man himself thought to break the day into “hours,” or parts of the whole. Such a division led eventually to measurement of size and weight. Now early man knew not only how many goats he had, but how many “hands” high they were, and how many “stones” they weighed. This further division ordained another kind of mechanical computer man must someday contrive—the analog.

The first counting machines used were pebbles or sea shells. For the Stone Age businessman to carry around a handful of rocks for all his transactions was at times awkward, and big deals may well have gone unconsummated for want of a stone. Then some genius hit on the idea of stringing shells on a bit of reed or hide; or more probably the necklace came first as adornment and the utilitarian spotted it after this style note had been added. At any rate, the portable adding machine became available and our early day accountant grew adroit at sliding the beads back and forth on the string. From here it was only a small step, taken perhaps as early as 3000 B.C., to the rigid counter known as the abacus.

The word “counter” is one we use in everyday conversation. We buy stock over the counter; some deals are under the counter. We all know what the counter itself is—that wide board that holds the cash register and separates us from the shopkeeper. At one time the cash register _was_ the counter; actually the counting board had rods of beads like the abacus, or at least grooves in which beads could be moved. The totting up of a transaction was done on the “counter”; it is still there although we have forgotten whence came its name.

The most successful computer used for the next 5,000 years, the portable counter, or the abacus, is a masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness. Though only a frame with several rows of beads, it is sophisticated enough that as late as 1947 Kiyoshi Matsuzake of the Japanese Ministry of Communications, armed with the Japanese version—a _soroban_, bested Private Tom Wood of the U. S. Army of Occupation punching the keys of an up-to-the-minute electric calculating machine in four of five problem categories! Only recently have Japanese banks gone over to modern calculators, and shopkeepers there and in other lands still conduct business by this rule of thumb and forefinger.

[Illustration:

The abacus, ancient mechanical computer, is still in use in many parts of the world. Here is the Japanese version, the _soroban_, with problem being set up. ]

The name abacus comes to us by way of the Greek _abax_, meaning “dust.” Scholars infer that early sums were done schoolboy fashion in Greece with a stylus on a dusty slate, and that the word was carried over to the mechanical counter. The design has changed but little over the years and all abacuses bear a resemblance. The major difference is the number of beads on each row, determined by the mathematical base used in the particular country. Some in India, for example, were set up to handle pounds and shillings for use in shops. Others have a base of twelve. The majority, however, use the decimal system. Each row has seven beads, with a runner separating one or two beads from the others. Some systems use two beads on the narrow side, some only one; this is a mathematical consideration with political implications, incidentally: The Japanese _soroban_ has the single-bead design; Korea’s _son pan_ uses two. When Japan took over Korea the two-bead models were tabu, and went out of use until the Koreans were later able to win their independence again.

About the only thing added to the ancient abacus in recent years is a movable arrow for marking the decimal point. W. D. Loy patented such a gadget in the United States. Today the abacus remains a useful device, not only for business, but also for the teaching of mathematics to youngsters, who can literally “grasp their numbers.” For that reason it ought also to be helpful to the blind, and as a therapeutic aid for manual dexterity. Apparently caught up in the trend toward smaller computers, the abacus has been miniaturized to the extent that it can be worn as earrings or on a key chain.

Even with mechanical counters, early mathematicians needed written numbers. The caveman’s straight-line scratches gave way to hieroglyphics, to the Sumerian cuneiform “wedges,” to Roman numerals, and finally to Hindu and Arabic. Until the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and that most wonderful of all, 0 or zero, computations of any but the simplest type were apt to be laborious and time-consuming. Even though the Romans and Greeks had evolved a decimal system, their numbering was complex. To count to 999 in Greek required not ten numbers but twenty-seven. The Roman number for 888 was DCCCLXXXVIII. Multiplying CCXVII times XXIX yielded an answer of MMMMMMCCXCIII, to be sure, but not without some difficulty. It required an abacus to do any kind of multiplication or division.

Indeed, it was perhaps from the abacus that the clue to Arabic simplicity came. The Babylonians, antedating the Greeks, had nevertheless gone them one better in arithmetic by using a “place” system. In other words, the position of a number denoted its value. The Babylonians simply left an empty space between cuneiform number symbols to show an empty space in this positional system. Sometime prior to 300 B.C. a clever mathematician tired of losing track and punched a dot in his clay tablet to fill the empty space and avoid possible error.

The abacus shows these empty spaces on its rows of beads, too, and finally the Hindus combined their nine numerals with a “dot with a hole in it” and gave the mathematical world the zero. In Hindu it was _sifr_, corrupted to _zephirium_ in Latin, and gives us today both cipher and zero. This enigma of nothingness would one day be used by Leibnitz to prove that God made the world; it would later become half the input of the electronic computer! Meantime, it was developed independently in various other parts of the world; the ancient Mayans being one example.

Impressed as we may be by an electronic computer, it may take some charity to recognize its forebears in the scratchings on a rock. To call the calendar a computer, we must in honesty add a qualifying term like “passive.” The same applies to the abacus despite its movable counters. But time, which produced the simple calendar, also furnished the incentive for the first “active” computers too. The hourglass is a primitive example, as is the sundial. Both had an input, a power source, and a readout. The clock interestingly ended up with not a decimal scheme, but one with a base of twelve. Early astronomers began conventionally bunching days into groups of ten, and located different stars on the horizon to mark the passage of the ten days. It was but a step from here to use these “decans,” as they were called, to further divide each night itself into segments. It turned out that 12 decans did the trick, and since symmetry was a virtue the daylight was similarly divided by twelve, giving us a day of 24 hours rather than 10 or 20.

From the simple hourglass and the more complex water clocks, the Greeks progressed to some truly remarkable celestial motion computers. One of these, built almost a hundred years before the birth of Christ, was recently found on the sea bottom off the Greek island of Antikythera. It had been aboard a ship which sank, and its discovery came as a surprise to scholars since history recorded no such complex devices for that era. The salvaged Greek computer was designed for astronomical work, showing locations of stars, predicting eclipses, and describing various cycles of heavenly bodies. Composed of dozens of gears, shafts, slip rings, and accurately inscribed plates, it was a computer in the best sense of the word and was not exceeded technically for many centuries.

The Greek engineer Vitruvius made an interesting observation when he said, “All machinery is generated by Nature and the revolution of the universe guides and controls. Our fathers took precedents from Nature—developed the comforts of life by their inventions. They rendered some things more convenient by machines and their revolutions.” Hindsight and language being what they are, today we can make a nice play on the word “revolution” as applied to the machine. The Antikythera computer was a prime example of what Vitruvius was talking about. Astronomy was such a complicated business that it was far simpler to make a model of the many motions rather than diagram them or try to retain them in his mind.

There were, of course, some die-hard classicists who decried the use of machines to do the work of pure reasoning. Archytas, who probably invented the screw—or at least discovered its mechanical principle—attempted to apply such mechanical devices to the solving of geometrical problems. For this he was taken to task by purist Plato who sought to preserve the distinct division between “mind” and “machine.”

Yet the syllogistic philosophers themselves, with their major premise, minor premise, and conclusion, were unwittingly setting the stage for a different kind of computer—the logic machine. Plato would be horrified today to see crude decks of cards, or simple electromechanical contrivances, solving problems of “reason” far faster than he could; in fact, as fast as the conditions could be set into them!

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_The Mechanics of Reason_

Aristotle fathered the syllogism, or at least was first to investigate it rigorously. He defined it as a formal argument in which the conclusion follows logically from the premises. There are four common statements of this type:

All S (for is P (for subject) predicate)

No S (for subject) is P

Some S (for is P subject)

Some S (for is not P subject)

Thus, Aristotle might say “All men are mortal” or “No men are immortal” as his subject. Adding an M (middle term), “Aristotle is a man,” as a minor premise, he could logically go on and conclude “Aristotle, being a man, is thus mortal.” Of course the syllogism unwisely used, as it often is, can lead to some ridiculously silly answers. “All tables have four legs. Two men have four legs. Thus, two men equal a table.”

Despite the weaknesses of the syllogism, nevertheless it led eventually to the science of symbolic logic. The pathway was circuitous, even devious at times, but slowly the idea of putting thought down as letters or numbers to be logically manipulated to reach proper conclusions gained force and credence. While the Greeks did not have the final say, they did have words for the subject as they did for nearly everything else.

Let us leave the subject of pure logic for a moment and talk of another kind of computing machine, that of the mechanical doer of work. In the _Iliad_, Homer has Hephaestus, the god of natural fire and metalworking, construct twenty three-wheeled chariots which propel themselves to and fro bringing back messages and instructions from the councils of the gods. These early automatons boasted pure gold wheels, and handles of “curious cunning.”

Man has apparently been a lazy cuss from the start and began straightway to dream of mechanical servants to do his chores. In an age of magic and fear of the supernatural his dreams were fraught with such machines that turned into evil monsters. The Hebrew “golem” was made in the shape of man, but without a soul, and often got out of hand. Literature has perpetuated the idea of machines running amok, as the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” but there have been benevolent machines too. Tik-Tok, a latter-day windup man in _The Road to Oz_, could think and talk and do many other things men could do. He was not alive, of course, but he had the saving grace of always doing just what he “was wound up to do.”

Having touched on the subject of mechanical men, let us now return to mechanical logic. Since the Greeks, many men have traveled the road of reason, but some stand out more brightly, more colorfully, than others. Such a standout was the Spanish monk Ramón Lull. Lull was born in 1232. A court page, he rose in influence, married young, and had two children, but did not settle down to married domesticity. A wildly reckless romantic, he was given to such stunts as galloping his horse into church in pursuit of some lady who caught his eye. One such escapade led to a remorseful re-examination of himself, and dramatic conversion to Christianity.

He began to write books in conventional praise of Christ, but early in his writings a preoccupation with numbers appears. His _Book of Contemplation_, for example, actually contains five books for the five wounds of the Saviour, and forty subdivisions for the days He spent in the wilderness. There are 365 chapters for daily reading, plus one for reading only in leap years! Each chapter has ten paragraphs, symbolizing the ten commandments, and three parts to each chapter. These multiplied give thirty, for the pieces of silver. Beside religious and mystical connotations, geometric terms are also used, and one interesting device is the symbolizing of words and even phrases by letters. This ties in neatly with syllogism. A sample follows:

… diversity is shown in the demonstration that the D makes of the E and the F and the G with the I and the K, therefore the H has certain scientific knowledge of Thy holy and glorious Trinity.

This was only prologue to the _Ars Magna_, the “Great Art” of Ramón Lull. In 1274, the devout pilgrim climbed Mount Palma in search of divine help in his writings. The result was the first recorded attempt to use diagrams to discover and to prove non-mathematical truths. Specifically, Lull determined that he could construct mechanical devices that would perform logic to prove the validity of God’s word. Where force, in the shape of the Crusades, had failed, Lull was convinced that logical argument would win over the infidels, and he devoted his life to the task.

Renouncing his estate, including his wife and children, Lull devoted himself thenceforth solely to his Great Art. As a result of dreams he had on Mount Palma, the basis for this work was the assumption of simple premises or principles that are unquestionable. Lull arranged these premises on rotating concentric circles. The first of these wheels of logic was called A, standing for God. Arranged about the circumference of the wheel were sixteen other letters symbolizing attributes of God. The outer wheel also contained these letters. Rotating them produced 240 two-term combinations telling many things about God and His good. Other wheels prepared sermons, advised physicians and scientists, and even tackled such stumpers as “Where does the flame go when the candle is put out?”

[Illustration:

From the _Enciclopedia universal illustrada_, Barcelona, 1923

Lull’s wheel. ]

Unfortunately for Lull, even divine help did not guarantee him success. He was stoned to death by infidels in Bugia, Africa, at the age of eighty-three. All his wheelspinning logic was to no avail in advancing the cause of Christianity there, and most mathematicians since have scoffed at his naïve devices as having no real merit. Far from accepting the _Ars Magna_, most scholars have been “Lulled into a secure sense of falsity,” finding it as specious as indiscriminate syllogism.