Class today started with a few administrative reminders, noting that Assignment 5 is due on Wednesday and final presentations will begin next week, with the schedule of speakers posted on the website.

The subject for today’s class was exploring how computers have affected the way we communicate with one another. To start, five scenarios were proposed, and the class had to indicate who they would share that information with, and via what method. The scenarios, and the general responses, were:

• Car breaks down: the consensus was to call someone with a cell who could come and help, or in the event of a lack of reception to manually flag down a passing motorist (computer free, presumably).
• You get a new job: this would be worthy of a Facebook status, and perhaps a call or email to friends and/or family.
• You broke up with your significant other: talking to people in person, generally closer friends and family; however, texting someone to initiate this interaction was also mentioned. Notably absent: updating the Facebook “relationship” status.
• You’re having a great day: some felt this was worthy of a Facebook status, others felt that it could come up naturally in conversation.
• Mom’s (figurative) cancer in remission: close friends and family only, in person or over the phone (privacy here was a much greater concern).

Variation occurred due to individual personalities, as well as the response sought from the contacted parties. Generally, though, the more private the information the more private the modes of communication.

From here, we transitioned into a discussion of Turkle’s paper, regarding how technology has presented us with new social problems, as illustrated by the tech conference in which no one was paying attention to the speaker, and merely playing on their laptops or smartphones. Problems noted by the class:

• Introduction of a general lack of attention span. People were more interested in their own email or something on the internet than the speaker of the conference that they had flown somewhere to attend.
• Email in itself has made it so we expect response times to be much more rapid (minutes as opposed to days).
• We now spend less face-to-face time with other humans. Initially, it was funny to text or IM someone you could just physically say something to, but the irony has since worn off; however, it still remains useful in the context of discussing or sharing something on the internet, or when talking out loud would be disruptive.
• Animals are no longer real enough. This actually ended up being a subjective problem: seeing something in person seems to coincide with said person’s interest in whatever that thing is (e.g. turtles from the Galapagos to a 14 year-old vs. an evolutionary biologist).
• Relentless consumption vs. thinking and introspection (i.e. passive vs. active brain activity). There is some need for a balance between the two (thinking is hard), but the internet and various other devices have made it perhaps dangerously easy to get lost in a sea of RSS feeds and never surface to actually “think” about anything.
• Technology’s effect on kids. Sub-issues mentioned were technology fostering bad habits, perhaps actually altering mental development patterns (e.g. lack of attention span), and setting different boundaries and/or losing some independence (e.g. “growing up tethered”; if you have relied on a cell phone your entire life, what do you do when it dies/breaks/etc?).

This brought us to kids and powerpoint, and how both children and especially middle-school teachers have abused it to the point of losing the efficacy it was initially designed to provide. Generally, a good rulebook can be found here.

Our last topic was the “mind habits” computers seem to have imposed on us. Most of the discussion centered around social networking and instant communications apparatuses. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have made it far too easy to share even the most mundane of details from one’s daily life with everyone you have ever met, and to do so in the simplest way possible, thanks to character limits (I have little hope for the poor fellow who had to post pictures of his handwritten tweets on flickr when Twitter went down).

Another interesting topic was the internet as brain extension (another here). With so much information at our fingertips, it can be hard a) not to continually be searching for newer and newer information, and b) to remember any of the facts, in lieu of knowing only where to find them.

Finally, we concluded class with the topic of computers as a proxy for physical intimacy (i.e. being in contact with people when you’re actually alone), or even the concept of robot friends, including robotic pets and companions for the elderly. It seemed like no one felt the companionship was necessarily a bad thing, but people were a bit weirded out with the concept of giving affection to something that can only mimic reciprocation.

Class today began with a short feedback session, in which we filled out short notes stating something we thought was going well in the class, and something that we thought could be improved.

From there we jumped stright into sharing interesting quotes and passages from the reading, “Johnny Builds Bombs and Johnny Builds Brains”. Topics of favorite quotes were very diverse: how von Neumann managed to win vast amounts of financial support from the government, likely due to his charisma and well-placed connections (rather unlike our old friend Babbage); the somewhat lucky rise of Mauchly and Eckert, and their fortuitous partnership with Goldstine, who had grown increasingly frustrated with army policies; von Neumann’s diverse and rather charmed existence, with his intellectually star-studded parties and major contributions to the fields of game theory, quantum physics, operational research (and later life itself and the construction of automata, to be called von Neumann machines); and finally the mess about who came up with which ideas first during this period of extremely rapid innovation.

This last topic started the discussion over rights and patents during this period. This started with the innovation of the stored program (and the infamous First Draft which lead many to give the credit solely, and perhaps unjustly, to von Neumann, who likely put only his name on the manuscript because it was only the draft version), as well as the arguments between von Neumann and co.’s ENIAC machine and Atanasoff and Berry’s ABC. The disagreement stemmed from a short visit by Mauchly to Atanasoff, where the exchange of ideas eventually leading to construction of the ENIAC may or may not have taken place While that disagreement was “solved” by Minnesota courts in 1973 (in favor of the ABC), discussion is still ongoing and unclear about who was responsible for which ideas during this time of extremely rapid innovation.

Discussion then flowed into an attempt to organize the figures and machines that took part in the computer revolution. What we came up with as a class was sort of a mish-mash of connected events and tangled ideas; however, this disarray was actually reflective of the time, in which many people were sharing ideas with others, as well as coming to similar conclusions through independent work. Dr. Wagstaff has graciously organized this information by hardware technology and chronologically:

1. Mechanical computers: Differential Analyzer (1931)

2. Electromechanical computers: Z3 (1941), Harvard Mark 1 (1944)

3. Electronic computers:

– ABC (1942, first vacuum tube logic, 300 tubes, binary representation, not programmable)

– Colossus (1944, 1500 tubes, limited programming with cables)

– ENIAC (1946, 18,000 tubes, decimal representation, programmed with cables)

– EDSAC (1949, Cambridge, 3000 tubes, binary, first stored program, using mercury delay line memory)

– Manchester Mark 1 (1949, first stored program, using cathode ray tube memory)

– ACE (1950, 1450 vacuum tubes, mercury delay line memory, 1 MHz)

– EDVAC (1951, 6,000 tubes, mercury delay lines)

– UNIVAC (1951, 5,200 tubes, mercury delay lines, first commercially available computer in US)

A bit more detail can also be found on this Wikipedia page, which includes a fully chronological table of events from the 1940’s. There were also several theoretical constructs included in this discussion, including self-replicating von Neumann machines, universal Turing machines, and how one could turn a Turing machine into a von Neumann machine by adapting the Turing machine’s output with a robotic construction device.

As for the figures, we discussed how the various groups formed and influenced one another. This ends up being somewhat of a web, so I shall arbitrarily choose Turing as our starting point. Turing made his initial contributions while at Princeton studying under Church, a mathematical logician. It was here that he initially came into contact with von Neumann, a student of Hilbert’s, though the contact didn’t foster much in the way of later partnerships; Turing returned to England to aid with code breaking during the war, and later drew up the plans for ACE. ACE was eventually built after Turing left the NPL (at the time the fastest computer in the world at 1 MHz), while Turing oversaw the construction of the Manchester Mark I. On the other side of the pond, von Neumann joined with Goldstine, Mauchly and Eckert in efforts that eventually lead to construction of the ENIAC (and this group’s interactions with those that constructed the ABC have been mentioned earlier), which later blossomed into the EDVAC. Other somewhat more independent mentions were Aiken, who was responsible for the Harvard Mark I, and the group at MIT who constructed the Differential Analyzer.

And, finally, any discussion mentioning von Neumann machines would be incomplete without the thoughts of philosopher Randall Munroe.