Towards a Historical Notion of ‘Turing—the Father of Computer Science’

Abstract

In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing's theoretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he published his 1936 paper 'On Computable Numbers'. Careful historians are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley, Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, Haigh, and others that several computing pioneers, including Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on (let alone were they aware of) Turing's 1936 universal-machine concept. Furthermore, it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann's celebrated 1945 'First Draft Report on the EDVAC' is influenced in any identifiable way by Turing's work. This raises the questions: (i) When does Turing enter the field? (ii) Why did the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) honor Turing by associating his name to ACM's most prestigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have been rather vague about these questions, suggesting some date between 1950 and the early 1960s as the point at which Turing is retroactively integrated into the foundations of computing and associating him in some way with the movement to develop something that people call computer science. In this paper, based on detailed examination of hitherto overlooked primary sources, attempts are made to reconstruct networks of scholars and ideas prevalent in the 1950s, and to identify a specific group of ACM actors interested in theorizing about computations in computers and attracted to the idea of language as a frame in which to understand computation. By going back to Turing's 1936 paper and, more importantly, to re-cast versions of Turing's work published during the 1950s (Rosenbloom, Kleene, Markov), I identify the factors that made this group of scholars particularly interested in Turing's work and provided the original vector by which Turing became to be appreciated in retrospect as the father of computer science. E. G. Daylightbe named after one of the early great luminaries in the field (for example, 'The Von Neuman [sic] Award' or 'The Turing Award ', etc.) . (Association of Computing Machinery 1966b)The mathematician Alan J. Perlis officially became ACM's first A.M. Turing Lecturer and Turing Awardee in 1966. Besides having been the first editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM, Perlis had earned his stripes in the field of programming languages during the 1950s and had been President of the ACM in the early 1960s. Perlis was thus a wellestablished and influential computer scientist by the mid-1960s. In retrospect, decorating Perlis was only to be expected. But why did the ACM honor Turing? Turing was not well known in computing at large in the 1960s and early 1970s (Daylight 2012a). Apparently, his name was preferred over John von Neumann's and Emil Post's, yet all three researchers had deceased by 1957 and all three were highly respected by some very influential actors in the ACM-including John W. Ca...

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