This article explores the entanglement of logic and computing by focusing on the activity of writing. Though mathematical logic is sometimes cast as the immaterial spirit of the computer's material body, the study of logic also takes place in the physical world through the manipulation of symbols on paper. Already in the nineteenth century, mathematical logic was understood to be related to mechanization, though not as the science behind an as-yet-uninvented technology. Rather, symbolic notations were seen as tools that opened possibilities but required new kinds of work. Turning to early electronic computing in the 1950s, I observe that researchers similarly relied on novel inscriptive techniques to mitigate labor. Finally, considering Charles Hamblin's Reverse Polish Notation, I show how logic was a source of notational invention, emerging as a practical resource for the work of writing programs independently of its role as a plausible theoretical foundation for computer science. THE PRECISE nature of the connection between logic and electronic computing has long proved elusive and at times controversial. Already in the earliest attempts to plan ENIAC's successor, a now well-known rift opened between the mathematicians who proudly publicized their plans for the logical design of a new machine and the engineers who insisted that the machine's decisive innovations were rather in the realm of electrical engineering [12,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81]]. An analogous fault-line later came to organize many influential efforts to think historically about computing. Michael Mahoney formulated a classic logical-technological bifurcation that remains compelling:The dual nature of the computer is reflected in its dual origins: hardware in the sequence of devices that stretches from the Pascaline to the ENIAC, software in the series of investigations that reaches from Leibniz's combinatorics to Turing's abstract machines. Until the two strands come together in the computer, they belong to different histories, the electronic calculator to the history DRAFT SUBMISSION for IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
