My contributions as a guest lecturer at KU Leuven for `History of Computer Science' amount to four lectures (A, B, C, and D). The present post is about:
Lecture A: The Advent of the `general purpose' computer and the `Turing Machine', 1940s-1950s.
My main source will be:
- A.main: E.G. Daylight. Towards a Historical Notion of `Turing – the Father of Computer Science’. Special issue of the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 205-228, 2015.
Students are kindly asked to study this source in some detail before I give Lecture A. The following sources are optional:
- A.optional.1: J. Kemeny. Man Viewed as a Machine. Scientific American, Vol. 192, No. 4, 1955.
- A.optional.2: D. Nofre, M. Priestley, G. Alberts. When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960. Technology and Culture, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 40-75, 2014.
- A.optional.3: T. Haigh. Actually, Turing did not invent the computer. CACM, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 36-41, 2014.
- A.optional.4: E.G. Daylight. A Turing Tale. CACM, Vol. 57, No. 10, pp. 36-38, 2014.
Note that "main sources" and "optional sources" are mandatory and non-mandatory reading materials, respectively. Only the main sources need to be studied well for the exam. To obtain a good understanding, however, students might also want to read some optional sources, either before or after I have given Lecture A.
There are two slide sets for Lecture A — that is: A.slideset1 and A.slideset2 — and they will be made available for students via Toledo.