A Technological History of the Computer

For the historian of computers Michael S. Mahoney, the computer results from the convergence of electromechanical engineering, computer science (close to mathematics) and software engineering¹. Electromechanical engineering saw the development of hardware, from the Pascaline (1642) to the ENIAC (1945), while, in parallel, mathematics evolved from Leibniz’s combinatorics (1666) to Turing’s abstract machines (1936)². When mathematics and electromechanical engineering meet in the computer, a new discipline emerges – in a far from spontaneous way, as we will see –, that of software engineering.

Within this tripartite nature of the computer, Mahoney indicates that it was electromechanical engineering that was the most fully constituted, the one whose evolution was the richest, the most legible and the most coherent. Consequently, marking a historiographical turning point, Mahoney proposes to consider a technological history of the computer, rather than favoring the scientific approach.

As for software engineering, Mahoney recalls that the discipline was created in 1967 after long and difficult deliberations and planning. The notion of software, according to the historian, did not emerge organically or spontaneously. Quite the contrary, it came into being only under the joint impetus of industry and government in the United States³:

Programming systems, operating systems, database and file management systems, as well as networks and communications – all aimed to facilitate the work of programmers, to maintain managerial control over them, and to ensure the reliability of their programs⁴.

The symbolic, software “Tower of Babel,” built on the material and electronic foundation of computers, answers to social rather than technical reasons, the aim being to make the use of the computer easier, more traceable and more controllable, at the same time as it becomes accessible to the greatest number.

This point of view of Mahoney’s, which stems from a thorough and concrete observation of historical evolution, echoes the – more radical and polemical – claims of Friedrich Kittler, who maintains that there is no software. Indeed, by pointing to a form of artificiality to be associated with the “Tower of Babel” of computer languages – which he designates using the same metaphor as Mahoney – Kittler emphasizes that it is in fact the hardware, and not the software, that does all the work. According to Kittler, this thick layer of programming languages fulfills strategic, cryptological functions⁵: hiding the true functioning of the computer, unalterable and inaccessible since Intel’s 80286 processor, a processor that includes a “protected mode” beyond the user’s reach. From this double constraint – the prohibition on accessing and modifying the internal functioning of the computer, coupled with the obligation to go through the manufacturer’s software – Kittler deduces that there is no reason for software to be associated with a patent, since it is an enforced choice that brings no new functionality and that, on the contrary, restricts and conditions the use of the machine.

1. Michael S. Mahoney, «The History of Computing in the History of Technology ». IEEE Annals of the History of Computing [en ligne]. April 1988, vol. 10, n° 2, p. 113–125.↩︎

2. Ibid.↩︎

3. Ibid.↩︎

4. Michael S. Mahoney, « The History of Computing in the History of Technology », IEEE Annals of the History of Computing op. cit.↩︎

5. Friedrich A. Kittler, Mode protégé, op. cit., p. 55.↩︎