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It began with Babbage : the genesis of computer science
Dasgupta S., Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY, 2014. 344 pp. Type: Book (978-0-199309-41-2)
Date Reviewed: Apr 15 2014

More than just a survey of the main developments that led to the discipline of computer science (CS), this book embeds the historical milestones in an intellectual context. In the prologue, CS (of the “ought”) is contrasted with natural science (of the “is”). Programs and computer architectures are described as liminal, as they are abstract while requiring material computational artifacts to make them useful. This thought-provoking approach is continued throughout.

The years ranging from 1819 to 1969 include the time from Babbage to the academic recognition of CS as its own discipline apart from mathematics and engineering. The book’s 16 chapters give significant insight into the development of computing over those 150 years. However, the chapters are not organized into subunits that would better structure the history. No basis is provided for the selection of topics, and the first section of each chapter may or may not introduce the topics to be covered and their importance. For example, chapter 3, “Missing Links,” clearly indicates an investigation of what happened after Babbage, but chapter 4, “Entscheidungsproblem: What’s in a Word?,” goes three-and-a-half pages before relating the discussion to computing and Turing. The discussion of Turing is appropriate for a history, and Turing is mentioned often throughout the book. There is reference to The annotated Turing [1], a book by Charles Petzold that includes an annotated version of Turing’s historic paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”

The middle of the book, chapter 8, “A Paradigm Is Born,” focuses on the stored program computer, and chapter 9, “A Liminal Artifact of an Uncommon Nature,” presents a program as a new kind of artifact. The remaining chapters, while interesting in themselves, would greatly benefit from placement in an overview of the development of CS in these years. I remember the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), deployed in 1950 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the fastest computer in the world at the time. It represented an effort started in the US in the late 1940s to enable mathematicians and scientists to integrate research and computing, and it was an important strand in the development of CS, but it is not mentioned in this book.

Dasgupta nicely treats the intellectual aspects of the genesis of CS, and the book is appropriately written for its intended audience.

Reviewer:  Arthur Gittleman Review #: CR142176 (1407-0532)
1) Petzold, C. The annotated Turing: a guided tour through Alan Turing’s historic paper on computability and the Turing machine. Wiley, Indianapolis, IN, 2008.
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