Bøger i SpringerBriefs in History of Computing serien

Microhistory is a technique that has been used effectively by writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It enables the author to cut through the complexities of large swaths of history by focusing on a particular time and place. Microhistories are particularly useful in historical study when a subfield has recently arisen and there are not yet enough monographic studies from which to draw general patterns. This microhistory focuses on a single year (1920) across the United States, with the goal of understanding the various roles of information in this society. It gives greater emphasis to the informational aspects of traditional historical topics such as farming, government bureaucracy, the Spanish flu pandemic, and Prohibition; and it gives greater attention to information-rich topics such as libraries and museums, schools and colleges, the financial services and office machinery industries, scientific research institutions, and management consultancies.

This work is a historical and philosophical study of the programming work carried out by John von Neumann in the period 1945-8. At the heart of the book is an examination of a manuscript featuring the earliest known surviving example of von Neumann's coding, a routine written in 1945 to 'mesh' two sequences of data and intended to be part of a larger program implementing the algorithm now known as mergesort.The text of the manuscript itself, along with a preliminary document describing the code he used to write this program, are reproduced as appendices. The program is approached in three chapters describing the historical background to von Neumann's work, the significance of the sorting application itself, and the development of the EDVAC, the machine for which the program was written. The subsequent chapters widen the focus again, discussing the subsequent evolution of the program and the crucial topic of subroutines, before concluding by situating von Neumann's work in a number of wider contexts. The book also offers a unifying philosophical interpretation of von Neumann's approach to coding.