This book documents a strand in Michael Mahoney's career which represents, to employ one of his own images, the coming together of long-established agendas in the history of science and mathematics with the new technology of the computer. Trained as a historian of early modern science and mathematics, Mahoney, who died in 2008, turned his attention in the 1980s to the computer, and his writings have since been highly influential in shaping the emerging discipline of the history of computing. This volume, edited by Thomas Haigh, collects the most important of his essays, talks and articles on this subject and includes a useful and insightful introduction by Haigh as well as an appreciation of Mahoney's life and work by two of his former colleagues.
Noting that the computer, one of the scientific and technological developments that define the twentieth century, was all but invisible in the literature of the history of science and technology (a situation that has not changed much in the intervening years), Mahoney's earliest forays dealt with the questions of what the history of computing could be, and how it could best be written. He argued for a move away from the prevailing interest in the invention of the computer and towards a concern with the technology in use, addressing in particular communities of users and the artefacts that embody that use, namely software. In doing this, he was situating the history of computing in the wider context of the history of technology, reflecting the themes and concerns of this parent discipline in their application to the computer. Mahoney then took his argument a step further, observing that the universal nature of the computer makes the notion of a single activity of ‘computing’ problematic, and arguing instead for the writing of parallel histories of the many fields affected by automated computation. As Haigh notes in his introduction, however, Mahoney did not always follow his own methodological precepts, and at several points a tension can be detected between the desire to align the history of computing with the historiographic trends of its parent discipline, and a manifest excitement about the exceptional nature of the first electronic computers developed in the mid-1940s, which Mahoney described as the result of a ‘convergence’ between the agendas of mathematical logic on the one hand and the development of mechanical calculation on the other.
Mahoney's substantive writings on the history of computing, which in this volume are grouped into two sections dealing with the history of software and software engineering and with the early history of theoretical computer science, paint on a similarly broad canvas. Working largely from the published technical literature, his approach is highly synoptic: a typical essay covers a lot of ground lightly, sketching a big picture and including many telling details and provocative observations, but leaving the reader with much to do to put flesh on the bones of the story.
One of Mahoney's most original and valuable observations was his recognition that the central artefacts in the history of computing are not the computers themselves, but rather the programs, both systems software and applications, written to run on them. After considering the practical problems of how to preserve and understand such artefacts, Mahoney turned to the emergence of software engineering, a development driven by the perception of a ‘software crisis’ in the 1960s and the ensuing desire to find predictable and manageable ways of producing software. He usefully relates this enterprise to other events in the history of American industry, such as Henry Ford's introduction of mass-production techniques in the automobile industry, analysing the way that various proponents of software engineering drew upon different aspects of the history of industrialization to provide models for the disciplining of the programming process.
The largest section of the book consists of a number of writings recounting the emergence of a mathematical theory of computing and software, from the development of theories of automata and formal languages in the mid-1950s through to the development of mathematical foundations for programming-language semantics in the early 1980s. Here Mahoney tells a story of scientific progress and developments in response to largely internal processes and problems that will mostly be familiar to workers in the field, and somewhat challenging to those without such background. An interesting theme in this section describes the reciprocal influence of computing on the development of mathematics, where it provided a new field of practical application for some of the most rarefied areas of twentieth-century mathematics such as universal algebra, formal logic and category theory.
These two histories, of software engineering and of theoretical computer science, occupied much of Mahoney's attention, and the reader can observe him revisiting key events and quotations, setting them in different perspectives as his understanding matures. They did not exhaust his interests, however, and this volume also includes essays on feminist approaches to computing, and the emergence of a computational science of nature, for example in the work of Stephen Wolfram.
One leaves this volume with something of the sense of having read a summary of a history that has yet to be written in detail. Mahoney provides useful guides to the territories he covers, however, and this book provides a valuable overview of the work of an influential pioneer in the field.
