Authors:
- Presents the text of a hitherto unpublished seminal work in the history of computing
- Provides an accessible and rich contextual discussion of an article by von Neumann
- Describes the earliest known example of a "modern" computer program, and discusses ideas that shaped the emergence of the discipline of programming
Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in History of Computing (BRIEFSHC)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
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.Authors and Affiliations
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Freelance Writer and Historian of Computing, London, United Kingdom
Mark Priestley
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Routines of Substitution
Book Subtitle: John von Neumann’s Work on Software Development, 1945–1948
Authors: Mark Priestley
Series Title: SpringerBriefs in History of Computing
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91671-2
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Computer Science, Computer Science (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-91670-5Published: 22 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-91671-2Published: 14 August 2018
Series ISSN: 2662-3005
Series E-ISSN: 2662-3013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 131
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Computing, Programming Techniques, History of Science