Towards a Historical Notion of
“Turing — the Father of Computer Science”
Third and last draft, submitted in August 2013 to the
Journal History and Philosophy of Logic
Edgar G. Daylight
Eindhoven University of Technology
Department of Technology Management
egdaylight@dijkstrascry.com
Abstract. In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing’s the-
oretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and
appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he
published his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. Careful historians
are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know
from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley,
Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, and others that several computing pioneers, in-
cluding Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on (let alone
were they aware of) Turing’s 1936 universal-machine concept. Further-
more, it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann’s celebrated
1945 ‘First Draft Report on the EDVAC’ is influenced in any identifiable
way by Turing’s work. This raises the questions: (i) When does Turing
enter the field? (ii) Why did the Association for Computing Machin-
ery (ACM) honor Turing by associating his name to ACM’s most pres-
tigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have been rather
vague about these questions, suggesting some date between 1950 and
the early 1960s as the point at which Turing is retroactively integrated
into the foundations of computing and associating him in some way with
the movement to develop something that people call computer science.
In this paper, based on detailed examination of hitherto overlooked pri-
mary sources, attempts are made to reconstruct networks of scholars and
ideas prevalent to the 1950s, and to identify a specific group of ACM actors
interested in theorizing about computations in computers and attracted
to the idea of language as a frame in which to understand computation.
By going back to Turing’s 1936 paper and, more importantly, to re-
cast versions of Turing’s work published during the 1950s (Rosenbloom,
Kleene, Markov), I identify the factors that make this group of scholars
particularly interested in Turing’s work and provided the original vector
by which Turing became to be appreciated in retrospect as the father of
computer science.
The author, also known as Karel Van Oudheusden, thanks Nancy R. Miller and
J.M. Duffin of the University of Pennsylvania Archives, and also Jos Baeten of the
‘Centrum voor Wiskunde & Informatica’ for funding his visit to the Archives.
II
1
Introduction
In August 1965, Anthony Oettinger and the rest of the Program Committee
of the ACM met and proposed that an annual “National Lecture be called the
Allen [sic] M. Turing Lecture” [4, p.5].
1
The decision was also made that the
ACM should have an awards program. The ACM Awards Committee was formed in
November 1965 [5]. After having collected information on the award procedures
“in other professional societies”, Lewis Clapp — chairman of the ACM Awards
Committee — wrote in August 1966 that
[a]n awards program [. . .] would be a fitting activity for the Association as
it enhances its own image as a professional society. [. . .] [I]t would serve to
accentuate new software techniques and theoretical contributions. [. . .] The
award itself might be named after one of the early great luminaries in the
field (for example, “The Von Neuman [sic] Award” or “The Turing Award”,
etc.) [6].
The mathematician Alan J. Perlis officially became ACM’s first A.M. Turing Lec-
turer and Turing Awardee in 1966. Besides having been the first editor-in-chief
of the Communications of the ACM, Perlis had earned his stripes in the field of
programming languages during the 1950s and had been President of the ACM in
the early 1960s. Perlis was thus a well-established and influential computer sci-
entist by the mid-1960s. In retrospect, decorating Perlis was only to be expected.
But why did the ACM honor Turing? Turing was not well known in computing at
large in the 1960s and early 1970s [41]. Apparently, his name was preferred over
John von Neumann’s and Emil Post’s, yet all three researchers had deceased
by 1957 and all three were highly respected by some very influential actors in
the ACM — including John W. Carr III, Saul Gorn, Perlis, and Oettinger.
2
And
why are we celebrating Turing today? The latter question was posed repeatedly
during Turing’s centennial in 2012.
The ACM, founded in 1947, was an institutional response to the advent of au-
tomatic digital computers in American society. Only some of those computers,
most of which were still under construction, were based on the principle of a
large store containing both numbers and instructions — a principle that is also
known today as the “stored program” principle.
3
That principle, in turn, paved
the way for computer-programming advancements which were sought by men
like Carr, Gorn, and Perlis. The Cold War was also responsible for massively
funded research in machine translation (— later also called automatic language
translation). The young student Oettinger at Harvard University was one of sev-
eral embarking on Russian-to-English translation projects. Another example is
Andrew Booth, a British computer builder who had met in 1946 with the promi-
nent American scientist Warren Weaver to discuss the possibility of mechanically
translating one language into another. In between 1946 and 1947, Booth visited
several computer laboratories in the United States, including John von Neu-
mann’s lab at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. By 1952, he was
both an accomplished computer builder and a programmer of a mechanical dic-
tionary. As the postwar years progressed, several computer specialists turned