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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,sci.math
Subject: Re: Questions about the history of computing...
Summary: I thought that this was well known.
Keywords: Were there (non-trivial) programs before computers?
Message-ID: <1487@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 89 19:30:03 GMT
References: <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Followup-To: comp.edu,sci,math
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 34

In article <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu>, bts@evergreen.cs.unc.edu (Bruce Smith) writes:
> When people talk about the history of computing or the history
> of computer science, the discussion is usually about hardware.
> Some AI folks talk about philosophical traditions and, some NA
> folks talk about mathematics before computers.  What about the
> history (more generally) of software before computers?
> 
> For instance, how did people produce tables of functions?  I'm
> not asking whether they used Taylor series, but rather how did
> they manage the computations.  Did someone shut a mathematician
> in a closet and not let him out 'til it was finished?  Or, did
> they hire an army of clerks and give each instructions on what
> numbers to add, what numbers to multiply and to whom to pass on
> their portion of the answer?

Essentially the algorithm was designed and then either done serially
or in parallel.  Little was passed on from one person to another, other
than tables of coefficients, etc.  We know that at least one of the
early tables of common logarithms was done by computing 10^(p/q), q
a power of 2, to sufficient accuracy, and then using interpolation.

The Ptolemaic school, around 2000 years ago, computed tables of the
trigonometric functions by successive bisection and the addition
formulas.  If the quadrant is divided into 96 parts, no interpolation
is needed.

Other tables were computed by power series, etc.  Do you really think
that computational procedures started with computers?  There are very
few computational methods which arose AC, and most of them would have
been appreciated BC, where C stands for computer.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)