Part 4

The Saturday Evening Post

“Herbert’s been replaced by an electronic brain—one of the simpler types.” ]

Some years ago a group of experts predicted that by 1967 the world champion chess player would be an electronic computer. No one has yet claimed that we would have a president of metal and wire, but some interesting signposts are being put up. Computers are now used widely to predict the result of elections. Computers count the votes, and some have suggested that computers could make it possible for us to vote at home. The government is investigating the effectiveness of a decision-making computer as a stand-by aid for the President in this complex age we are moving into. No man has the ability to weigh every factor and to make decisions affecting the world. Perhaps a computer can serve in an advisory capacity to a president or to a World Council; perhaps—

It is comforting to remember that men will always tell the computer what it is supposed to do. No computer will ever run the world any more than the cotton gin or the steam engine or television runs the world. And in an emergency, we can always pull out the wallplug, can’t we?

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“History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.”

—James A. Garfield

2: The Computer’s Past

Although it seemed to burst upon us suddenly, the jet airplane can trace its beginnings back through the fabric wings of the Wrights to the wax wings of Icarus and Daedalus, and the steam aerophile of Hero in ancient Greece. The same thing is true of the computer, the “thinking machine” we are just now becoming uncomfortably aware of. No brash upstart, it has a long and honorable history.

Naturalists tell us that man is not the only animal that counts. Birds, particularly, also have an idea of numbers. Birds, incidentally, use tools too. We seem to have done more with the discoveries than our feathered friends; at least no one has yet observed a robin with a slide rule or a snowy egret punching the controls of an electronic digital computer. However, the very notion of mere birds being tool and number users does give us an idea of the antiquity and lengthy heritage of the computer.

The computer was inevitable when man first began to make his own problems. When he lived as an animal, life was far simpler, and all he had to worry about was finding game and plants to eat, and keeping from being eaten or otherwise killed himself. But when he began to dabble in agriculture and the raising of flocks, when he began to think consciously and to reflect about things, man needed help.

First came the hand tools that made him more powerful, the spears and bows and arrows and clubs that killed game and enemies. Then came the tools to aid his waking brain. Some 25,000 years ago, man began to count. This was no mean achievement, the dim, foggy dawning of the concept of number, perhaps in the caves in Europe where the walls have been found marked with realistic drawings of bison. Some budding mathematical genius in a skin garment only slightly shaggier than his mop of hair stared blinking at the drawings of two animals and then dropped his gaze to his two hands. A crude, tentative connection jelled in his inchoate gray matter and he shook his head as if it hurt. It was enough to hurt, this discovery of “number,” and perhaps this particular pioneer never again put two and two together. But others did; if not that year, the next.

Armed with his grasp of numbers, man didn’t need to draw two mastodons, or sheep, or whatever. Two pebbles would do, or two leaves or two sticks. He could count his children on his fingers—we retain the expression “a handful” to this day, though often our children are another sort of handful. Of course, the caveman did not of a sudden do sums and multiplications. When he began to write, perhaps 5,000 years later, he had formed the concept of “one,” “two,” “several,” and “many.”

Besides counting his flock and his children, and the number of the enemy, man had need for counting in another way. There were the seasons of the year, and a farmer or breeder had to have a way of reckoning the approach of new life. His calendar may well have been the first mathematical device sophisticated enough to be called a computer.

It was natural that numbers be associated with sex. The calendar was related to the seasons and the bearing of young. The number three, for example, took on mystic and potent connotation, representing as it did man’s genitals. Indeed, numbers themselves came quaintly to have sex. One, three, and the other odd numbers were male; the symmetrical, even numbers logically were female.

The notion that man used the decimal system because of his ten fingers and toes is general, but it was some time before this refinement took place. Some early peoples clung to a simpler system with a base of only two; and interestingly a tribe of Australian aborigines counts today thus: enea (1), petchaval (2), enea petchaval (3), petchaval petchaval (4). Before we look down our noses at this naïve system, let us consider that high-speed electronic computers use only two values, 1 and 0.

But slowly symbols evolved for more and more numbers, numbers that at first were fingers, and then perhaps knots tied in a strip of hide. This crude counting aid persists today, and cowboys sometimes keep rough tallies of a herd by knotting a string for every five that pass. Somehow numbers took on other meanings, like those that figure in courtship in certain Nigerian tribes. In their language, the number six also means “I love you.” If the African belle is of a mind when her boyfriend tenderly murmurs the magic number, she replies in like tone, “Eight!”, which means “I feel the same way!”

From the dawn of history there have apparently been two classes of us human beings, the “haves” and the “have nots.” Nowadays we get bills or statements from our creditors; in early days, when a slate or clay tablet was the document, a forerunner of the carbon copy or duplicate paper developed. Tallies were marked for the amount of the debt, the clay tablet was broken across the marks, and creditor and debtor each took half. No chance for cheating, since a broken half would fit only the proper mate!

Numbers at first applied only to discrete, or distinctly separate, things. The scratches on a calendar, the tallies signifying the count of a flock; these were more easily reckoned. The idea of another kind of number inspired the first clocks. Here was a monumental breakthrough in mathematics. Nature provided the sunrise that clearly marked the beginning of each day; man himself thought to break the day into “hours,” or parts of the whole. Such a division led eventually to measurement of size and weight. Now early man knew not only how many goats he had, but how many “hands” high they were, and how many “stones” they weighed. This further division ordained another kind of mechanical computer man must someday contrive—the analog.

The first counting machines used were pebbles or sea shells. For the Stone Age businessman to carry around a handful of rocks for all his transactions was at times awkward, and big deals may well have gone unconsummated for want of a stone. Then some genius hit on the idea of stringing shells on a bit of reed or hide; or more probably the necklace came first as adornment and the utilitarian spotted it after this style note had been added. At any rate, the portable adding machine became available and our early day accountant grew adroit at sliding the beads back and forth on the string. From here it was only a small step, taken perhaps as early as 3000 B.C., to the rigid counter known as the abacus.

The word “counter” is one we use in everyday conversation. We buy stock over the counter; some deals are under the counter. We all know what the counter itself is—that wide board that holds the cash register and separates us from the shopkeeper. At one time the cash register was the counter; actually the counting board had rods of beads like the abacus, or at least grooves in which beads could be moved. The totting up of a transaction was done on the “counter”; it is still there although we have forgotten whence came its name.

The most successful computer used for the next 5,000 years, the portable counter, or the abacus, is a masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness. Though only a frame with several rows of beads, it is sophisticated enough that as late as 1947 Kiyoshi Matsuzake of the Japanese Ministry of Communications, armed with the Japanese version—a soroban, bested Private Tom Wood of the U. S. Army of Occupation punching the keys of an up-to-the-minute electric calculating machine in four of five problem categories! Only recently have Japanese banks gone over to modern calculators, and shopkeepers there and in other lands still conduct business by this rule of thumb and forefinger.

The abacus, ancient mechanical computer, is still in use in many parts of the world. Here is the Japanese version, the soroban, with problem being set up. ]

The name abacus comes to us by way of the Greek abax, meaning “dust.” Scholars infer that early sums were done schoolboy fashion in Greece with a stylus on a dusty slate, and that the word was carried over to the mechanical counter. The design has changed but little over the years and all abacuses bear a resemblance. The major difference is the number of beads on each row, determined by the mathematical base used in the particular country. Some in India, for example, were set up to handle pounds and shillings for use in shops. Others have a base of twelve. The majority, however, use the decimal system. Each row has seven beads, with a runner separating one or two beads from the others. Some systems use two beads on the narrow side, some only one; this is a mathematical consideration with political implications, incidentally: The Japanese soroban has the single-bead design; Korea’s son pan uses two. When Japan took over Korea the two-bead models were tabu, and went out of use until the Koreans were later able to win their independence again.

About the only thing added to the ancient abacus in recent years is a movable arrow for marking the decimal point. W. D. Loy patented such a gadget in the United States. Today the abacus remains a useful device, not only for business, but also for the teaching of mathematics to youngsters, who can literally “grasp their numbers.” For that reason it ought also to be helpful to the blind, and as a therapeutic aid for manual dexterity. Apparently caught up in the trend toward smaller computers, the abacus has been miniaturized to the extent that it can be worn as earrings or on a key chain.

Even with mechanical counters, early mathematicians needed written numbers. The caveman’s straight-line scratches gave way to hieroglyphics, to the Sumerian cuneiform “wedges,” to Roman numerals, and finally to Hindu and Arabic. Until the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and that most wonderful of all, 0 or zero, computations of any but the simplest type were apt to be laborious and time-consuming. Even though the Romans and Greeks had evolved a decimal system, their numbering was complex. To count to 999 in Greek required not ten numbers but twenty-seven. The Roman number for 888 was DCCCLXXXVIII. Multiplying CCXVII times XXIX yielded an answer of MMMMMMCCXCIII, to be sure, but not without some difficulty. It required an abacus to do any kind of multiplication or division.

Indeed, it was perhaps from the abacus that the clue to Arabic simplicity came. The Babylonians, antedating the Greeks, had nevertheless gone them one better in arithmetic by using a “place” system. In other words, the position of a number denoted its value. The Babylonians simply left an empty space between cuneiform number symbols to show an empty space in this positional system. Sometime prior to 300 B.C. a clever mathematician tired of losing track and punched a dot in his clay tablet to fill the empty space and avoid possible error.

The abacus shows these empty spaces on its rows of beads, too, and finally the Hindus combined their nine numerals with a “dot with a hole in it” and gave the mathematical world the zero. In Hindu it was sifr, corrupted to zephirium in Latin, and gives us today both cipher and zero. This enigma of nothingness would one day be used by Leibnitz to prove that God made the world; it would later become half the input of the electronic computer! Meantime, it was developed independently in various other parts of the world; the ancient Mayans being one example.