HIST212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Ibm 1620, Harvard Mark I, Maurice Wilkes
18 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
Today we will be talking about the latter. Ibm was a company that set the path, and drove the technology, and society"s perception of it forward. The point of the course is to give a bigger picture, not just to outline a sequence of events. There is a problem with only outlining a chain of events/people. Chronologies can oversimplify our understanding and misrepresent the past. They lead to a nice linear sequence, but that"s not how actually things happen. Where should we question the linearity: the endvac began development when the eniac"s shortcomings became visible. Their development was overlapping (endvac was not a successor: we"re also missing the development of the binac before the univac, as well as ibm"s developments on a completely di erent line . There is still a problem with the branching model. The harvard mark i branching o into everything else is misleading because the. Mark i and the eniac are not actually related.
