In the early part of the last century, clerks who sat on stools and did columns of ciphers in order to keep business books current were called computers. In World War II, a mathematical protege named Alan Turing was brought into British Intelligence to try and help break the Nazi code system, Enigma. The coding system for communication among German forces was baffling the Allies and, in particular, wreaking havoc in the Atlantic as the German sub forces were sinking over sixty British ships per month. Enigma was used with the aid of some ingenious coding machines that used a series of random changes that constantly altered the code.
In order to break the code, Turing invented some primitive mechanical devices that could do long strings of calculations with accuracy and at speeds no human could match. They were about the size of three refrigerators and, with their aid, Turing broke the code. Arguably, these may have been the first computers. Some of the machinery developed at Los Alamos by the physicists who built the atom bomb was similar in scope.
After the war, IBM created a roomful of tubes and circuits that functioned as the first modern computer. It was with the advent of the transistor that computers became viable both in terms of size and speed. Apple and IBM had their first machines on the market in the late 1970s, the Macintosh appeared in 1983, and Windows was introduced in 1984.
It was probably at about this point that the term “computer science” took on sufficient heft to actually be called a “science.” Computer programs called applications were introduced: word processing and spreadsheets being the first and most durable. Computers doubled in speed about every eighteen months for a number of years, and their uses multiplied fruitfully as well. Databases became practical with the development of sufficient computing power; today they are a primary business tool for bookkeeping, business analysis, forecasting and sales targeting.
Computer science is taught in some schools as the theoretical science of algorithms and the science of mechanical reasoning. Quantum physics emerged from this sort of computer science. Other schools consider computer programming as an integral part of computer science, and programming languages as the various communications platforms of the science. The theorists argue that programming falls in the field of systems analysis and/or information technology; in other words, the technical application of the product computers put out – namely, data.
The question remains – what is computer science? Many a tenured professor will argue that the study of a computer’s component parts is computer engineering. Computer systems, their networking and use are in the domain of information technology. Developing the computer’s uses are the fields of software engineering and programming – which may or may not be the same thing. Absolute purists argue that computer science is none of these; that the term is reserved to the theory of computing at its purest. For the rest of us, it seems that computer science is all of these disciplines and more that are on the horizon, such as artificial intelligence and the process of pushing quantum physics out to a more distant orbit. It is probably not the first science that, as it has grown to maturity, has become more difficult to define.
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Tags: computer science, computers, information technology, science
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