Free Computing with Quantum Cats by John Gribbin Page B

8) and add them up, spitting out a card punched with holes corresponding, in this case, to the number 15. They could alternatively be set up to carry out subtraction or multiplication, and they could handle large numbers of cards. Several machines could be set up so that the output from one machine became the input of the next, and so on. In this way they could carry out tasks along the lines of “take a number, double it, square the result, take away the number you first thought of and punch a card with the answer on.”
    In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman? , Richard Feynman describes how machines like this were used to carry out the donkey work of computations for the Manhattan Project. It was a colleague, Stanley Frankel, who realized the potential of the IBM machines, but Feynman ended up being in charge of their operation. The first step was to break down the calculations involved in working out things like the compressibility of plutonium into their individual components—something now familiar to anyone who does computer programming. The instructions for the complex calculations were thenpassed to a team of “girls” (as Feynman describes them), each armed with a mechanical calculator, like a glorified adding machine, operated by hand. One girl did nothing but multiply the numbers she was given and pass the result on to the next girl; one did nothing but calculate cubes; and so on. The system was tested in this way and “debugged,” in computer jargon, until Frankel and Feynman knew it worked, then put onto a production line basis using the IBM machines. In fact, after a bit of practice the team of girls was just as fast as the room full of IBM machines. “The only difference,” says Feynman, “is that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.” Von Neumann was closely involved with this project, as one of Feynman's “customers,” and learned all about the operation of the system in the spring of 1944. To all intents and purposes, this was computing without a computer, with Feynman as the programmer, and it highlights the point that for all Turing's hopes we do not yet have anything like a mechanical intelligence; we only have machines that can do the same thing as a team of humans, but faster and without tiring. In either case, the team, or the machine, needs a human programmer.
    THE AMERICAN HERITAGE
    Computers of the kind we use today owe as much to von Neumann as to Turing, and in his post-war work von Neumann built on a heritage of American developments. The prehistory of electronic computing in the United States had two strands, one involving computing and the other involving electronics. The direct line to the IBM card-sorting machines which Feynman used to carry out calculations for vonNeumann goes back to the American census of 1890. The tenth US census of 1880 (and all previous ones) had been tabulated by hand, with hundreds of clerks copying stacks of information from the record sheets into various categories. But with the US population growing so rapidly through immigration, the point was being reached where it would be impossible to tabulate the results of one census fully before the next census was due. John Billings, who was in charge of statistical analysis for both the 1880 and the 1890 censuses, was well aware of the problem, and early in the 1880s this led him into a conversation recalled by his colleague Herman Hollerith in 1919:
    One Sunday evening at Dr. Billings’ tea table, he said to me there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics. We talked the matter over and I remember [that] he thought of using cards with the descriptions of the individual shown by notches punched in the edge of the card. [I] said that I thought I could work out a solution for the problem and asked him if he would go in with me. The Doctor