B C, BEFORE COMPUTERS

B C, Before Computers

On Information Technology
from Writing to the Age of Digital Data

Stephen Robertson
 [Link]

© 2020 Stephen Robertson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY
4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text
and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not
in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Some of the material in this book has been reproduced according to the fair use principle which
allows use of copyrighted material for scholarly purposes.

Attribution should include the following information:

© Stephen Robertson, B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of
Digital Data. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, [Link]
0225

In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit [Link]
[Link]/product/1232#copyright

Further details about CC BY licenses are available at [Link]

by/4.0/

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been
archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at [Link]

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-029-0

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-030-6
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-031-3
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-104-4
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-80064-105-1
ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-80064-106-8
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0225

Cover image: Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), A merchant making up the account. Wikime-
dia [Link]
Public Domain.
Cover design: Anna Gatti.
For Molly and Erin, and Frida and Einar,
and the next generation
 Contents

Contents vii
Acknowledgements ix
Prologue 1
1 In the beginning. . . 3
2 Sending messages: the post 17
3 Sending messages: electricity 27
4 Spreading the word 35
5 More about the alphabet 49
6 Organising information 65
7 Picture and sound 75
8 On physics and physiology 89
9 On perspective—and music 97
10 Calculation 115
11 Data processing 123
12 Ciphers 131
Epilogue 143
Bibliography 145
List of illustrations 147
Index of topics 149
Index of names 155
 Acknowledgements

This book started life many years ago as an occasional series of talks to var-
ious different audiences, including students at City University, fellow re-
searchers at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and academics at Girton Col-
lege, Cambridge. Questions and comments from these audiences were im-
mensely helpful.
My wife Georgina, and my son Colin, have both read drafts of this book
at different stages and given me a lot of very useful feedback. Michael
Williams and another reviewer for Open Book Publishers did the same.
Alessandra and the team at Open Book have been unfailingly helpful. Colin
also contributed to the design of the cover.
The bibliography at the end lists some books that have given me food
for thought. But as indicated there, my primary source for many areas with
which I was unfamiliar before researching this book has been Wikipedia. So
I would particularly like to thank the huge number of anonymous authors
of Wikipedia articles on whose work and insights I have relied.
The mistakes are of course my own.

Stephen Robertson
Norfolk, 2020
 Prologue

I was born in 1946. Somewhere around that time was the beginning of a
sea change, often proclaimed as a revolution, one which, in the ensuing
three-quarters of a century, has transformed our lives in extraordinary ways.
Following the pre-war work by such visionaries as Konrad Zuse and Alan
Turing, and the inventive necessities of the war-time code-breaking effort at
Bletchley Park, the first working computers (in something close to the mod-
ern sense of the word) were just being put together in a handful of labora-
tories in Britain and the United States. Today computers are pervasive—it is
hard to identify any aspect of our lives that has not been affected by them.
But computers are only part of it. We can talk about information technol-
ogy, or more broadly the information and communication technologies, to
encompass computers and the digital world that they have made possible,
as well the whole of telecommunications, the internet and the web, sound
recording and photography and film, broadcasting, and so on. But immedi-
ately we have to call into question what I just said about the start of a revolu-
tion. The telephone, for example, predates the computer by maybe seventy
years (another lifetime); photography by maybe a hundred. So must we
then go back another century to look for the start of this revolution? Or
perhaps five more centuries, to the invention of printing?
This kind of question is exactly what this book is about. I think it is unde-
niable that the period I have lived through has seen revolutionary changes
in the domain of information technology. But the word revolution suggests
a complete break, a hiatus, a rupture with the past. It invites us to define
when it happened, and to treat this point in time as a discontinuity.
But like all real revolutions, both the start and the origins of this pe-
riod of huge change are hard to pin down. My contention is that we had
to make many other inventions, to devise or learn many ways of thinking
about things or of doing things, before the sea change I have lived through

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

2 B C, Before Computers

could come about. What follows is an attempt to pull together into a single
story all these necessary precursor technologies, beginning with writing.
This story is not a linear, chronological history. The collection of ideas,
of theories, of ways of thinking and ways of doing that have come together
under the umbrella of information technology did not start together, either
in time or (more importantly) in context. Each strand has its own incep-
tion and development; sometimes different strands come together, or one
strand splits apart, to follow different historical courses. As a result, I will
be jumping about in time, following one strand up to the twentieth century,
and putting it aside to go back to the source of another.
Although I have taken the start of the computer age as around 1945,
many of the themes that I discuss remained outside the province of the com-
puter or the digital world for much longer. For example, mainstream pho-
tography, now absolutely part of the digital world, did not become so until
after 1980. In such cases I will follow each theme through into my lifetime,
to the point where it is absorbed into or enveloped by this new reality—or
perhaps more accurately, until the new ways of thinking and doing expand
to include it.
Among the themes that will emerge in a roundabout way is a notion that
is key to the modern world—that of data. This now all-pervasive idea, which
is essentially both the raw material and the product of all computational pro-
cesses, and encompasses pictures and sounds as well as text and numbers
(and a lot of other things), began to emerge explicitly around the start of the
twentieth century. It is now hard to think of many aspects of what I will be
discussing without this notion in the background. But I invite you to put it
aside, at least as far as you can, until Chapter 6.
 1. In the beginning. . .

Ever since the dawn of recorded history, and before, we have been trying to
learn how to do things with information.
This is not at all the grand claim it may seem to be. Rather, it is a tau-
tology. We could not begin recorded history until we had ways and means
of recording—and recording information is one of the things we have been
learning how to do. This is perhaps one of the few necessities of recorded
history. We didn’t have to come down from the trees, or even out of the
ocean, before beginning our recorded history—though in fact we did both
of those things. We didn’t have to learn how to plant crops instead of rely-
ing on hunting and gathering; we didn’t have to build towns, invent trade,
organise markets and establish trade routes—though probably we did all
of those things, and probably they all helped to stimulate the invention of
writing. We certainly didn’t have to invent the wheel, and indeed it’s not
clear whether we invented the wheel before or after we learnt how to write.
But we did have to learn how to write.
The written message is a specific human invention, just as much as the
means to make that message. Once this was invented, information technol-
ogy had begun to emerge.

Technology

The components of the phrase information technology need a little discussion.

First, what do I mean by ‘technology’?
In today’s usage, technology is frequently bracketed with science, and has
come to mean almost exclusively the gadgets and devices that we have in-
vented to allow us to do things—as summed up in the advertising slogan
‘the appliance of science’. But this is a very limited view of technology. My
(1944 edition) Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines technology as ‘a discourse

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

4 B C, Before Computers

or treatise on an art or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial

arts; practical arts collectively’. It is no accident that this definition contains
the word art(s) four times and the word science/scientific only once. Technol-
ogy is the art of doing things, of changing the world. We might also think
of the word technique, concerning ways of doing things, whether in the arts
or the sciences.
In this respect, technology is in some sense the opposite of science. Sci-
ence is about understanding why the universe is as it is; it is about the rules
and regulations, and the structures and regularities. Cyril Northcote Parkin-
son, in Parkinson’s Law, says

It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds.

Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.

The ultimate achievement to which any scientist aspires is the discovery of a

law; and a law of nature, just as much as a human law, is about what cannot
be done—what possibly imaginable states of the universe are in fact for-
bidden. There is an old paradox, ‘What happens when an irresistible force
meets an immovable object?’ But Newton has given us some laws, which tell
us (among other things) that no force is resistible except by another force,
but that any force is resistible by another equal and opposite force; and that
no object is immovable.
Technology’s view of the world is quite different. For technology, the ex-
istence of the universe in its present state is a constant challenge: how do we
modify it? How do we mould it to our own ends? How do we avoid these
famous scientific laws, or make them work on our behalf, enlist them to our
service? Of course, we cannot actually break the laws of science (though
sometimes technology discovers that the scientists had it wrong, and that
what they thought was a law could in fact be evaded). But the ways in
which we can make use of them are many and wonderful. The laws of me-
chanics, including those that govern leverage, are one thing that we learnt
about the universe. But when Archimedes said (as a comment on those
laws) ‘Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world’, he was talking
(metaphorically at least) technology, not science.
In short, technology is about changing the universe, about knowing how
to do things. Not necessarily on a large scale, of course—in fact some tech-
nology is about very small changes. But the knowing how is a necessary part.
 1. In the beginning. . . 5

A tool or device is not technology per se; it is only technology insofar as it

enables us to do things.
Furthermore, technological change requires choice. Often, technological
advances are proclaimed as liberating, as simply expanding our horizons
and our opportunities. But as we adopt new ways of doing things through
technology, we not only leave behind older ones, we render the older worlds
impossible, unattainable (as discussed, for example, in David Rothenberg’s
Hand’s End). The huge social change brought about by the availability of
the personal automobile, for example, has now spread to almost all corners
of the world. Even if the exigencies of climate change fail to force changes
in this mode of operating, such changes will perforce come about when the
oil runs out. But a return to the pre-car world of 1890 is simply out of the
question—we have lost those ways forever.

Information

The word information is also a little tricky, and has been used in many ways
at different times and by different people. Theses and books have been de-
voted to the question ‘what is information?’ and to discussing the conse-
quences of the possible answers (two examples: Luciano Floridi’s Informa-
tion—A Very Short Introduction, and Antonio Badia’s The Information Mani-
fold). However, to go down that route would take me away from my main
purpose. In this book I will take a rather naïve view of information. When
a speaker speaks and a listener hears and understands; when the speaker’s
voice is transformed by the telephone handset into electrical signals, and
possibly again into radio waves, and something at the other end does the
reverse process; when a writer writes and a reader reads and understands;
when someone puts data into a database, and later someone else enquires
of the database, and gets out these same data in a different form but still
understandable—all these are processes involving information.
The only general assumption I shall make is that there are indeed human
agents involved at some point (even if I am temporarily concerned only with
mechanisms and devices). That is, I shall assume that for some thing to be
or carry information, there has to be at least the possibility that the result
will at some time reach a human being and be understood. We may think of
information as residing somehow in records, and in some sense this book is
6 B C, Before Computers

entirely about records and recorded information—but the human recipient

is implicit in everything.
There are certainly notions of information that do not depend on this
assumption. However, identifying or understanding some general notion
of information that would encompass all these is hard.
There is a well-known theory of information, due in part to Claude Shan-
non (see his paper of 1948), which uses the idea that ‘information is that
which reduces uncertainty’. It is possible to read such a definition as re-
quiring no human; however, if we ask “Who or what is experiencing the
uncertainty?”, it becomes clear that assuming a human (or at least a sen-
tient being) helps with this conception as well.
Shannon himself thought of his theory as having nothing to do with hu-
man beings or with meaning. His theory had huge influence in the years
that followed, in many different fields, as described by James Gleick in his
fascinating book, The Information. Gleick’s book takes off from many of the
same historical starting points as will appear in the pages that follow. To
Gleick, Shannon’s theory is central to the IT revolution, and encompasses
all notions of information. To me, (and also to Badia, cited above) for all its
undoubted power and usefulness, this theory fails to address some of the
central features of information in the context of human-to-human commu-
nication. I shall make no further use of it.

Language

As we have studied animals over the last half-century or so, we have come
to realise that many animals have some form of communicative behaviour.
We know that bees dance to tell each other about good sources of food, that
whales communicate over large stretches of ocean, that chimps learn from
each other. Nevertheless, the human behaviours that come under the gen-
eral heading of language are extraordinary in their range and scope.
The evolution and invention of language is one of the great events in hu-
man pre-history. I say ‘evolution and invention’ deliberately. Steven Pinker
argues strongly in his book of the same name that ‘the language instinct’
is exactly that, a basic instinct that has evolved and is part of what makes
us human, common to all humanity. In this sense, language in the abstract
does not really belong in this history of human invention. However, all those
 1. In the beginning. . . 7

parts of language that are learnt and constructed, all the specifics of actual
languages, must be regarded as invention.
The invention of a language is a continuous process. Like most inven-
tions, but even more so than most, languages are not the product of a lone
inventor in a garret, but of a social process. Every writer or speaker who
uses language inventively or creatively is contributing to the invention of
the language, and every writer or speaker who copies or borrows from or
imitates a previous speaker or writer is also contributing to the establish-
ment of that invention. Language, in addition to being a basic instinct, is a
technology that we use to change the world, by communicating with other
people, and the social process by which particular languages develop is one
long invention.
We often refer to such a process of social invention as evolution. This is
in homage to Darwin’s biological theory, but is not a part of it—it is an anal-
ogy rather than an application. Probably it is also the case that the biolog-
ical evolution of humanity in matters relating to language continues to this
day—perhaps in obviously physiological features such as voice production,
but perhaps also in our language-processing capabilities. That is harder to
see happening, however.
It is also hard to know much about the origins of either the social or
the biological process, and I will not attempt to go into either. The true
starting point of this book, the point from which a genuine technology of
information takes off, is the invention of writing.

Writing

The question “What makes humans different from animals?” has been asked
many times, and answered in many different ways—including, of course,
the answer “They aren’t!”. Other answers have included intelligence, lan-
guage, abstract thought and many other things. However, many of these
possible answers have been undermined by discoveries in relation to other
species. But it may be argued that one characteristic that really does distin-
guish us from other species is writing. Whether or not you feel the necessity
for such a distinguishing feature, writing is certainly a strong candidate.
Writing began, we believe, some time in the fourth millennium BCE—say
five-and-a-half millennia ago—in Mesopotamia. A great account of the de-
8 B C, Before Computers

velopment of writing is given by Andrew Robinson in The Story of Writing.

The first purposes of writing were relatively mundane; certainly not the
recording of human history. They had to do with commerce and adminis-
tration—with accounting, recording transactions, listing stock, identifying
ownership, and so on. Later writing came to be used to glorify leaders, and
to tell stories. These stories (and the people who wrote them) did not distin-
guish between myth and history. Later still came chronicles and real history,
and philosophy and science and religious tracts and laws and administrative
rulebooks and poetry and advertising and all the rest.
But the receipts and the tallies and the laundry lists that started it off,
however mundane, are central to the history. The kinds of information they
represent are the mothers of invention. The people who invented writing
felt the need to do several things. They wanted to supplement their own
memory, they wanted to organise and impose order on the world, and they
wanted to be able inform others of the validity of their own memory and
their organisation of the world.
Later I will expand these reasons for writing.

Systems of writing

In order to make this invention of writing work, for any of the purposes
mentioned, we need to have a notion of a system of writing. In principle, any
mark (on paper or skin or stone or cloth or in clay or whatever) could mean
anything we choose it to mean, as in Humpty Dumpty’s way with words
(‘“When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean”’—Through
the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll). But that is not a lot of use unless there
is some reasonable chance that someone, either the writer at a later date,
or someone else to whom the message is directed, will be able to recognise
the meaning. So we have to be systematic, at least to some degree, about
assigning meaning to marks.
The same problem has occurred long before, in language generally. We
have some notion already of the relationship between words and mean-
ing—that is, we can say in some way what a word means, and then con-
struct new sentences out of existing words, whose meaning can be inferred
from a knowledge of the words. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification
of the notion of meaning, and in any case our present notion of words is
 1. In the beginning. . . 9

rather highly dependent on written language. Consider for example Ger-

man, where the written form allows some words to be run together to build
longer words, or Chinese, which has no word boundaries in its written form.
Nevertheless, it is a useful starting place for writing.
At the very least, we might expect our system of writing to tie in with
the words of our language, in the sense that the same word is represented
in the same way when repeated. This assumes that written language does
indeed represent spoken language, and that spoken language is made up of
words. It provides us with one of the major ways in which early written lan-
guages were constructed—with symbols that may start as stylised pictures
representing words.
The system of writing that most clearly illustrates this method is ancient
Egyptian—see Figure 1. Small pictures can be seen in many examples of
Egyptian writing, and these can sometimes be translated via the words that
the pictures represent (though actually ‘ancient Egyptian’ covers several dif-
ferent writing systems). But even the Cuneiform system, the wedge-shaped
marks in wet clay that came out of Mesopotamia, has similar roots.

Figure 1: Ancient Egyptian writing—stela of Senusret III,

Altes Museum Berlin
[Link]
Ancient_egyptian_stela_Senusert_III.JPG
CC BY-SA 3.0.
10 B C, Before Computers

In the earliest writing systems, a method based on puns was commonly

used. That is, you may want to represent a word about which it is hard to
draw a picture (an abstract concept, say). Then one of the methods open
to you is to draw a picture of another, more concrete word, which sounds
similar, and allow the punning picture to represent the abstract word. This
picture now comes to represent the sound rather than the concept that it
originally pictured. For example (using modern English words) if I want to
represent the word son (‘my son’), I would find it difficult to represent that
meaning directly with a picture. But the language has another word which is
pronounced in the same way and represents a very concrete physical object,
sun. A picture of the sun will do quite well to represent the word ‘son’,
almost certainly unambiguously in the context of a sentence.
This process can be taken one interesting stage further. If the word you
want to represent has multiple syllables, it may be hard to find another word
that sounds like it. However, you may be able to divide it into smaller parts
(shorter words or single syllables or even alphabet-like sounds) and draw
a picture to stand for each of the parts. Then you have a representation
of the abstract word as a combination of pictures. You have taken a vital
step towards a modern system! When each symbol represents a syllable of
sound, we have a syllabary. Several such systems were invented, and indeed
they still exist in languages such as Chinese and Japanese.

The alphabet

For two thousand years or so, writing systems developed slowly; new sys-
tems were invented, and borrowed ideas from each other or introduced new
ones, but the changes were not huge. Then, around the late second millen-
nium BCE and the beginning of the first, a huge change took place. The
alphabet was invented. In the account that follows, I have oversimplified
many things—and borrowed a great deal from John Man’s book, Alphabeta.
When children in cultures with alphabetic written languages are taught
to write, they learn about alphabetic characters and sounds. The idea is
that letters represent sounds, and that you can at least to some degree work
out what (spoken) word is intended by putting together the sounds of the
individual letters of the written word. It seems to be suggested that the
natural units of sound are those encapsulated in the letters.
 1. In the beginning. . . 11

Part of the theory of spoken language is based on the view that the small-
est unit of sound that can be distinguished is something like a letter—a
phoneme. But this is somewhat misleading, because it is hard to pronounce
individual letters. Vowels may be pronounced on their own, but consonants
usually need the addition of a vowel before we can actually speak them
(hence the way, in English, we vocalise the alphabet as bee, cee, dee, eff
etc.). In some sense, the natural units of sound in terms of which spoken
language may be understood are not really letter-like; they are much more
akin to syllables. Which makes the first stage of developing an alphabet—a
syllabary—readily understandable, but lends an air of mystery to the next
stage.
So let’s step through the process. We have already seen how puns may
be used, and how (as a result) a word may be broken into smaller words
before it is written down. If we follow that process to its conclusion, we
would try to think of an elementary set of single-syllable words, represent
them as best we could (by pictograms or whatever), and then construct all
multi-syllable words as combinations of these elementary words. Modern
Chinese illustrates this approach very well. (At this point I am skating over
some rather complex notions of the relation between spoken and written
language, which certainly come into play with Chinese.)
But a syllabary—a set of symbols to represent every possible spoken
syllable—is a clumsy thing. From our vantage point of an alphabetic sys-
tem, we may think of generating syllables from every possible consonantal
sound, followed by every possible vowel sound, followed by every possible
consonantal sound. There may easily be thousands of such combinations,
therefore thousands of different symbols required, all of which have to be
learnt (as any Chinese schoolchild will tell you!).
How could we simplify it? Well, we need a couple of historical acci-
dents. First, we need a language in which consonant sounds are always
followed by vowel sounds—so that we can associate each consonant with
its following vowel and not the preceding one. Among modern languages,
both Japanese and Italian have some of this character. This means that we
can get away with an open syllabary or ‘abugida’ (equivalent to consonant-
vowel instead of consonant-vowel-consonant). An open syllabary can be
very much smaller than a closed one. Modern Japanese makes use of three
different scripts, two of which are essentially open syllabaries. For example,
12 B C, Before Computers

the hiragana script has 46 base characters.

As a second historical accident, we need a language in which the vowel
sounds do not vary too much. If most consonants, most of the time, are
followed by ‘ah’ sounds, then we may be able to do without the vowels alto-
gether. Modern Arabic is like this—it can be written without the vowels, and
still be understood by the reader, because the vowel sounds are sufficiently
predictable, and the ambiguities that sometimes arise can generally be re-
solved easily enough by context. Now all we need is a consonant alphabet
or ‘abjad’—say 20-30 symbols.
This sequence of events probably took place in the second half of the
second millennium BCE, around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and
the Horn of Africa. One of the cultures to adopt a consonantal alphabet was
that of the Phoenicians, a people who traded throughout the Mediterranean
region around the turn of the millennium. The consonantal alphabet was
broadcast widely, and its survival was ensured. Note once again that it was
the necessities of trade, rather than of literature or philosophy or history or
science, that drove this spread.
The final step towards the modern alphabet was an explicit invention,
made by the ancient Greeks in the very early first millennium BCE. They
observed the Phoenician system and realised just how useful and powerful
an alphabetic system of writing could be. Unfortunately their own language
was rich in vowel sounds, and would have resisted a purely consonantal so-
lution. So they invented vowels to represent the vowel components of the
sounds of language. Well, actually, they borrowed some of the symbols pre-
viously used as consonants, but which were not required for their language,
and re-assigned them as vowels. And the modern alphabet was born.
Later, of course, the Greeks would invent history and philosophy, and
bring science and mathematics and many of the arts to new heights (I ex-
aggerate only slightly!). Beside these, the final step in the invention of the
alphabet might seem like small beer. Nevertheless, it is hard to overstress
its influence.
As this account suggests, the alphabet was (we believe) invented only
once, albeit in several stages. It seems that the syllabary, which is perhaps
the more obvious development of the idea of trying to represent the sounds
of words, was reinvented more than once. But the alphabet is something
altogether more peculiar. Its economy, the fact that we can get away with
 1. In the beginning. . . 13

some 25 symbols to represent the entirety of our language, including words that
have not yet been coined, is nothing short of astonishing. And its implications
are going to reach far into the following 3000 years.

Numbers

Having achieved the astonishing knowledge that we only need a small num-
ber of symbols to represent the whole of past and future language, let us put
general language aside for a while and think about numbers. Numbers fig-
ured strongly in early writing systems, being a very important component
of the kinds of information we wanted to represent. And given that we have
words for them, we can (in principle) write them down using the same sys-
tem. However, they do have some peculiar characteristics, which we should
perhaps worry about.
For one thing, beyond a certain point we need to be systematic about
how we name numbers—we can’t simply coin a new name for every new
number we come across: there are far too many of them. This applies as
much in spoken language as in writing, though whether the development
of systematic ways of constructing names for numbers preceded the devel-
opment of writing is not clear. Secondly, it seems obvious (though again,
when it became obvious is not clear) that it makes sense to use the char-
acteristics of numbers to guide us in devising a systematic representation.
Thus if we can see a new number as the sum of two numbers for which we
already have names, then it might make sense to use the names of the two
known numbers to construct a name for the new one. Of course this requires
that the idea of addition is already understood, but the early uses of writing
suggest that this was the case.
More generally, we would like the representations of numbers (verbal
and/or written) to help us with the kinds of operation that we want to
do with them. This general principle will take a long time to reach its fi-
nal fruition—the Arabic number system with which we are familiar today.
But in the meantime, early literate civilisations such as the Babylonians and
Egyptians developed number systems of some sophistication, and the great
mathematicians of classical Greece explored some of the ramifications.
14 B C, Before Computers

Systems of numbering

Before the alphabet took hold, numbering systems tended to use special
symbols. The basic principle, that you have a symbol for each number of
a special set, and indicate intermediate numbers (which don’t have their
own symbols) as sums (additions) of these basic numbers, was established
by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and remained in place until the Arabic
system took over. In the Sumerian system, the special numbers were one,
six, ten, sixty, six hundred, and so on. Our 60-minute hour is supposed to be
a relic of that system. But we are now much more familiar with the Roman
system, where the special numbers are one, five, ten, fifty, etc.
By the time of the Romans, the alphabet was established, and they did
not need to devise special symbols for their special numbers—they followed
the general principle of re-using their existing small set of alphabetic sym-
bols for a new purpose. However, as we shall see later, this is not a true
alphabetic solution to the number-representation problem.
The Greeks actually had a variety of number systems. One of their meth-
ods had separate symbols for each of the numbers from one to ten, then
twenty, thirty, forty, etc. This required 28 symbols to reach what we would
now call 900, allowing numbers up to 999. This was a rather profligate use
of symbols—they used the letters of their alphabet, but had to borrow a cou-
ple of extra ones from someone else’s alphabet. Also, 999 was rather early
to stop, so they then repeated the alphabet but with a special extra mark
on each letter, to get them up to 999,999. But it gave a rather more compact
representation of numbers than the Roman one.
A characteristic of all these number systems is that they run out. A point
is reached where you have exhausted all the allowable combinations of all
the defined symbols, and simply cannot represent the next number (with-
out, that is, defining a new symbol for the purpose). Probably this did not,
in general, bother the pragmatic Romans—as engineers and administrators
they had the range of numbers that they required, and abstract notions of
numbers which they could not represent, but would not need in any case,
were of no concern.
But the limitation has some interesting Roman consequences. Consider
for example Julius Caesar’s books about his military campaigns. His armies
or smaller forces are always measured in cohorts and legions, rather than in
 1. In the beginning. . . 15

men. Those were, no doubt, convenient units to use; but it is also the case
that Caesar would have had difficulty in expressing the size of his army
as a number of men. The Roman system contained both names and sym-
bols up to M (1000), and could therefore represent numbers up to 3999: if
we wanted to represent 4000 in the usual Roman system, we would need a
symbol for 5000, just as 400 (CD) makes use of the symbol for 500 (D). But
a legion was between 3000 and 6000 men, and Caesar normally had several
legions under his command. When he referred to the armies against him,
he tended to use a mixture of numbers and words, such as ‘LX mille’—60
thousand, or 60,000. This is not unlike the modern habit of mixing numbers
with the words ‘million’ or ‘billion’, but is forced on Caesar. In effect, he has
to treat ‘one thousand men’, in words, as a single unit and then apply the
usual numerical system.
However, these limitations on all such number systems most certainly
did bother the great classical Greek mathematicians. Archimedes, in the
third century BCE, was particularly exercised, and invented his own num-
ber system which allowed him to express seriously large numbers (as an il-
lustration, he calculated the number of grains of sand in the universe). But
it was still essentially limited by an upper bound on the numbers that could
be represented, albeit a very large upper bound.
A true alphabetic solution to the number representation problem eluded
even the Greeks. It had to wait another millennium or so.

The great Hindu invention

The positional notation that we use today, whereby the same symbol can
stand for many different numbers (for example, a "1" can mean one or ten
or one hundred, depending on its position) was the revolution we needed.
This in turn depended on the zero, as a position marker for an otherwise
empty position.
This invention was made by Hindu mathematicians in about the sev-
enth century CE. Though once again, I am summarising with gay abandon
a complex and not fully understood process, which may have occurred in-
dependently in different places at different times, and/or may have been
influenced by earlier ideas—there is a great account in the book by Robert
Kaplan, The Nothing That Is. The idea that reached the House of Wisdom in
16 B C, Before Computers

Baghdad, then the centre of the civilised world, was formulated as a gen-
eral system of both numbering and arithmetic, and re-exported to the rest
of the world as the Arabic system—as described in Jim Al-Khalili’s Pathfind-
ers. One of the masters of this formulation was the Persian mathematician
Al-Khuwārizmi, whose name has given us the English word algorithm.
The Arabic system provided for numbers what the alphabet had pro-
vided for words—a way of representing any number, including those for
which no-one has yet found a need. The ten decimal digits and the posi-
tional notation allow for the representation of any positive whole number.
The Arabs also had a precursor to our (relatively modern) decimal point or
comma for representing the decimal part of a number—allowing the same
rules of arithmetic to apply to non-whole numbers too. It also provided a
simple set of rules for arithmetic operations, again applicable to all num-
bers, which, stood us in good stead a millennium later when we began to
try to mechanise arithmetic.
Following the original revolutionary invention of writing, these two rev-
olutionary and not at all obvious inventions, the alphabet and the Arabic
numbering system, are two of the cornerstones of the developing technol-
ogy of information. In ways that are quite unimaginable to their progenitors,
they will reverberate down the centuries: they will give us ideas, and allow
us to think things, that would otherwise have been, quite simply, beyond
our ken.
 2. Sending messages: the post

Why do we want to write things down? Here are some (not exclusive) rea-
sons:

• in order to organise our thoughts

• in order to remember (remind our future selves)

• in order to communicate with someone else

• in order to communicate with many other people.

The first, organising information, I will discuss later, in Chapter 6. The sec-
ond, writing as a memory device, I will simply assume. This chapter and
the next two are devoted to the idea of sending messages, over space and
(usually of necessity) over time. We are concerned with the occasions when
the author of the message and the intended recipient(s) are apart, and the
message cannot be passed by simply talking across a room.

Messengers

You don’t absolutely need to write something down in order to send a mes-
sage to another person. A human intermediary, who can remember a spo-
ken message, go and find the recipient, and repeat it (exactly or in essence)
is of course a perfectly plausible means, which has been used no doubt since
spoken language was invented and continues to this day. Many early soci-
eties relied heavily on such messengers.
But one of the reasons why writing is so important is exactly that we no
longer need to rely on the memory of a single messenger. This method is
hardly feasible if the message might have to pass through many intermedi-
aries before it gets to the recipient. If the sender can write the message or

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

18 B C, Before Computers

cause it to be written down, then she can be much more confident that the
recipient will receive what she intended, and not some garbled version.
Once you have a system of writing, it is possible to think about system-
atising the transmission of messages.

The medium

One limitation in this regard is the medium used for writing.

The clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia were not terribly suitable for
carrying around over distances—they were better suited to local record-
keeping, individual memory or message transmission over time rather than
space. Carved stone is even harder to move around (despite the story of
Moses bringing the tablets down from the mountain). So serious letter-
writing had to await the invention of a suitably transportable medium.
Over the millennia, several such media have found use. But pride of
place in the classical world belongs to papyrus. Made from the dried leaves
of the papyrus plant, this medium could be used to construct very substan-
tial messages—whole books were written on papyrus scrolls.
From the time of its invention by the Egyptians, probably in the fourth
millennium BCE, the papyrus scroll acquired a huge importance in the af-
fairs of empires. If you want to run an empire extending over a large area,
you need effective means of administering it. One requirement is effective
communication. In a relatively static hierarchical society such as the Egyp-
tian, where you may have been able to rely on the people in power locally
knowing how they were supposed to run their domains, this may not be
such a critical requirement. But if you want a dynamic, highly interactive
structure, this requires systematic communications. The obvious example
here is the Roman Empire.
Many other empires, both earlier and later than the Roman, failed at
least in part because they did not have such systematic communications.
Of course other things are also necessary, but it is hard to exaggerate the
importance of this component. Furthermore, if you are dependent for this
on the papyrus plant, control of the papyrus supply becomes a vital factor
in the survival of your empire.
 2. Sending messages: the post 19

Roads

The destination of your message may be just across town, but again, if you
have an empire to run, it may be days or weeks away. For a large part of
our history, the best way to send anything (goods or letters) across any dis-
tance involved boat journeys. But boat journeys are slow and perilous—and
they often have to go a long way round. If messengers are to carry your
written message at some speed over great distances, they will need roads.
Some roads are established simply by people walking them, but your bud-
ding empire may need some more reliable and extensive system. Again, the
champions here are the Romans.
The Romans are famous for building roads. Straight, well-made roads
ran the length and breadth of the Roman empire. For whom were they
built? Partly for the soldiers or the administrators: a legion or a governor
doing a turn of duty in a remote province would use the established roads
where possible, though of course the soldiers at least normally had their
main activities in areas not well covered by roads. They may have been
built partly for the tradesmen—Rome depended very heavily on trading,
and some goods were traded over large distances. But trade was primar-
ily a private concern, and the access that the tradesmen had to roads was a
by-product rather than their primary purpose.
But the main reason for the road-building activity of the Romans was for
the messengers. The road network, together with the boat routes across and
around the Mediterranean, formed the primary communications network of
the empire.
In more recent times, for example in the Victorian era, the word ‘com-
munications’ came to refer just as much to the road and rail networks as
to, for example, the postal system. This is no accident. Road and rail, and
the shipping lanes, were as much about communicating information as they
were about moving people and goods.

The Cursus

Efficient empire-wide communication to serve the needs of imperial admin-

istration needs to be highly systematic. An official in Rome who wants to
instruct another official in one of the far-flung provinces will need to entrust
20 B C, Before Computers

his message to a (human) system, with the confidence that it will reach its
destination. Thus was the concept of a postal system born.
Several early empires had postal systems for this purpose; these were
not generally accessible to private individuals, but for the use of govern-
ment only. But, once again, the Roman system introduced by the emperor
Augustus was second to none. Called the Cursus Publicus, it relied on sup-
plies of messengers running or riding stages and fresh horses at each stage.
There were two classes of post—the normal class could be expected to cover
50 miles a day, but urgent letters could go at twice that speed. Its domain
was the whole of the Roman empire, and it played a significant role in the
success of that institution.
When the Roman empire fell apart, and was replaced by many local ad-
ministrations, often warring petty kingdoms, both the system of roads and
the postal system declined too. The kind of speed with which a Roman offi-
cial could get a letter to (say) a governor in Gaul was not rivaled again until
the end of the eighteenth century.
To the east, some five centuries before Augustus, the Persian emperor
Cyrus had initiated a postal system called the Chapar Khaneh. Later, after
the decline of Rome, during the (relatively) Dark Ages in Europe, a system
called the Barı̄d was established in the Islamic world. An account of these
systems is given by Adam Silverstein in Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Is-
lamic World.
Postal systems in the ancient world, being primarily organisations for
the benefit of the rulers and the government, were closely associated with
espionage—one of their main functions was to enable the rulers to discover
all they thought they needed to know about what was going on in their
domains.

The birth of the modern postal system

The Cursus was confined to government business, but in medieval times,

some non-government organisations (some universities, for example) were
large enough to require their own internal messenger services. The idea of
an organisation devoted to providing this service to individuals and other
organisations emerged gradually from this need.
 2. Sending messages: the post 21

The most successful of these private firms, by a long way, was Thurn und
Taxis. This started as a private Italian family business, but in the fifteenth
century, the family acquired from the Hapsburg emperors a licence—in ef-
fect, a state-assigned monopoly—to run all the postal services throughout
the Holy Roman Empire. Thurn und Taxis held this monopoly for a little
over 300 years. The family were variously ennobled by successive emperors
until by the end of the seventeenth century they were princes.
They built a modern and (at its best) highly efficient postal service of a
sort we might recognise today. They carried government and private letters,
and had an extensive distribution system based, like the Cursus, on horse
relays with staging posts between the major cities of the empire. It was they
who, by the end of the eighteenth century, could rival or beat the kinds of
mail delivery speed established by the Cursus.
But, again like the Cursus, they depended on the authority of the state
they served. As stronger national governments developed in Europe, they
saw a foreign-run postal service as a threat to their own control over their
communications. Countries began to develop their own postal systems. Is-
sues concerning the relation between government and private enterprise, all
too familiar today, complicated the development process. On the one hand,
some governments preferred a system that was run entirely for their bene-
fit, not serving the public in any way. On the other hand, they were not too
keen on any purely private postal service being outside their control. One of
the concerns, which again is familiar today, was with security—just think of
the horrors that might arise if conspirators were able to communicate freely
by letter!
What gradually emerged as the standard approach was to have a
government-owned and -run postal monopoly, offering services to the pub-
lic. The postal charges were often treated by government as a form of taxa-
tion, which could be raised to pay for a war or whatever else was required.
A good example of this ambiguous relationship was the experience of
William Dockwra in London in the late seventeenth century. He organised
a private ‘penny post’ in London, which quickly became very successful.
But its success alarmed the authorities, and they (almost equally quickly)
took it over and merged it with the public service.
22 B C, Before Computers

The Penny Post

Actually, one of the most significant subversive uses of the public postal sys-
tem arose from the cost of sending a letter. The usual system of payment was
for the sender to send the letter without payment, and for the postman to
collect the required fee from the recipient on delivery. The fee could be high
and quite complex, depending not only on weight but also on the distance
travelled and perhaps on the route taken. But it was not hard to work out
that simple messages could be coded, for example, by the way the name and
address of the recipient was written on the envelope. So when the letter was
delivered, the recipient could look at it and then return it to the postman,
refusing to pay, on grounds of poverty or whatever—having nevertheless
understood the message from the sender.
The obvious solution to this problem, from the point of view of the au-
thorities, was to force prepayment. But it took an enlightened visionary,
Rowland Hill (together with another who will reappear later in this book,
Charles Babbage), to see that was only part of the solution. Prepayment
would actually make the system much more efficient anyway, because de-
livery would not depend on the postman finding the recipient at home. Hill
not only understood this, but also realised that the cost of delivering a let-
ter depended very little on distance, and that a cheaper service would be
used very much more widely. When the Penny Post, with pre-payment
postage stamps, was introduced in Britain 1840, the effect on the postal ser-
vice was immediate and far-reaching. It became the universal communica-
tions medium, accessible to everyone.

The Universal Postal Union

National postal organisations such as the British Post Office gradually uni-
fied and simplified their own internal services, but international mail was a
different matter. In order to send an international letter, you would have to
know the route and how it was going to be charged by the various carriers
involved. Certain national post offices had bilateral agreements with each
other, but these might involve a specific fee for each letter. A letter might
have to cross several countries in the course of its journey.
All this complication was swept aside in 1874, with the Bern agreement
 2. Sending messages: the post 23

based on Heinrich von Stephan’s proposal for a General Postal Union. This
laid the foundation for what came to be called the Universal Postal Union.
This was a union of national postal services, agreeing to carry each other’s
international mail to its destination without further charge or accounting
on specific items. Initially twenty-two countries joined, but very rapidly it
expanded to include practically all postal services throughout the world.
This was a truly revolutionary move, a supra-national agreement to al-
low a simple system of point-to-point communication across the globe. Any-
one could send a letter to anyone else in the world (well, at least to an ad-
dress, a location). The Universal Postal Union must be regarded as one of
the great triumphs of civilisation.

The heyday of post

Universal literacy, with the help of the Penny Post and the Universal Postal
Union, ushered in a golden age for postal services. Letter-writing took off
as never before. Before radio, before the telephone, long before the arrival
of the Internet, the world became a connected place.
From the vantage-point of the twenty-first century, when we have such a
variety of ways of communicating, and when the postal service has largely
degenerated into a mechanism for delivering purchased goods and spam,
it is difficult to imagine the importance of post in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. It is also a little difficult to get a grasp of how efficient
the service could be. The following letter to the editor of The Times of Lon-
don reveals not only the efficiency (despite the author’s protestations to the
contrary), but also the importance attached to it:

May 25th , 1881

Sir,—I believe that the inhabitants of London are under the impres-
sion that letters posted for delivery within the metropolitan district
commonly reach their destination within, at the outside, three hours
of the time of postage. I myself, however, have constantly suffered from
irregularities in the delivery of letters, and I have now got two instances
of neglect which I should really like to have cleared up. I posted a let-
ter in the Gray’s Inn post office on Saturday, at half-past 1 o’clock, ad-
dressed to a person living close to Westminster Abbey, which was not
delivered till next 9 o’clock the same evening, and I posted another letter
24 B C, Before Computers

in the same post office, addressed to the same place, on Monday morn-
ing before 9 o’clock, which was not delivered till past 4 o’clock in the
afternoon. Now, sir, why is this? If there is any good reason why letters
should not be delivered in less than eight hours after their postage, let
the state of the case be understood; but the belief that one can commu-
nicate with another person in two or three hours whereas in reality the
time required is eight or nine, may be productive of the most disastrous
consequences.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant. K.

I would not be surprised if the letterboxes which K used are still there,
but if you were to post a letter nowadays, at Gray’s Inn at 1.30 p.m. on a
Saturday, it would not even be collected from the letterbox before Monday.
The importance of the postal system in the late 19th and early 20th century
is indicated by the following statistic: at the start of the First World War, the
totality of the Civil Service in Britain was approximately 168,000 people, of
whom about 124,000 were employed by the Post Office. During the First
World War, the postal service contributed greatly to the public perception
of the war, at least for those who were in correspondence with soldiers at the
front, which was very far removed from the picture provided by the news
media. This sense is vividly conveyed in Vera Britain’s book Testament of
Youth. In a way, despite the inevitable delays of post in wartime, it evokes
the kind of feeling of immediacy achieved by television in later conflicts such
as Vietnam.
In the 1930s, the British General Post Office produced a wonderful doc-
umentary called Night Mail. With words by W. H. Auden and music by
Benjamin Britten, this short film celebrated a mail-train journey the length
of Britain, and at the same time caught the essence of the postal service, as
it was seen by the public who used it.

The decline of post

Old media seldom die, but they change. A succession of developments (tele-
graph, telephone, email and so on) have taken their toll on the concept of a
postal service. Paper documents are still important, but for different reasons
than those which inspired the letter-writers and -readers of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. No doubt there are still people in the world who
 2. Sending messages: the post 25

wait on the arrival of the post in the same way that K or Vera Britain did,
but this particular manifestation of the global village is surely in decline.
 3. Sending messages: electricity

A new medium

The ideal method of sending messages over a distance would not involve
the physical transfer of an object at all. The use of bonfire beacons is an old
method suitable for a limited number of tasks; slightly more sophisticated
is the smoke signal. Both of these have a venerable history. A more re-
cent (eighteenth-century) idea was semaphore, sometimes used for Naval
signalling, using hand-held flags or mechanical arms, involving a simple
alphabetic code. But major developments in this direction arose from the
evolving understanding of electricity. The idea of using electricity for point-
to-point communication is almost as old as the serious investigation of elec-
tricity as a physical phenomenon. It is certainly older than the notions of
using electricity for power, heat or light.
Various systems of signaling using electrical methods were proposed in
the early nineteenth century, but the one that had the greatest impact was
the system of telegraphy devised by Samuel Morse. This, unlike the earlier
proposals, used just one wire, but had a distinct electrical code for each let-
ter of the alphabet. This is the famous Morse Code, consisting of dots and
dashes (short and long signals), still occasionally in use today. (At the time
of writing this paragraph, one particular brand of mobile phone has, as its
default audible signal for the arrival of a text—that is, an SMS—message,
the letters SMS in Morse code.)
Morse’s electrical system, transmitting codes down a wire, takes us one
small step further from visual signals, which is nevertheless a giant leap
towards the huge developments of the late twentieth century.
We might also notice how the invention of the alphabet, some three mil-
lennia earlier, paved the way. Given that we can construct any message using
only the letters of the alphabet (perhaps with a few extra characters such as

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

28 B C, Before Computers

digits and some punctuation), the notion of using a similar small number of
codes, which may be manipulated by some physical mechanism, is simple
but revolutionary. Now we can transmit any message in our language, via
writing and the alphabet, using on-off electrical pulses sent along a single
wire. It’s enough to blow the mind.

The telegraph

As Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet shows us, Morse’s telegraph
became, around the middle of the nineteenth century, a huge success—not
just commercially, but in revolutionising our view of the world in general
and communication in particular. Suddenly the speed of physical commu-
nication, messengers carrying messages, was no longer the limiting factor
in long-distance communication. The achievements of the Cursus Publicus
and Thurn und Taxis no longer mattered. Provided you had a wire run-
ning from A to B, messages could be delivered to all intents and purposes
instantly. And wires there were. Networks of telegraph wires spread like
wildfire across the developed (and sometimes the less developed) portions
of the globe.

But what is most extraordinary about this process is the way in which
people suddenly discovered the necessity for fast communication, and em-
braced the medium. Just as the far cheaper and easier penny post was at
the same time inviting vast numbers of people to enter the letter-writing
age, other groups were discovering the wonders of instant communication.
Governments, military authorities, businessmen and news organisations all
found it was a medium that they could not do without.

There was never any serious competition between the postal system and
the telegraph. The needs for communication expanded to such an extent
that both media could simultaneously grow at a prodigious rate. We have
not yet reached the heyday of post; the telegraph will in the end turn out to
be a rather short-lived medium, because of real competition from the tele-
phone and other media.
 3. Sending messages: electricity 29

Printing telegraph

We are now well into the period of Victorian invention, and many challenges
were quickly recognised and taken up by the inventors of the time. Morse
telegraphy required a human operator at each end, to make the conversion
both ways between the written letters and the dot-dash code. How much
easier it would be, people realised, to have machines do these conversions.
Although the eventually successful printing telegraph service, the telex,
was a twentieth-century development (actually later than the telephone),
there were several nineteenth-century precursors that achieved some de-
gree of success. One of these was due to David Hughes. In the tradition of
inventors of the time, he was a polymath; he was eventually honoured as
a physicist, and has a Royal Society medal named after him. But in 1855,
when he was a professor of music at a college in the United States, he de-
vised a system with a keyboard and a printing wheel. The sender would
type out the message letter by letter on marked keys, and the receiving ma-
chine would print the message on a sort of ticker tape.
The image that comes to mind from this description is probably the
typewriter-like keyboard with which we are now so familiar. I will be talk-
ing about the QWERTY keyboard later, but the modern typewriter had not
yet been invented in 1855. However, Hughes took his inspiration from the
much older keyboard tradition with which he personally was particularly
familiar. His keyboard, with alternate black and white keys, looks like noth-
ing so much as that of a piano.
In fact he was not the only, nor even the first, person to consider using
something like a piano keyboard for keying alphabetic messages. A slightly
earlier device in the vein of printing telegraph was developed by Royal Earl
House—his keyboard too was piano-like. In truth, until the invention of the
QWERTY keyboard late in the nineteenth century, the piano and its prede-
cessors defined the canonical idea of keyboard control.

Telephony

Even better than writing a message out on a keyboard and then reading
a printed version at the other end, would be to speak and hear it. Again,
this was a challenge to which the Victorians rose with enthusiasm. In 1876,
30 B C, Before Computers

Alexander Graham Bell won that particular race by a short head over Elisha
Gray. David Hughes was not involved in this race, but he did, within two
years of Bell’s patent, invent the carbon microphone. The era of the tele-
phone had begun.
But quite quickly, a new dimension was added. The telegraph was a spe-
cialist point-to-point messaging system rather like the postal system, with
wires strung between offices that acted as gateways for the messages. With
telephones, everyone wanted a piece of the action.
The wires had to go to people’s homes, and the gateway became the
switchboard or exchange, operated by a human being. Directing calls in-
volved connecting one bit of wire to another, via a plugboard. Although
manual exchanges continued for a long time, and are familiar to us through
films, already in the nineteenth century people were devising automatic ex-
changes.
The earliest automatic exchanges were of the rotary type. The rotary
telephone dial in effect controlled a rotary switch, which moved in synchro-
nisation with the dial. In this system, the number dialled was not held in
the exchange (except implicitly in the position of the dials), and not used
in any other way. However, already by the 1930s there were exchanges that
remembered the dialled digits in a register (like the register in a calculator)
and had embedded decision rules about how to route different numbers.
This is a form of information processing to which I will return.
Over the course of a century of development of the telephone system,
we eventually reached a universal addressing system—a system of num-
bers defining not only the line on the local exchange, but the exchange
itself, then the city or wider area, then the country—so that by the late
twentieth-century, a full telephone number represents a single household
on the planet. This is comparable to a postal address, somewhat less trans-
parent to a human reader but more amenable to mechanical manipulation.

Radio

By this time, of course, we also had radio: wireless electrical messages. Ra-
dio broadcasting will be discussed further below, but it was also used for
direct one-to-one communication from very early. Point-to-point radio, ra-
dio telephones, international telephone calls routed via satellite, and mobile
 3. Sending messages: electricity 31

cellphones, all make use of this medium.

This is a slightly curious development, because radio is naturally a
broadcasting medium. That is, a message transmitted by radio can be re-
ceived by anyone within range and with a suitable receiver. Basically, in
order to use it for point-to-point communication, we have to subvert its pri-
mary nature. Later, we will see other examples of subverting media to serve
other purposes than their nature would suggest.
The technicalities of constructing a temporary link between two tele-
phones for the purpose of making a call (now more like a virtual link than
a physical wire) have of course become somewhat more complex, and de-
pend heavily on other late-twentieth-century developments in information
technology. The addressing system in the form of telephone numbers has
been pushed a little further—now, in the mobile phone age, it designates a
unique individual on the globe. Well, that is a slight exaggeration—really
it designates a unique phone, but given the present-day spread and use of
mobile phones, it’s coming close.

Email and text messaging

Perhaps the medium that has provided the closest rival to the postal service
is electronic mail. Email systems followed the development of computer
networks in the last third of the twentieth century, but really took off with
the Internet in the 1990s.
Email is also similar to post in that a one-way message is self-
contained—a package with an address on the outside. It does not matter
much to the sender or recipient what route it takes; it may go through any
number of switches, and some delay at some of the switches is not gener-
ally critical. Nevertheless, it took email some time to learn the lessons that
the postal services had learnt in the previous century, namely that what was
required was a universal addressing system and transparent interfaces be-
tween the networks. If you wanted to send a long-distance or international
email in the 1970s, you would have had to specify the route to be taken, or at
least the main staging-posts along the way. One system used the so-called
‘bang notation’, leading to an address like this:

utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!ihnss!ihuxp!grg
32 B C, Before Computers

This means that I want to reach a user called grg, whose mail account
lives on a machine called ihuxp—but my machine does not know about
ihuxp. Instead, I tell my mail system to send it to a machine called utzoo,
which should forward it to decvax, which should send it on to harpo—with
three more intermediate machines before it reaches its destination. In order
to send the email, I have to know the route. Furthermore, each staging-post
would add another address wrapper around my message, so that even a
short message would arrive encased in several layers of headers.
But the Internet and the universal addressing system eventually arrived,
and the niche occupied by email in the assembly of communication methods
open to us has expanded vastly. For all its similarities to conventional mail,
it turns out to have some substantial differences also, and its usage reflects
these differences. For example, while it is possible to write the kinds of let-
ters one used to send by post, it is also possible to use email in a much more
informal and immediate way—to hold conversations by email that have at
least some of the characteristics of spoken conversation.
Another medium that has emerged in the last few years is text messag-
ing. This is a most interesting development, because it has no obvious pre-
cursor. As a result, the niche that it has now come to occupy was practically
invisible until texting started to become popular (although the informal end
of the email spectrum provides some clues). But it shows clearly that de-
spite the huge and obvious advantages of speech, written communication
has some distinct advantages of its own. It might be hard for generations not
brought up with it to recognise texting as a written form of communication;
nevertheless, that is what it is.

A note on electricity

In this chapter, I have regarded electricity purely as a ‘medium’ for commu-

nication. Although we have known tiny bits about electricity for millenia,
the serious scientific study of the phenomenon did not begin until around
the seventeenth century. But in the nineteenth, we began to discover some
of its uses. And our love affair has proceeded at pace. By the end of the
nineteenth century, we have made serious inroads into electrical engineer-
ing, and have begun to think of it as a resource with many functions. In the
twentieth century, it will come to be seen as a vital service to which everyone
 3. Sending messages: electricity 33

should have access, with a status almost comparable to the supply of fresh
water. Nowadays I have a plethora of electrical devices, and the expectation
(even if I am occasionally disappointed) that I can get the electricity needed
to run them anywhere in the world, in a standardised form.
And then in the twentieth century our understanding of electricity
spawns a monstrous offspring—electronics. Already by 1883 we have pho-
tosensors; then the thermionic valve (1904), the flip-flop circuit (the origi-
nal electronic form of a single-bit memory, 1918), the transistor (1947), in-
tegrated circuits (1958), a whole variety of sensors, and so on. In the elec-
tronics era, the uses of electricity multiply a thousandfold, leading up to and
including the entire digital world.
A full exploration of this aspect of our history would take me too far
away from the main themes of this book—though it certainly counts as one
of the necessary precursors of the digital age.

The connected world

Now, at the beginning of the third millennium CE, we have a range of

methods of communicating with others, which is unparalleled in history.
Whether the person we wish to communicate with is in the next office, across
the street, across town, the other side of the country, or half way round the
world, we have ways to make our messages heard. With a variety of media,
at least three global addressing systems, and transparent routing, we are
spoilt for choice. In this sense at least, it’s a small world.
In the next chapter, we go back again in time, in order to consider the
idea of broadcasting.
 4. Spreading the word

At the beginning of Chapter 2, I talked about writing things down in order to

communicate with many other people. We might describe this as broadcast-
ing. For much of recorded history, the notion of broadcasting was strongly
distinguished from point-to-point messaging. If the originator (a) wants
many people to receive the communication, and (b) does not know who all
the people might be, the message needs to be thrown out in some sense,
like seeds being spread on a field. We will see at the end of this chapter how
this distinction might be blurring or even disappearing, and younger peo-
ple brought up in the era of social media might even find it a little strange
or unfamiliar. But its historical importance is huge.
Further, the word broadcast is usually associated with radio, and its
derivative, television, because of the way the medium of radio is, by its
nature, broadcast into the ether. But long before the discovery of radio, a
number of technologies were harnessed to the task of spreading messages
among many people.
A proclamation read by a crier in a town square is a form of broadcast-
ing (it may be more or less effective in that role, depending on the envi-
ronment and social structure). Another method that was used extensively
in the Middle Ages and for much longer was the pulpit. This mechanism
provided not only for broadcasting to a local community, but also allowed a
well-organised church to co-ordinate its message across a country or region.
A latter-day form of proclamation, which broadcasts a message to a local
community, many of whom might be expected to visit the church or town
square, is the poster on a wall. Since the twentieth century, particularly in
the west, we have associated posters with commercial advertising, but in
some environments they have acquired quite different connotations of pub-
lic debate. For example, during the cultural revolution in China in the 1960s,
major political arguments were conducted through the medium of posters

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

36 B C, Before Computers

on walls.
However, this mode requires a community in which literacy is
widespread. During that much longer period of human history in which
literacy was a relatively specialised accomplishment, broadcasting via writ-
ing took various forms.

The library

The first great mechanism, device, technology that was brought to bear on
the problem of broadcasting was the library.
Nowadays we see libraries in various lights—as repositories or archives,
as a form of entertainment, as part of the system of education, and so on.
Fundamental to these ways of understanding the notion of a library is that
libraries, over time, make written information available to many people.
This is, indeed, a major technology. A piece of writing in the pre-
computer world can, by its very nature, normally be read by, at most, one
person at a time (of course a huge poster may be read by several people at
once, but this is the exception). Furthermore, writing on paper is normally
in the possession of one person. That person may read it more than once, or
may lend it or pass it on to a friend or acquaintance—but this is a very lim-
ited form of broadcasting. If broadcasting is seen as desirable, a much more
efficient mechanism is required. Given that, in the era we are discussing,
we do not yet have the technology for multiple reproduction of a written
text, we need to establish a place where people may come and consult dif-
ferent writings, and then to make sure that that place contains all the texts
that people might want to consult. Placing a book in a library is broadcast-
ing it—making it available to many people over its potential lifetime, people
you do not know.
Libraries have been around for quite a while—in particular, for at least
two millennia prior to Gutenberg’s invention of movable metal type and the
start of the mass printing of books. Indeed, in some sense, libraries were all
the more important because there were no mass-produced copies of books.
A well-organised archive of clay tablets dating from around 2250 BCE was
found at Elba in Syria. We know that there was a library in Assur-bani-pal’s
palace at Nineveh, in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, when it was sacked in 612
BC—more of that below, as of the Royal Library of the Ptolemys at Alexan-
 4. Spreading the word 37

dria. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which I mentioned in the first

chapter in connection with the Hindu/Arabic numbering system, was es-
sentially a library and a meeting-place that scholars from all over that world
came to visit.
The model that I shall take for my description of the functioning of li-
braries as broadcasting devices is that of the medieval monasteries in Eu-
rope. In the period (the very early Middle Ages, or as they used to be called,
the Dark Ages) after the fall of the Roman empire and before the recovery of
European civilisation, the monastery system provided the major repository
of knowledge and the resources for its spread—the universities came along
a little later. But first, a bit about attitudes to libraries.

Burning the library

When Nineveh was overrun (as with Elba more than a millennium earlier),
the invaders who sacked the palace also burned down the library it con-
tained. Almost certainly, they had no knowledge that what they were burn-
ing was a library—the palace was the seat and symbol of power, but the
library was simply part of the palace. As it happens, the burning of the li-
brary turned out to be one of the greatest acts of cultural preservation in his-
tory. The books in the library used the medium of the time and place—clay
tablets. Thousands of these clay tablets were baked hard in the fire, and
then buried in ash and sand, and as a result can be seen to this day, in the
British Museum. We have, from that event, among many other treasures,
the best version of the earliest known written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This story was old already, probably a millennium or more, but the survival
of the Nineveh version is one of those extraordinarily valuable accidents of
history.
By, say, half a millennium or so later, library burning had acquired an al-
together different character and meaning. The first emperor of China, in
the second century BCE, systematically burnt books because of the sub-
versive ideas they contained—a mode of behaviour repeated many times
over the following centuries, including most famously the library at Alexan-
dria. The notion of a library had changed: it had become a repository of
knowledge, not a building or an administrative archive, and furthermore
the technologies of the time (such as papyrus) were very susceptible to fire.
38 B C, Before Computers

If you happened to regard knowledge as a bad thing, subversive in some

sense—any knowledge or just some of the particular knowledge held in the
library—then one recourse open to you was to burn it.
The story goes that the library at Alexandria was subject to this kind
of attack, possibly more than once in the early Christian era (a time when
subversion of established ideas was not treated lightly). By this time the per-
petrators would have known perfectly well what they were burning. Apart
from burning down the building, they would (still according to the story)
form vigilante patrols to seek out books that had somehow escaped or been
rescued from the flames, and burn them as well. This brings to mind Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, about a future world in which the function of ‘fire-
men’ is exactly to root out and burn books. This may be fiction, but some
of the attitudes it represents have existed in the real world for a couple of
millennia.
Actually, the current consensus is that the story of the burning of the
Alexandria library is essentially myth. But even as myth, it supports my
argument. It was told (certainly from the very early Christian era) as a cau-
tionary tale—burning a library is at the very least an act of cultural vandal-
ism. At its worst, it is an attack on knowledge itself.

The medieval scholar

In Europe, scholarship was associated with religious life. If you wanted to

study, you would join a monastic order and seek in that environment the
teachers and teachings you would need. And while personal teaching is,
of course, as necessary as it has always been, many of the teachings since
classical times now reside in books. Your monastery library would contain
copies of some of these books.
But every single one has been laboriously copied by hand. While you
might eventually hope to write a book yourself, other duties associated with
the spread of knowledge may intervene. You may have to undertake ardu-
ous journeys to other monasteries to consult books that your library does
not hold. And above all, you may have to copy out books by hand, and
transport them to other places. For many monks, indeed, copying out other
books would be the nearest they would ever get to writing a book.
The business of copying books by hand and carrying them from one li-
 4. Spreading the word 39

brary to another was a major occupation of medieval scholarship. At some

places and times it acquired an almost industrial flavour. The normal way of
copying a book ties up both the original being copied and the monk-scribe
for a considerable period, and only produces one extra copy. In one or two
monasteries, possessing particularly valuable and sought-after books and
many scribes, it was possible to go in for a form of mass-production. A sin-
gle reader would read the book aloud, and a number of scribes would take
it down as dictation. Thus many copies could be produced simultaneously.
So when, in the fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s form of printing came
along, in some sense the western world was ready and waiting.

Printing and publishing

The ability to reproduce written material exactly, in multiple copies, by me-

chanical means, was the second great invention to change the face of broad-
casting utterly. Once again, I am indebted to John Man’s The Gutenberg Rev-
olution for this account.
Gutenberg is credited with this invention in Europe, with the proviso
that many aspects of printing had previously been invented in the Far East
(Gutenberg was probably not aware of this work). From the ninth cen-
tury, documents were being printed in China, at first with a specially carved
wooden printing block for each page, but later with a system of movable
type. Individual characters were carved or modelled in clay and stocks of
the common characters were built up; rarer characters had to be specially
made for a page. In one system in use in the eleventh century, the charac-
ters chosen to make up a page were temporarily fixed in resin in a metal
frame.
We may note the characteristics of Chinese versus European languages,
which might help or hinder this process. Chinese characters are all of the
same size, with no breaks between words. Thus the arrangement in the
frame is simple—each printed line contains the same number of characters,
and the sequence may be broken anywhere for a new line (the same applies
if the characters are arranged in columns rather than horizontal lines).
However, the Chinese language suffers one considerable disadvantage
compared to European languages: the lack of an alphabet. Chinese has tens
of thousands of distinct characters. Even though the number in daily use
40 B C, Before Computers

is somewhat smaller, there is little possibility of building sufficient stocks

of characters that every new page can simply be made from stock. And cer-
tainly the creation of a mould, from which many new instances of a character
can be cast in metal as required, would have made no sense in the Chinese
context. Both of these were characteristics of the Gutenberg system.
We can think of printing in economic terms, in a way that may help us to
see its revolutionary status. At the core of the industrial revolution is the no-
tion of investing in machinery—to enable the cheap reproduction of goods
for which people will pay. The Chinese system of printing involves a lot
of investment in the individual printed object—the book or whatever—and
might gain a little from a generic investment in printing characters, but not
a lot. Gutenberg’s system involves a significant prior investment, in the
moulds from which the individual characters of type are cast. This makes
the typesetting of different books (as well as different pages of a long book)
very much cheaper.
This precursor of the industrial revolution is remarkable, not only for
being approximately three centuries early, but also for being devoted to the
production of information rather than of more material goods. Well, that’s
an overstatement—books are of course material goods. Nevertheless, their
primary value lies in their content rather than their physical nature.
But the mechanical process of printing was only part of the invention.
The other part was the system of publishing. The real Gutenberg revolution
was to make it possible for the first time for people outside of monasteries or
governments to obtain books, build libraries, and take full part in intellec-
tual life and the construction of mankind’s fund of knowledge. Publishing
joined libraries as a core mechanism for the broadcasting of information.

Publishing

Publishing was not a single datable invention in the way that we might see
printing. On the contrary, the idea of publishing started out as a not-very-
radical extension of what had been common practice before printing. But
the notion has been growing and changing ever since.
When books have to be individually copied, the copies are often (usu-
ally) allocated, their destinations predetermined, before they come into ex-
istence. In the early days of printing, a book would be prepared for a prede-
 4. Spreading the word 41

fined list of ‘subscribers’: people who expected, and probably paid upfront,
to receive a copy. The idea of printing a large number of copies specula-
tively, hoping to be able to sell them, emerged only gradually. Also the
idea of subscription was transformed, over several centuries, into period-
ical publications. In the seventeenth century, scientific journals began. If
you subscribed to such a publication, you would not know exactly what to
expect, but you would have some confidence that it had gone through some
selection process before it got into print. Newspapers and other periodical
publications eventually followed. Even without subscriptions, the publisher
would put out new issues according to some regular schedule, and could
reasonably expect many people to buy regularly.
This model has at different times been used for many kinds of publica-
tion, not necessarily those we would associate with it today. For example,
both the novels of Dickens and the Oxford English Dictionary first appeared
in serialised form. Indeed, the model applies at different levels. If you like
reading novels, there is some chance that you will try a new novel; if you
like Dickens, there is a fair chance that you will try a new Dickens; if you
liked the last instalment of Bleak House, there is a very high chance that you
will try the next.
Far from settling down into some steady state, models of publishing con-
tinue to change radically, as we shall see further below.

Cinema

I will later be considering the technologies associated with images and their
development over the period of slightly less than two centuries since the
invention of photography. However, the role of film as a method of broad-
casting belongs here.
Photography itself is no more a natural broadcasting medium than writ-
ing. The analogue of the library is the art exhibition or gallery, which has
been around for a time and to which photography can contribute. Later,
when it becomes feasible to print them in a similar fashion to the printing
of text, photographs become part of the publishing world. But film is some-
thing different.
In order to see a film, you have to put aside some time and not only
reserve that copy of the film for that period, but also have exclusive use of
42 B C, Before Computers

some equipment—including a screen, which means an entire room. The

film is equally available to everyone in the room; there is no problem about
some people reading faster than others, because the timing is fixed. So it
becomes not only feasible but desirable to have a number of people watching
at the same time.
The model for bringing people together in this way has existed for mil-
lennia already, in the form of the popular show—think, to name but two,
of the great playwrights of classical Greece or the Elizabethan theatre. This
notion gave birth to the cinema show, one of the dominant broadcasting
methods of the early twentieth century. That you can persuade people in
large numbers to congregate at fixed times for the purposes of information
and entertainment, not knowing exactly what they are going to see and hear,
is one of the great social discoveries, repeated over the ages. We can argue
that the great populist politicians of the same period, Hitler included, made
full and effective use of this discovery, and that the church had previously
achieved a similar effect by very different means. But it took the church
several centuries, and required a village culture that was receptive to this
method of communication.
Although cinema is still around as a method of broadcasting, it is clear
that other media such as television not to mention DVDs, the web, and
streaming, which do not require people to gather in one place, have chal-
lenged and largely overcome its domination. In fact exactly the same might
be said of the political rally.

Radio and television

When radio was first developed for communication at the tail end of the
nineteenth century, the fact that it was essentially a broadcast medium (that
is, if you transmit, anyone within range and with a receiver can hear you)
was seen, at least by some people, as a disadvantage. Despite the existence
of broadcasting and broadcasting methods for centuries, for many people,
the model of communication that came most readily to mind was that of the
point-to-point message. The extraordinary success of the telegraph over the
previous 50 years no doubt contributed to this view.
Radio was then, and is now, used for point-to-point communication. But
the medium of radio had a huge effect on the notion of broadcasting. In one
 4. Spreading the word 43

sense, the history of the twentieth century is the history of the development
of broadcasting—embracing cinema, radio and television.
Once again, for both radio and television, we require an audi-
ence—people who listen or watch speculatively, on the grounds that this
particular source has informed, interested or entertained us in the past. This
is a little like the traditional notion of a subscriber, though modified for the
times. To such an extent has mass communication, broadcasting in all its
guises, taken hold in our society that many people spend much of their lives
actively or passively open to incoming communication. We expect, all the
time, to be aurally or visually entertained.

Copying and printing

Meanwhile, at the turn of the nineteenth century and for about three-
quarters of the twentieth, the technologies associated with making multiple
copies of documents proceeded apace. In some respects they went in the
opposite direction from the printing press and the typewriter—instead of
breaking down text into characters, they moved towards the holistic treat-
ment of pages of printable material.
For example, a method of reproducing architects’ plans was invented in
1842 and widely used towards the end of the century. This was the blueprint,
and it has given us a metaphor that has lasted to this day. Original drawings
were made on translucent paper, and were reproduced using a simplified
photographic process (no camera or lens involved). The wax stencil dupli-
cator was invented in the 1880s—in this case, the original wax stencil was
normally prepared on a typewriter although it was also possible to do sim-
ple line drawings with a stylus. Given the developments in photography (to
be explored further in Chapter 7), it was possible to photograph a document
and then make single or multiple prints of it (in the traditional optical-and-
chemical photographic method of printing). In the early twentieth century,
a photostat machine was developed to make single copies automatically. In
this case, the copy was in negative—an original in black type on white paper
became a copy in white type on black paper.
But the major development of the twentieth century in document copy-
ing was the xerographic process. The main principle was patented in 1942,
though the first commercial machine not till 1960. However, it soon made
44 B C, Before Computers

major inroads into the world of business, becoming a ubiquitous presence in

offices around the world. The key was another use of electricity—making an
electrostatic image on a photosensitive plate, from an original document on
paper. The electrostatic image is transferred to paper; black toner particles
stick to the charged areas, and are heat-fused onto the paper. No chemical
processes were involved, and prints were made on ordinary paper.
Although the Xerox machine printed a single copy at a time, it was very
fast, and could easily be used to print multiple copies of an original. Similar
techniques were developed for small printing presses, in a process known
as offset lithography. Lithography itself as a method of printing, using a
prepared flat stone as a printing plate, has a venerable history, having been
discovered at the end of the eighteenth century, and used for example by
the artist Goya to reproduce pictures, in the nineteenth. But offset litho uses
a metal printing plate, normally produced photographically from a paper
original.
Both the xerographic process and offset litho have thrived in the digital
age. Laser printers use a laser to build an electrostatic image on a print-
ing drum, for printing directly to paper. Similar methods can be used to
make a printing plate that can be used for longer print runs. In both cases,
the starting point is a computer file, rather than a paper original. Now, of
course, in the digital age, virtually all digital objects themselves (in the form
of computer files) are indefinitely and accurately copyable, at the touch of a
button.

The web

About a century after the development of radio, we discovered a new

medium. This is the internet: the vast international network of connected
computers. At first glance, the point-to-point wires that make up the inter-
net seem entirely unsuited to broadcasting, in just the same way that radio
seems unsuited to point-to-point messages. But just as we have succeeded in
subverting the medium of radio to serve many different purposes, including
point-to-point messages, we have also subverted the wire-based communi-
cation of the internet to devise many new ways of broadcasting.
Of course not all internet connections are wire-based. In fact more and
more use is made of radio and other wireless media, to connect computers
 4. Spreading the word 45

and other electronic devices, on any scale from centimetres (infrared and
Bluetooth) to metres (wi-fi) to thousands of kilometres. But the almost uni-
versal arrangement is first to subvert the broadcasting medium of wireless
to serve a point-to-point function between two computers (which might be
your phone and the exchange), and then to subvert the multiple point-to-
point connections between multiple computers to serve a broadcasting pur-
pose.
The most obvious manifestation of this technology is the World Wide
Web. But we have to pay particular attention to the type of system that has
emerged as a core component of the web: the search engine. Although the
interlinked nature of the web contributes a great deal to its use as a publish-
ing medium, general search engines like Google and Yahoo! and a whole
host of specialist search systems have turned out to be critical to its success.
We now seem to be entering a new phase of broadcasting. In the web
environment, the reader/listener/viewer/user who used to have to choose
a channel and then take a relatively passive role, is suddenly given vastly
more control over the communication process. This potential recipient can
actively seek out desired information, using a combination of the power of
the search engine, the ability to follow links from one page to another, and
the ability to recognise what is wanted or needed when it appears on the
screen in front of him or her. None of these means is perfect or infallible,
but in combination they are very powerful indeed.
The existing publishers or broadcasters, the owners or controllers of the
older media, have been having great difficulty in coming to terms with this
new medium and its inherent transfer of the locus of control. One battle-
ground in which this conflict is most apparent is that of intellectual property.
In the older publishing environments, publishers liked to think they could
retain control over the uses of their ‘products’ even after they had been sold
to their customers. This view was already somewhat divorced from reality
in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of cheap and easy
copying facilities (the photocopier as discussed above, the tape recorder, the
VCR, the CD/DVD, and finally computer files themselves). But the web has
multiplied the opportunities, and therefore the threats to intellectual prop-
erty, a thousandfold.
46 B C, Before Computers

Blurring the boundaries

The distinction with which I started Chapter 2, between sending a message

to a specific recipient and broadcasting it to anyone who would listen, was
a convenient way to discuss a range of different ideas in communication.
But it was a somewhat loose distinction, which does not stand up well to
detailed examination. The variety of communication methods that we now
have at our disposal make the boundary between the two look even more
fuzzy.
For example, I can write messages for sending to lists or mailgroups. A
mailing list may be something I have created for myself (my siblings, the
members of a committee that I run, etc.). Or it can be a list whose mem-
bership I know exactly; one whose membership I mostly know but which
might include some new members I don’t know; a public list or mailgroup
where I do not expect to know everyone. It might be a list controlled by one
person or one that anybody can join. The knowledge of its existence and/or
eligibility for membership may be restricted or widespread. I can post on a
blog, which, like depositing my book in a library, opens my message to any-
one who finds it in the future. I can tweet a message that might go only to a
very few people, or might be picked up by someone with a large following
and rebroadcast to a cast of thousands.
If I put a page up on the web, it might be for a particular audience or
for general interest. I may link it to some other page that I know is widely
accessed, in order to encourage anybody who is interested to visit. I may,
in various ways, help the general search engines to find it and to index it
in ways I think appropriate, so that a particular but unknown audience can
find it easily. Or I may put up a page in order to make it available to a small
number of people, those whom in general I would expect to be able to iden-
tify. I may, in fact, want to restrict access to those people; this I may try hard
to do, by putting serious obstacles in the way of anyone not in that group
trying to access this page; or I may try this only in a minor way or not at all.
A similar variety of possibilities arises in the world of printed paper doc-
uments. I can easily make any number of copies of anything, from one to
a thousand or a million (depending on my resources); I can give them or
send them to individuals or to a (paper) mailing list; I can leave copies of a
leaflet in some public space, for a limited or a broad audience.
 4. Spreading the word 47

All of these possibilities represent forms of communication somewhere

in the no-man’s-land between one-to-one communication with another in-
dividual and broadcasting.

The connected world—two

The huge variety of communication methods that are now available to us, to
which I referred at the end of the last chapter, extend into the realm of broad-
casting and into the hinterland just described. Few old media have died: we
still have books and journals and newspapers, and radio and television, as
well as the web. We have an extraordinary range of devices and methods to
help us construct, display, transmit, publish, locate, and access messages of
all sorts. Our communication activities, both sending and receiving, can be
highly focussed or widely spread or anything in between.
 5. More about the alphabet

We have seen how important the alphabet was to many later developments
in information technology. Once we have a small alphabet supplying the ba-
sic unit from which we can construct text, many other things become much
easier or simply possible. Out of the inventions I have discussed so far, the
most outstanding examples are movable-type printing and telegraphy.
In this chapter, I will look at four further aspects of the alphabet and al-
phabetic writing. The first is the way in which we separate our words when
we write, mainly with spaces. The second comes directly out of telegra-
phy, and is the idea of encoding letters or characters with electrical pulses.
Eventually, abstracted somewhat from the specific medium, the pulses will
become what we now know as bits (the basic units of digital data, as we will
see later). The third we have seen briefly already, on the Hughes printing
telegraph: it is the keyboard, with each key representing a letter or other
character. Finally, I will discuss the abstract notion of a ‘character’, which
both I and the histories I have described have contrived to over-simplify.
But first, a small anecdote.
My father was an intellectual, academic, writer, born in 1911. He wrote
all his life—books, articles, reviews, letters, poems. His handwriting was
all but unreadable; his main method of writing was the mechanical type-
writer. He was a competent if sometimes inaccurate typist—I believe he
taught himself. Despite being not at all mechanically minded, he came to
some accommodation with his typewriters—he even learnt to change the
ribbon, which readers of a certain age might just remember as a tricky oper-
ation. As a writer, he tended to do a lot of drafting and rewriting. So when,
rather late in his life, relatively cheap word processors became available, he
eventually acquired one. He was probably in his late seventies or eighty.
As with the typewriter, he became quite good at making the word
processor do what he wanted. I don’t remember the make, but it had a

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

50 B C, Before Computers

monochrome green text-only screen, a floppy disk, and a more-or-less con-

ventional keyboard. No mouse; no windows: special combinations of con-
trol keys would do things like move the cursor around the screen, go to the
end of the text, delete whole words, save a document. He would typically
open a document on which he had already done a lot of work, go to the end,
and start adding to it or editing the previous days’ work. But at some point
he mentioned to me a small problem that he had. When opening such a
document and going to the end, he would often find that the cursor was not
actually at the end of the visible text, but considerably further down and to
the right. He would have to use the cursor control keys to get back to where
he wanted to be.
I worked out that, when deleting words at the end of the existing text
(something he did quite often), he would not delete the spaces between
them, or the newline characters—so they would accumulate at the end of
his text. They were of course invisible—as far as he was concerned, all he
had below the text was blank paper. The idea that this apparently empty
space was actually part-full of invisible characters is really a very strange
one—no wonder he had difficulty recognising it. But I only had to point out
to him that he could delete them as well.

Spacing the words

In written English today, as in most writing systems based on alphabets, it

is normal to separate the words that we write, by means of spaces—not to
mention all the other things that may come between words, such as punctu-
ation marks. This comes so naturally to us that not to do so seems perverse
in the extreme. But it was not always the case. Much early writing did not
separate the words at all, and even in the Roman period, although some
writing would mark the word boundaries in some way, this was not always
or consistently applied.
It was not until the sixth and seventh centuries CE that monks in Irish
monasteries began to make systematic use of spacing. This was the period
when the written culture of the West was largely kept alive in monasteries,
in whose libraries books were copied out longhand. A somewhat flip ex-
planation of the introduction of the inter-word space is that the Irish monks
were not very good at Latin (the language in which all books were written).
 5. More about the alphabet 51

But Paul Saenger, in his book Space Between Words: the Origins of Silent Read-
ing, links the practice of word spacing to both the spread of literacy and the
practice of reading silently, in one’s head. Again, this comes so obviously
to us in the universal literacy of the twenty-first century that it is hard to
imagine the absence of this practice. But if we go back to classical Greece
for a moment, writing was seen in quite a different light. A written text was
something a little akin to our present notion of a written musical score: a
script for an expert reader to interpret and read out loud to an audience.
In such a context, the notion of making it easy for readers simply does not
figure.
The spread of the practice of word spacing owes a lot to an English monk.
In the late eighth century, Alcuin, a well-known teacher, was invited by King
Charlemagne of the Franks to come to his court in Aachen, in order to ed-
ucate Charlemagne’s sons. Among very many contributions to the culture
of the court and more widely, Alcuin contributed to the development of a
highly legible script (what we might now call a typeface), Carolingian mi-
nuscule, and wrote a manual of writing style. It covered many of the things
we now take for granted, including punctuation, paragraphs, initial capitals
for sentences—as well as spaces between words.
Charlemagne encouraged and presided over a new period of high cul-
ture, and eventually became the most powerful man in Europe, reigning as
Emperor over a large area. Thus the culture and practices of his court were
spread far and wide, and the use of spaces spread to other scripts and lan-
guages. We will see below how inter-word spacing comes into the era of
telecommunications.

Coding the letters

Although all systems of telegraphy depend on having a small alphabet, the

man who saw the connection most clearly was Samuel Morse, together with
his collaborator Alfred Vail. His great leap forward was to see that we can
take the process one stage further, and work with an ‘alphabet’ of just two
elements: a short and a long electrical pulse, generally referred to as dot and
dash. The step is simple, requiring only a small codebook, and makes it very
much easier to think about electrical processing of text.
Morse and Vail were very conscious of movable type printing as inspired
52 B C, Before Computers

by some of the same considerations. The Morse-coding scheme involved dif-

ferent length codes for different letters, and they had the inspiration, which
is actually the basis for some modern data compression schemes, that it
would be most efficient if the commonest letters had short codes. So Vail
visited a newspaper printer’s workshop to count the stocks of each letter
that they kept—because printers know full well exactly what stocks to keep
to satisfy most printing requirements.
The idea of encoding the letters in this kind of way has gone through a
number of versions since his time. Morse’s short and long pulses were de-
signed to allow humans to do the encoding and decoding easily, but we can
think of them as any pair of distinguishable states (for example up/down,
off/on, black/white). We then need a number of these, spread out in time
or space, in groups. A code book lists each distinct group with the object it
represents—for example, the Morse code book says that the letter A is rep-
resented by the group dash-dot, and D by dash-dot-dot. In this case, the things
we want to represent are the letters of our usual alphabet.
If we think of this pair of elements as itself an ‘alphabet’—in the abstract,
rather than in a specific physical form—what we have is the modern concept
of a ‘bit’, a binary digit. Usually nowadays we think of the two states as 0
and 1. So the letter A in Morse is 01, and D is 100. (Morse code uses differ-
ent numbers of bits for different letters, but most schemes allocate codes in
fixed-size groups.)
Actually, Morse was not the first to use such a binary coding scheme for
letters. The familiar Braille system of embossed dots on paper (invented by
Louis Braille), designed to allow the blind to read with their fingers, pre-
dates Morse code by a decade or so. The dots are in groups of six—that is,
the group is a rectangular array with six positions, in each of which the dot
is either present or absent. The codebook specifies which dots are actually
present for each letter.
The later Baudot code (invented by Émile Baudot) used for telex is a
fixed-length, 5-bit code. A small calculation will show you that this gives
32 different combinations—enough for the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet,
though not for upper and lower case. Actually this is not quite enough, even
if we do not care about case—it does not allow for any punctuation marks
or the digits (Morse has codes for the ten digits and one or two punctuation
marks). For this reason the Baudot scheme includes a shift code—a little like
 5. More about the alphabet 53

the shift key on a keyboard, or more precisely a caps-lock key—which dou-

bles up the meanings of the remaining codes. Braille uses a similar method
for extending the range of characters represented.

Coding for the modern era

As we entered the computer age in the 1960s, new coding systems were
defined. In fact there were two main rival schemes, EBCDIC (pronounced
ebsidik, for IBM machines) and ASCII (pronounced askey, for all other com-
puter manufacturers). I will leave EBCDIC aside, but ASCII is worth some
discussion. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a
more ambitious system than Baudot, and was used for multiple purposes
in the transmission and storage of data in the early computer age, and in
fact is still in use. It is a seven-bit code, allowing a total of 132 different
combinations. These include the 26 letters, in both upper and lower case
(making 52), the ten digits (62), a significant number of punctuation marks
and special symbols (96), and 32 codes reserved for control purposes. Mi-
nor variations on this system were defined for various European languages
with features not seen in English, e.g. accented characters. More system-
atic variation is provided for by the scheme known as ANSI, which started
from ASCII, but has different code pages for different languages. Each code
page provides a complete coding of a set of characters for a language—but
the computer must ‘know’ which code page is in use to interpret ANSI cor-
rectly.
The coding scheme known as Unicode, which is currently becoming the
standard for many purposes, is a much larger set. It includes not only all
the characters for other alphabets than the Latin one, e.g. Greek, Russian
and Arabic, but also characters for non-alphabetic languages, e.g. Japanese,
Chinese. This is a fascinating development: the idea of a coding of charac-
ters could only have developed in the context of a small alphabet; but given
the idea, it now becomes possible to apply it to much larger character sets.
Unicode in its original full form requires 16 or 32 bits per character, but there
are alternative encodings for the same scheme, which allows the old ASCII
character set to be represented as it traditionally was, in eight bits. (Yes, I
know I said seven. ASCII is a seven-bit code, but since most computers op-
erate with multiples of eight bits, ASCII is usually embedded in eight bits.)
54 B C, Before Computers

Although there remain some languages and scripts in the world that
have not yet been incorporated into the scheme, nevertheless we seem (in
the early twenty-first century) to be approaching the state where any text
character in any language can be represented by means of a standard binary
code. This is a remarkable achievement.

The last alphabet

The bit—the binary digit, a character from a two-letter ‘alphabet’—might be

seen as the final stage of a process that began when we started inventing sys-
tems for writing, something like five-and-a-half millennia ago. At the start
of the third millennium CE, we realise that we can represent any record by
means of bits. Not just language, but also, as we shall see in later chapters,
numbers, images, sounds, moving pictures, and so on. The universal alpha-
bet consists of just two symbols, a zero and a one.
But it is not just a matter of representation. We have already seen how
the alphabet has helped us towards new ways of doing things with infor-
mation. Printing, and thus the publishing revolution that followed it; and
Morse code, and the telegraphic revolution that followed that: each of these
would have been inconceivable if we had not invented the alphabet in the
first place. Now, in the new revolution, the biggest changes have come about
in the ways of processing information: of systems and methods and mech-
anisms that operate on information rather in the way that a loom operates
on the raw material of thread to produce something quite different, cloth.
Sending messages was just one such operation; but the possibilities are al-
most limitless.

The strange story of the keyboard

I am writing this text by means of a device that has become so common that it
passes almost without notice: a QWERTY keyboard. This is something else
that the alphabet made possible. Although my keyboard has rather more
than 26 keys, its existence depends on the small number of possible char-
acters—a keyboard with a key for each of the tens of thousands of distinct
Chinese characters is quite inconceivable.
We have had keyboards for musical instruments for centuries. But the
 5. More about the alphabet 55

idea of associating keys with letters of the alphabet (or with numbers, come
to that) has been around since the mid-nineteenth century at least. As we
have already seen, Hughes used a piano-like keyboard for his telex-like ma-
chine. Various attempts were made to develop typewriters from earlier in
that century.
But the development of an effective and useable typewriter had to wait
until a little later. The primary inventor was Christopher Sholes; over a pe-
riod from the 1860s until the 1890s, he and Remington, the company he
worked with and eventually sold out to, pushed the typewriter from the sta-
tus of one of those fascinating but impractical Victorian inventions to that of
a common business accoutrement. To do this, Sholes had to solve a number
of tricky mechanical problems. The design and layout of the keyboard he
produced, as a result of confronting these mechanical problems, is with us
to this day. If Sholes were to walk into your twenty-first-century office, one
of the very few things he would recognise would be the QWERTY sequence
on your computer keyboard. That this is so is even more extraordinary than
you could possibly have imagined.

Figure 2: Basic QWERTY keyboard (with the interleaved bars of a traditional

typewriter). Diagram: the author.

It’s not just the sequence of letters we are talking about here. Look at
Figure 2 (if you have a keyboard close to you, compare it to the diagram).
In particular, look at the way that successive rows of keys are offset from
56 B C, Before Computers

each other. Notice that the ZXCVB line is offset from the ASDFG line by
half a key width; in other words, Z is half way between A and S. Also the
QWERTY line has a half-key offset from the numeral line. But the offset
between the QWERTY line and the ASDFG line is—what?—one-quarter of
a key? But why on earth?
No, it is most certainly not any ergonomic or ease-of-use reason; in fact
it is quite hard to learn to use. The reason is purely mechanical. Imag-
ine that each key perches on the end of a metal bar, which comes out of
the back of the machine (where the paper would have been). These bars
have to be straight and parallel—or their movement would not be true when
pressed—and cannot be allowed to interfere with each other. So they have
to be carefully interleaved. The Q bar goes between the 1 bar and the 2 bar,
and W between 2 and 3, that’s easy. But now the A bar has to go between
the Q bar and the 2 bar, S between W and 3; and Z between 2 and W, and so
on. Now you see why it had to be so.
It is just possible that you have a keyboard that does not follow this off-
set convention. Some PDAs and other small machines, and tablets with
on-screen keyboards, have the QWERTY sequence but use either no offset
at all or a universal half-key offset. But real keyboards invariably use the
Sholes offsets. Even if you are (say) French, and have one of those keyboards
where the letter sequence is AZERTY or some other variation on Sholes, you
will still have those offsets. Some keyboards are split into two parts, for er-
gonomic reasons associated with the way you place your hands; but they
still use the Sholes offsets on each half.
But, you may argue, my keyboard no longer has those metal bars: in-
deed, you have to be of a certain age even to remember their existence.
Nowadays, each key operates its own microswitch, and they could be ar-
ranged in any way we choose. So why do we persist in using these offsets?
Well, this is part of the story.

Keyboard wars

In the 1880s and ’90s, several rival typewriter companies were formed, and
a number of different keyboard arrangements were in use. Another charac-
teristic of the Sholes keyboard is that when they introduced lower as well
as upper case, they did this by means of the familiar shift key—which has
 5. More about the alphabet 57

now, of course, been joined by a few imitators, like the CTRL control and
ALT alternate keys. But at least one of the rival companies just added more
keys, so that upper and lower case letters were on separate keys.
As typewriting became more common, schools to train typists were set
up, and various systems of fingering were devised for the different key-
boards to help typists work faster—the earliest typists were almost certainly
one- or two-finger typists. Claims and counter-claims were made about the
relative speeds of these different combinations. And pretty soon, they be-
came competitions.
An 8-finger method of typing was devised by Margaret Longley, who
ran such a school, in the early 1880s. She applied this method to different
makes of typewriter—but as applied to the Sholes keyboard, it is similar to
the fingering taught today. Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer, used it
with great skill on an early Remington. Another student and later principal
of the Longley school, Louis Traub, used a similar fingering on Caligraph
machine with a six-row keyboard.
The first competition, in 1888, pitched Traub against McGurrin. But
McGurrin had a card up his sleeve. The trick was that he had discovered
that he could memorise the keyboard layout, not looking at the keyboard
while typing, but at the paper (he could also type blindfolded). He invented
what we now know as touch-typing.
This turned out to be the ace. McGurrin thoroughly beat Taub, who
shortly afterwards switched to a Remington. McGurrin went on to win
many more competitions; and the keyboard never looked back. Gradu-
ally, the rival companies adopted the Sholes layout. Having a single sys-
tem, a standard keyboard layout and method of typing, was a big advantage
from the labour point of view. There is a delightful account of this event in
Stephen Jay Gould’s essay The Panda’s Thumb of Technology, published in the
collection Bully for Brontosaurus.
In the twentieth century, it was common to denigrate the Sholes key-
board, and to claim that it is very inefficient and unergonomic for the typist
(even that it was designed to slow the typist down, which is not actually
the case). A rival system was designed on ergonomic grounds, the Dvorak
keyboard, which has the same basic structure as Sholes but a very different
arrangement of the letters. In a series of experiments, it was demonstrated
that Dvorak was easier to learn and faster to type on than Sholes. However,
58 B C, Before Computers

the Sholes keyboard was so well established by then that it proved impossi-
ble to dislodge. In fact, the experiments (rather like the 1888 competition)
were somewhat suspect as scientific evidence; probably the differences are
not very large. Besides, Dvorak did nothing at all about the offsets, which
are certainly one of the sources of ergonomic problems with the Sholes key-
board.
In the second half of the twentieth century, we saw the development of
(successively, inter alia) the IBM golf-ball typewriter, the word processor,
the PC, the laptop. With each of these developments, we could, in princi-
ple, have abandoned Sholes and devised something that might have been
better. But this is not the way things work: technologies have to co-exist;
people have to switch between them; people have to maximise the benefit
they get from the investment they have put into learning something. If you
are an experienced typist, your fingers remember not only the locations of
the letters, but also the offsets. Even moving ASDFG a quarter-key to the
right, so that all the key offsets are half-keys, would confuse you.
I once pointed out the offsets to a man with touch-typing skills who had
managed to transfer them to one of those tiny PDA keyboards, about ten cen-
timetres wide. The designers of this keyboard had retained the QWERTY
layout, but (obviously not expecting anyone actually to touch-type on it)
had made all the offsets a half-key. His instant response was “I knew there
was something wrong with it!”.
All these things conspired to ensure the persistence of almost every as-
pect of the Sholes design, including the offsets. Designers of laptops, with
their fairly severe space limitations, have contrived to follow the Sholes off-
sets but to make interesting use of them by changing the shapes of the keys
on the side edges of the keyboard, so as to fit into a rectangle. The laptop on
which I am typing just now has a normal size shift key on the left, next to \
next to Z, but above that it has a one-and-a-half size Caps Lock key next to A,
and a one-and-a-quarter Tab key next to Q. On the right, there is a Return
key which is an upside down L shape covering two rows, and a one-and-
three-quarter Backspace key. At the top is a row of smaller-than-standard
function keys, so that more can be fitted in the row, with a few more at the
bottom right.
 5. More about the alphabet 59

Other languages

There is of course some variation between countries and languages. Lan-

guages that use the Roman alphabet do not have to do much to make Sholes
work for them—maybe add a few accents or special characters. Non-Roman
alphabets obviously need more drastic change; but it’s really just a question
of making substitutions. But what about non-alphabetic languages? Chi-
nese, for example, has very many more characters than could possibly be
represented on a Sholes-like keyboard.
There was a form of typewriter developed for Chinese. It consisted of
a tray of several thousand embossed metal characters, each one in mirror
image, like those on a traditional western typewriter. But in this case the
characters are all separate, not attached to any part of the machinery. In
order to type a character, the typist has to locate a movable frame above
the correct character, then press a lever, which causes that character to be
lifted out of the tray and struck against the ribbon and paper. Although it
was possible to achieve quite fast typing speeds (if measured in words per
minute), it required the typist to train for a couple of years.
Nowadays, in China as in the West, most such work is done on com-
puters, with western (i.e. Sholes) keyboards. There are a couple of dif-
ferent ways of typing Chinese on a western keyboard (involving multiple
keystrokes per character and/or menus), which obviously have to be learnt.
But essentially this is very much easier than trying to construct a direct rep-
resentation of Chinese on a keyboard.

What would Sholes think?

Let us return, for a moment, to the fantasy of communicating across time

with Christopher Sholes.
If you were to go back to 1877 and explain to Sholes that his keyboard
design will still be in use at the start of the next millennium, despite the
fact that every one of the mechanical constraints that determined the design
in the first place will have disappeared, he might be flattered but would
probably think you a little crazy. If you were to add that a keyboard based
on his design will be attached to practically every typewriter-like device in
the world, including China—he would surely have no doubt that you were
60 B C, Before Computers

certifiably insane.
Yet, at the start of the third millennium CE, such is the case.

The concept of a character

Earlier, I referred to ‘letters or other characters’. We have already seen the let-
ters of the alphabet and the digits of the Arabic numbering systems as char-
acters, and inventions such as the typewriter or the ASCII coding scheme
give us extra characters such as punctuation marks and currency symbols.
Every so often, an old symbol gets resurrected for an entirely new purpose.
Consider for example the @ sign, which used to be used to indicate the unit
price of some commodity (‘2lbs margarine @ 4d per lb = 8d’, lb being a
pound weight and d being a penny in the old UK coinage). @ has now been
taken over as the universal email address sign and for other uses.
One character for which ASCII has a code (though neither Morse nor
Baudot did) is the famous inter-word space, which I discussed earlier in
this chapter. In this respect ASCII, following Baudot before it and inspired
by the typewriter, has somewhat extended the notion of a character. Fol-
lowing the space-bar on the typewriter (which is treated very much like
an invisible letter), ASCII defines space as a ‘printable’ character, distin-
guished from ‘control’ characters like newline or tab. We have now become
completely familiar with the idea that the space is just another character.
Further, the ASCII distinction between printable and control characters now
seems rather strange, at least to computer programmers. Even Tab or New-
line is just another character, with its own key on the keyboard and its own
code in the coding system.
As an aside, an immense source of confusion and problems with ma-
chines has resulted from the fact that despite ASCII, there has been no agree-
ment on which character should be used to represent the end of a line. ASCII
has two, defined as ‘carriage return’ (CR) and ‘line feed’ (LF), both terms
again being relics of traditional typewriters—a CR moves back to the begin-
ning of the line on the typed page, and an LF advances by one line down the
page. Files on the Windows operating system have lines ending with CRLF,
on the Unix system the convention is LF, and on the Apple Mac it used to
be CR. And this is not an exhaustive list of the conventions that have been
used!
 5. More about the alphabet 61

ASCII also distinguishes clearly (as Morse did before it) between letters
and numbers. The Sholes typewriter on the other hand had digit keys for
2-9 but not for zero or one; the typewriting convention was to use lower-case
ell for one and upper-case oh for zero.
I have assumed, and the typewriter and the ASCII scheme both encour-
age me to assume, that there are well-defined, separable things called char-
acters, not only in alphabetic systems but also in syllabaries and other writ-
ing schemes. This is something of an over-simplification; we can see odd-
ities even within ASCII, and more so when we consider other languages
than English. Actually, much the cleanest character system is the Chi-
nese: each character is self-contained and occupies a square block on the
page—beautifully simple, if you forget for a moment about the number of
different characters.
One oddity in ASCII is that it has two codes for every English letter: lower
and upper case. The ASCII code for ‘A’ is different from that for ‘a’. There
is some reason for this—although there are certain rules about when to use
capitals and when to use lower case, these rules are not clear or unambigu-
ous enough for us to leave the decision to a machine. So when we are typing,
we use the shift key to indicate a capital letter, and the coding is done ac-
cordingly.
We could easily have decided to make the shift key a character in its own
right, a control code saying to the machine ‘Now go into upper case’, ei-
ther to apply only to the following character, or ‘locking’ and requiring a
corresponding ‘down-again’ code (this latter method is used in the Baudot
system to represent numbers). But we didn’t. On the other hand we typi-
cally use exactly this method to represent font or typeface variations; I have
to use some such convention in order to produce italics or boldface in this
book. We don’t have separate codes for Roman A, italic A and/or boldface
A.
This decision has many ramifications. Think for example of how names
are typically organised in a directory, or words in a dictionary or an index.
Traditionally, we do not distinguish between upper and lower case when
arranging things in dictionary order. Similarly we expect modern search
engines not to distinguish. But these expectations require our machines to
be told that (for some purposes at least) ‘A’ and ‘a’ are the same.
In Arabic, each letter has not two but four different forms. But here the
62 B C, Before Computers

rules are pretty clear: the four shapes occur when the letter is (1) at the
beginning of a word, (2) at the end of a word, (3) elsewhere in a word, and
(4) on its own. Although making a traditional typewriter do that would be
hard, this decision can now safely be left to a machine, so only one code for
the letter is necessary.
In English printing, we have some letters that are usually, in many type-
faces, joined together—called ligatures. The most common examples are f l,
represented as fl, and f i, represented as fi . The typesetting system I am us-
ing for this book will do these ligatures automatically for me (except that
I have to tell it not to do so when I want to show the letters separately).
In older books, you sometimes see other ligatures (for example s and t are
sometimes joined), though most other ligatures have now died out. Also it
is traditional to form a single character from an a followed by an e in some
circumstances, for example ‘archæology’. But this example is more tricky,
for two reasons. First, it only applies to some words of Latin origin, it is not
a general rule for when these letters occur together. Second, if it is ever en-
countered in modern English it is regarded as a ligature of the two letters a
and e—dictionary order treats it as two separate letters. But in the Scandi-
navian languages and in Old English, this character is regarded as a letter
in its own right, with a position in the alphabetical order distinct from the
two component vowels.
As we explore other languages, we find many complex examples. In Ger-
man there is a double-s symbol ß (nevertheless treated as two esses in al-
phabetical order). In Spanish we have a letter that is printed as ll (two ells),
but is regarded as a single letter in its own right, with its own alphabetical
position. Decorations on characters, such as accents or umlauts or cedillas,
introduce their own complications. Sanskrit is written in an alphabetical
system (the Devanagari script), but all the letters that make up a syllable
are joined by ligature into a single syllable-symbol; there are hundreds of
different ligatures. Sanskrit and Arabic also share the property that vowels
are typically regarded as decorations on the consonants, rather than letters
in their own right.
These complexities are hard to deal with in a coding system; eventu-
ally, instead of representing self-contained characters, some codes have to
be used to represent instructions to the machine as to how to interpret the
characters, or how to render them in readable form.
 5. More about the alphabet 63

So the idea of a ‘character’ is a little complex. We English speakers and

writers are lucky to be spared some of these complexities. And, just possi-
bly, the development of computing in the English-speaking world benefited
from the relative simplicity of our script.
 6. Organising information

Every act of communication involves organising information—choosing

what to communicate, and how to express it, whether in speech or writing or
some other method. All forms of writing, even writing in order to enhance
your own memory (for example, a shopping list), require organisation—of
ideas, connections, facts, words, numbers, feelings, desires, intentions, sto-
ries, opinions, or whatever. We have already seen how the earliest forms of
writing were for such purposes as commerce and administration, and such
writing is necessarily an act of organisation. Another purpose, which de-
veloped early, probably counts as the first scientific endeavour: the study of
the heavens.

Astronomy

Observation of the stars, more particularly systematic observation and

recording, began very early in human history. Much of what we know
about it derives from written sources from the first millennium BCE, par-
ticularly Babylonian clay tablets, but these certainly include material from
much older sources, now lost. One particular set of observations of the
planet Venus probably dates to the seventeenth century BCE
Such observational data might reasonably be termed ‘information’ pre-
cisely because it is systematically collected and organised for recording. In
fact, it may now provide us with information not envisaged by its authors.
Despite various uncertainties about the accuracy of the copies we have and
the exact interpretations of the record, these observations can now be used
to validate aspects of historical chronology, because our present astronom-
ical knowledge allows us to determine the exact positions of the planets in
the second millennium BCE.
Babylonian astronomers constructed extensive catalogues of stars and

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

66 B C, Before Computers

constellations. We have copies of two such catalogues, the originals proba-

bly dating from around 1200 and 1000 BCE respectively.
Astronomical matters are of course important for human affairs. Sun,
moon and stars have been the most important resources for navigation
across open seas ever since humans tried such navigation—only in very re-
cent history replaced by satellite navigation. Astronomical navigation, as
practised over the last two or three centuries, requires the preparation and
distribution of nautical almanacs containing tables indicating the positions
of sun, moon and 57 selected stars (as well as, famously, an accurate marine
chronometer or clock).

The Computus

For an earlier example of the perceived importance of astronomical data, one

of the questions that much exercised the early Christian church was when
to celebrate Easter. This question brought into existence an entire subject of
study called the Computus, concerned with the various astronomical events
and cycles by which calendars are determined. Proper calculation of the
date of Easter requires the taking into account of the length of the true so-
lar year (approximately 365-and-a-quarter days—but the quarter is not ex-
act), the true lunar month (again approximately 29-and-a-half days), and
the week of seven days. The length of the solar year (then assumed to be
365-and-a-quarter days exactly) had been the basis for the introduction of
the Julian calendar under Julius Caesar in the first century BCE. Various
different versions of the Easter calculation were defined, but the one that
came to dominate was formalized by the Venerable Bede in the eighth cen-
tury, following a formula devised by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth. Bede’s
great work on the Computus, On the Reckoning of Time, contains a number of
tables based on astronomical predictions, and shows the date of Easter for
many years in the future.
Much later, in the sixteenth century, the Gregorian calendar was intro-
duced by Pope Gregory. The difference between the Julian and Grego-
rian calendars is to do with the difference between the assumed 365-and-
a-quarter days and the true length of the solar year. But the specific reason
for its introduction was to readjust the date of Easter in relation to the sea-
sons, in particular to the spring equinox, to what it had been at the begin-
 6. Organising information 67

ning of the Christian era. Currently, the date of Easter as celebrated in most
western churches differs from that used in most Orthodox churches. This
is a consequence of the fact that the western churches generally converted
to the Gregorian calendar, while the Orthodox churches stuck to the Julian
calendar.

Tax collection

Another early example of information organisation was to do with taxation.

We know that there was a system of taxation in Egypt, early in the Old
Kingdom, about 3000–2800 BCE. The easiest people to tax are the farmers,
because typically both their means of production (fields and livestock) and
what they produce are clearly visible to all. So the principle might be that
10% of the crop goes to the local governor or tax collector. Except that this
is hard to police—you would have to have someone watching the farmer
all the time. But you can measure his fields once or at long intervals, and
count his livestock also. For the fields, you might assume that a field of a
certain size will have a certain yield in a year, and tax the farmer on that
basis. Maybe you need to distinguish between the very productive fields
located in the Nile flood plain, and the somewhat less fertile fields on the
hills. Then the farmer can be taxed not on what he actually produces, but
on what the system assumes that he produces.
All of which requires the tax collector to keep records, in a standardised
form. What area of fields, in each yield category, does this named farmer
have? At once we see not only that the messy world has been manipulated
into a tidy form, but also that this manipulation is not neutral. It is to the
advantage of the farmer that his field on the edge of the slopes is classified
as ‘hill’—but to the tax collector, the advantage is reversed. Since the tax
collector is the literate one who actually makes and keeps the records, his
view is likely to prevail!

Census

One of the things a tax-collector needs to know is who the tax-payers are,
and what they own. Governments have been conducting censuses as long
as they have been systematically collecting taxes. There are of course other
68 B C, Before Computers

purposes for conducting a census—knowing who to call for military service,

all sorts of planning exercises that need statistical data, and so on. The word
itself is Latin, and in Rome originally signified a list of those available for
military service. But the concept is probably at least as old as tax collecting.
In England in the eleventh century, for example, William the Conqueror
initiated a census of all his possessions, people included, called the Domes-
day (Doomsday) book. The book is primarily organised around land—the
rural estates. In such feudal times, the people come with the land. But it
includes the names (first names only) of under-tenants of the lord of the
manor.
Modern censuses are normally tied to notions of ‘residence’ and ‘house-
hold’. A return is made for each household, and includes every person resi-
dent in that household. Both these notions are fuzzy at the edges. Neverthe-
less, the requirements of census-taking have played an important role in the
development of ideas of information processing, as we shall see in Chapter
11.

History

In early human societies, history and mythology are irretrievably inter-

twined. One might argue that the same is true today, as in the saying at-
tributed to Winston Churchill, that ‘history is written by the victors’. Nev-
ertheless, we now associate the great classical Greek historians of the fifth
century BCE, Herodotus and Thucydides, with the attempt to put history
onto a more systematic footing, and to base it on carefully gathered evi-
dence, in the process distinguishing history from mythology. Although I
started this book by arguing that recorded history could not begin until we
had developed writing, it is clear that this is not sufficient—we don’t imme-
diately start the systematic recording of history because we have invented
writing. These two Greeks had significant predecessors concerning whom
less is known; but their role in developing historiography, the systematic
study of history, is clear. Although they differed as to emphasis, between
them they championed the meticulous gathering, analysis and evaluation
of evidence, from witnesses and documents, about the events and circum-
stances they wanted to describe.
 6. Organising information 69

Libraries

We have already seen in Chapter 4 the importance of libraries in our story,

as a method of communication. They also play a central role in methods of
organisation of information.
Consider for example the great classical libraries that I mentioned: the
Library at Alexandria, for example, or the House of Wisdom in Baghdad,
or the library of one of the big medieval monasteries. In all these cases,
scholars would arrive from remote places hoping to find enlightenment of
some kind. The Alexandria library, for example, might have contained hun-
dreds of thousands of items (the collection seems to have consisted mainly
or entirely of papyrus scrolls; a single work might take up multiple scrolls).
Either locating particular known items, or looking for multiple items on a
subject, would have been a far from trivial task. The library was arranged by
subject, each subject having a bin to contain the collection of scrolls. A tablet
above the bin listed the contents of the bin, and each scroll had a tag attached
to it, giving the author and subject. This kind of information was also the
basis for what is supposed to be the first library catalogue, produced by a li-
brarian called Callimachus for some of the material in the Alexandria library
in the third century BCE. Just to indicate the scale of the finding problem,
the catalogue ran to 120 scrolls.
The art of the library catalogue (thinking now of the present) is of inter-
est to us for two reasons. The first is that it provides an organisation of the
books or other materials in the library. It does this by collecting information
or data about each book (sometimes referred to as metadata), specifying for
example its author or authors, its title, when and where it was published,
some codification of its subject matter, etc. It then provides access tools so
that a book can be identified in a variety of ways, say by looking up the
author. The location of a book on a shelf, quite likely as part of a subject
arrangement, provides one (but only one) way of finding it. A catalogue
typically provides multiple ways, suitable for different forms or types of en-
quiry. How it does this depends on other technologies available. Before the
availability of computer-based library catalogues, various forms of index
were needed—some were on cards, some printed on paper.
The second reason we may be interested in library catalogues is because
of the organisation of the catalogue data itself. Consider for example the
70 B C, Before Computers

data elements suggested above (author, title, publisher, date, subject). If an

index based on any of these elements is required, each has to be treated in
a consistent fashion across different items. For example, in order to make it
easy (or even possible) to look up an author name in an index, the recording
of the author name must follow a well-defined format and set of rules—and
(ideally) be consistent if the same author has written multiple books. This
might well require some manipulation of the messy real world.
Just for example, I have a book on the shelf next to me by the great physi-
cist and Nobel prize-winner, Richard Feynman. Well, actually, the author’s
name appears as Richard P. Feynman. Elsewhere (not in this book) it is pos-
sible to discover that his middle name is Phillips. Another book, containing
a collection of his writings, is titled No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard
Feynman—which gives as author Richard Phillips Feynman (together with
another person as editor). All of this would probably not matter very much,
since author indexes are normally ordered by surname, and I would be quite
likely to find entries for Feynman, Richard; Feynman, Richard P.; and Feynman,
Richard Phillips quite close to each other. Besides, Feynman is a relatively
uncommon name. And as I have only one Feynman in this book, I can get
away with Feynman, P. in the Person index at the back. But names can cause
much more serious problems than this—some further discussion below.

Forms

A very particular kind of organisation is required when you have to com-

plete a form, whether on paper or online. Every time you fill in a form, you
are slotting information that you have, about yourself and the world around
you, into a kind of information-organisation devised by someone else. How-
ever messy the world around you, or the information that you have about
it, the form makes you think about it in a particular way.
Let’s take a name, for example. You have a name. More than that, I can
say with some confidence (and any form you have to complete may well
assume) that you have a surname that you inherited from your parents, or
perhaps acquired later by marriage, and one or more given names—but if
more than one, it’s probably only the first that you actually use. So the slot
in the form into which you are supposed to put your single used given name
is quite likely labelled ‘First name’ (in my childhood, it was often labelled
 6. Organising information 71

‘Christian name’, though that obviously culturally biased terminology has

largely disappeared). A form in the USA might ask for a ‘Middle initial’.
But the entirety of the structure is culturally biased, of course. Chi-
nese people coming to the West typically learn to reverse their two
names—because by default in China, the surname comes first. Someone
from the Indian subcontinent (I have friends like this) may have acquired
only a single name as a child, and have had to invent a second for the pur-
pose of filling in forms and (more generally) living in the west. I have sev-
eral relatives who have two given names but actually use the second. I also
have friends and relatives with double-barrelled surnames, not hyphenated
but spaced, like the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams—that’s not a prob-
lem when they complete a form themselves, but is definitely a problem for
the library cataloguer. Other parts of the world have different practices—for
example, in both Spain and Portugal, most people have double surnames.
And of course if we go back in history as well as elsewhere in geography,
the range of variations is huge. Often, the messy world has to be doctored
in order to fit into a tidy form. And this is only the very first bit of the form!

Addresses

The next question on your form, after your name, is quite likely to be your
address—though like your name, the form may require it to be split into
multiple parts. This in itself is a slightly strange requirement in this day
and age. If a friend writes down an address for me on a piece of paper, I
will probably have no difficulty in parsing it—in distinguishing the house
number, the street name, the town name and the postcode. It’s a sim-
ple enough process, bound by rules, considerably simpler than long divi-
sion—so I would expect a machine to be able to do it reasonably well. (If
the form you are completing is not online already, it’s likely to be fed into a
machine shortly after completion.) So why isn’t it left to the machine to do
the parsing?
One reason might be that the form of an address is quite strongly history-
and culture-dependent. More specifically, the national postal systems dis-
cussed in Chapter 2 have been very closely involved in the determination of
standard address forms. Thus the standard varies considerably from coun-
try to country. Furthermore, although there have been attempts (since the
72 B C, Before Computers

establishment of the Universal Postal Union in 1874) to define an interna-

tional standard format for postal addresses, these now seem to have been
abandoned. From the point of view of post alone, it probably doesn’t mat-
ter very much—the Universal Postal Union is a federal structure, so as long
as the postal service where the letter is posted can recognise the destination
country, it can leave the rest of the address for interpretation by the local
postal service in that country. However, it can cause problems for other
uses of addresses (of which there are many).
One prime current example is the postcode. Although the first divisions
of large cities into postal regions began in the nineteenth century (London
1857), and some more detailed attempts began in the 1930s, these mostly
originate from the 1960s and ’70s, a period that might just still be regarded as
the heyday of the post, but perhaps its tail end. Many postcode systems pro-
vide a rather coarse level of granularity, a district containing many houses,
but some are much more precise. In the UK system, for example, a postcode
does not uniquely identify an address, but specifies a small group, up to a
hundred but probably many fewer.
Postcodes (indeed, addresses generally) serve or contribute to a number
of different functions other than postal deliveries. For example, postcodes
are commonly used for satellite navigation (despite the fact that they were
mostly devised before satellite navigation was invented). But for this pur-
pose, one would like a very fine granularity. On the whole, the UK system
works very well for this purpose, particularly in cities, but sometimes in the
countryside it is not precise enough. But there is considerable variation be-
tween countries, even among those countries that have postcodes.
Returning to the parsing question raised above: what we do now find
commonly in the UK is that the form-filler is invited to provide only the
postcode, and then allow the computer to deduce almost fully the rest of
the address, offering the user a small choice of house numbers and possibly
street names. This deduction is based on a database, to which the computer
has access, of postcodes and corresponding full addresses. To make sense
of this statement, we need to talk a little about databases.
 6. Organising information 73

The concept of a database

Despite my comments above about the difficulties inherent in both, name

and address data is often held up as a good example of a kind of informa-
tion with a high degree of structure, a high degree of regularity, and a high
degree of consistency. As a result, it is taken to be a good candidate for stor-
age in a computer in what is commonly known as a database. If you keep
your contacts on your computer or your phone or both, they will be held
in a database. This means that even if some of the addresses take a slightly
different form from others, or some data is missing from some, they are all
held in a common structure. There are several reasons for doing it this way:
essentially they revolve around how such data can be processed automati-
cally, including for display to you. Thus, for example, you would expect to
be able to see an alphabetical list of names. Once again, alphabetical sorting
of names is not quite as straightforward as it might seem; nevertheless, you
probably expect your computer, and your phone if it is even remotely clever,
to be able to do that.
Databases, and computer programs that manipulate databases, are sta-
ples in the world of computing. Indeed, the maintenance and manipulation
of databases is a vastly more important function of computers than calcula-
tion. Consider, for example, the computers in your bank, which look after
your bank account. Clearly they have to do some calculation, when you
add or withdraw funds or move them around—but by far their most im-
portant function is to maintain consistent records of all such transactions,
as well as all the other information relating to this and every other account.
Furthermore, you have probably never seen those computers make arith-
metical mistakes—that’s the easy part—but you are quite likely to have seen
instances where, for one reason or another, transactions have gone AWOL.
If you frequently do online transfers, and have ever made a mistake, you
may have discovered that a mistake in the destination account number can
be much worse than a mistake in the amount. An account number is not
really a number at all (nobody ever needs to do arithmetic with account
numbers): it’s a code identifying a particular set of database entries. As you
may have read in many newspaper reports, if you transfer money into the
wrong account, and the account holder is not willing to do anything about
it, neither you nor your bank can recover the money. Until very recently, in
74 B C, Before Computers

the UK at least, banks in these circumstances did not typically check names,
only account numbers. This is probably because of all the issues discussed
above with respect to names. If you do not know the exact form of the name
of your payee, as held in the bank’s database, then the chances are high that
you would enter it in a slightly different form, so the banks prefer to rely
on the code. Nevertheless, it is much easier for a human being to make a
mistake with a long numerical code than with a name, so this logic can be
counter-productive.

Varieties of database

Databases come in many different forms. In the present day, a database is

generally assumed to be held on a computer. Many such systems follow
the principle that data should be divided into its smallest coherent compo-
nent parts, and that exact rules of inference should be specified, completely
determining what can be learnt by recombining the data elements in new
ways. This is a reductionist view, and has a strong analogy to the status
of arithmetical calculation ever since the rules for this were codified. Some
kinds of data are amenable to this approach, and it brings advantages in the
ability to manipulate it in well-understood ways. However, not all data, let
alone all information, can be treated in this way.
In the past, long before computers or the coinage of the word database,
we have seen many collections of information that would now be called
databases. Of those we have discussed in this chapter, all collections of com-
pleted forms, all library catalogues, all sets of census returns (and all tables
derived from them), all tax collectors’ records of the people and institutions
that they tax, all banks’ records of people, accounts, transactions, and so on
and so on, can be seen as databases. All involve rules of organisation and of
manipulation.
We return to the theme of calculation in Chapter 10, and the broader
theme of information processing in Chapter 11.
 7. Picture and sound

For this chapter and the following two, we leave aside for the moment the
world of writing and characters, alphabets and numerical digits, to consider
pictures and sound.
As we saw in Chapter 1, pictures played an early role in the development
of writing systems. However, at that point the paths split apart. When it
comes to recording information in a form other than conventional language,
such as diagrams or images or pictures, moving images, and sound, we have
(broadly speaking) bypassed the language-writing-alphabet-digital code
sequence. But pictures, in particular, have their own sequence that leads
from the development of photography in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, to the almost universal digitisation of everything today.
Most people today are aware that pictures are usually made up of dots
(pixels), in a rectangular array—cameras are typically sold on the number of
pixels they have. If you look through a magnifying glass at a picture printed
in a magazine, you can see the pixels. Below, I will describe the sequence
of development from the first photographs to today’s pixel-based images.
However, first it is worth exploring a couple of byways of image-making.

Art

A very early art form, visible for example in the cities of Pompeii and Her-
culaneum, which were buried in volcanic ash in the first century CE, uses
the method of mosaic. In mosaic, a picture is built up out of small tiles; each
tile is a single colour. The subtlety that can be expressed by such means is
astonishing. However, there is a significant difference between the layout of
a mosaic and the modern notion of digitised images. In the modern version,
the picture is built on a rectangular grid—the colour at each intersection of
the grid is recorded. In mosaic, typically the tiles (even if they are often

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

76 B C, Before Computers

square individually) are usually laid following the shape of the design, so
that a curved boundary in the picture is usually made of two curved lines
of tiles (see for example Figure 3).

Figure 3: Ancient Roman mosaic, featuring a panther—detail

from Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum, Naples
[Link]
MANNapoli_SN_mosaic_Panthere.jpg
Public domain.

Very much later, in the late nineteenth century, a small group of artists
(Georges Seurat and others) developed a technique of painting relying on
small dots of colour. Rather than creating a particular desired colour by
mixing a small number of basic or primary colours on a palette, they would
use the same basic colours individually, close to each other in small dots, so
that to the eye they would appear to mix into the desired colour. The method
was known as pointillism. One of its effects is supposed to be to brighten the
colour sense of the viewer (see Figure 4).

Weaving

A simple form of weaving involves a set of parallel warp threads stretched

over a frame, a mechanism to lift alternate threads away from the others,
and a shuttle to pass the weft thread from one side to the other, in between
the lifted warp threads and those left flat. Before the next pass, the lifted
threads are returned to level and the remaining threads lifted instead.
 7. Picture and sound 77

Figure 4: Georges Seurat’s Honfleur, un soir, embouchure de la

Seine (detail) Museum of Modern Art, New York
[Link]
Honfleur,_un_soir,_embouchure_de_la_Seine_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Public domain.

If you want to weave a coloured pattern of any kind, the warp and/or
weft threads can be of different colours. But to weave a complex pattern,
even a picture, requires more complex control. One way to do this is as fol-
lows. The weft thread is a single neutral colour, but the warp threads are set
as a sequence of colours, as it might be yellow / green / red / blue, repeated
over the width of the fabric. Then the colour of a particular location in the
woven fabric, on the front or top face, is determined by which warp threads
have been lifted (and are visible) and which have been left flat. As in pointil-
list painting, if the threads are close enough together, the eye perceives the
mixture of the selected basic colours as a new colour.
A method like this gave rise to a fascinating invention at the start of the
nineteenth century, due to Joseph-Marie Jacquard. He devised a system for
controlling a loom, using a sequence of punched pasteboard cards, one for
each pass of the shuttle. The positions of the punched holes in each card
controlled which of the warp threads were to be lifted for the next pass. A
sequence of cards could be punched, potentially of any degree of complexity,
to produce a complex design in the fabric. The cards with punched holes can
be seen now as a digitised representation of the finished design (see Figure
78 B C, Before Computers

5).

Each punched card determines the pattern of lifted warp threads for a single pass
of the shuttle.
Figure 5: A modern Jacquard loom
[Link]
Hand-loom_pattern_cards_for_silk_sari_weaving_(2507306023).jpg
CC BY 2.0.

Jacquard’s loom was a major development in weaving technology. Pre-

dating photography, it continued in use for almost two centuries, in parallel
with but independently of the developments in photographic imaging de-
scribed below. Today’s computer-controlled looms are direct descendants of
Jacquard’s invention, but finally now integrated into the rest of the digital
world. However, Jacquard’s use of punched cards was to inspire two quite
different developments, as we shall see in later chapters. James Essinger,
in Jacquard’s Web, argues convincingly for Jacquard’s seminal position in the
development of information technologies.

Photography

The idea of photography, using light-sensitive chemicals, was developed in

the first half of the nineteenth century. The best-known name from that time,
Louis Daguerre, invented a form of photograph called the daguerreotype in
 7. Picture and sound 79

1839, but a much more successful and long-lived method was the calotype of
William Henry Fox Talbot (1841). This was the forerunner of the negative
process that was the norm for photography right up until the development
of the digital camera at the end of the twentieth century.
As an aside, Talbot’s name is a great example of the kind of issue with
names that I discussed in the previous chapter. He is usually referred to as
‘Fox Talbot’, on the assumption that this was a double-barrelled but unhy-
phenated surname—he was referred to thus even in his lifetime. Actually,
he did not regard Fox, a family name of his mother’s, as part of his surname.
In addition, he normally used the ‘first’ name Henry, not William.
Photography in this form can be described an analogue process. We
make a distinction between analogue and digital: in an analogue represen-
tation of something, a continuous or smooth variable in the outside world
is represented by a continuous or smooth variable in the system. In the
case of chemically-based photography, light causes a chemical change on
the plate—more light causes more change, in a more-or-less smoothly vary-
ing way.
At this point, someone familiar with traditional chemical photography
might well object ‘What about grain and graininess?’. It’s true that at a fine
level, the chemical process is not smooth. But this is not a matter of design:
it’s rather an accident of the process. It’s when we start designing in granu-
larity that we call something ‘digital’.
When we deliberately slice up the world, or some smoothly varying part
of the world, into discrete parts, in order to measure or represent or process
it, we are beginning the process of digitisation. As we will see below, some
processes are mixed, in that they include some continous elements that have
been divided into discrete parts and some that have not—this is particularly
so in the development from simple monochrome chemical photography to
today’s digital images.
However, in order to make this process a little clearer, we start with a
simpler example: sound.

Sound

As with so many things, digitised sound predates the computer era, though
not by very much. The standard form of digitised sound, pulse code modula-
80 B C, Before Computers

tion, was invented by Alec Reeves in 1937 and is still in use today.
Sound is waves of pressure moving through the air or other medium. A
pure musical note is a simple sinusoidal wave of fixed frequency (middle C
is about 260 Hertz, or cycles per second); all other sounds are more complex
patterns of pressure change. One can draw a graph of how pressure varies
over time—it looks like an undulating line (see Figure 6). A microphone
(invented in the nineteenth century) turns the pressure waves into electri-
cal waves, in an analogue fashion, so that the pattern of varying electrical
current looks like the pattern of varying pressure in the air.
In order to digitise a continuous curve like this, we need to make two sep-
arate quantities, which are naturally continuous, into discrete lumps. The
two quantities are time and pressure. So first we divide up time: we choose
discrete time intervals—in the case of CD audio, 44,000 times a second. Then
we measure and discretise the pressure at each of those times. Again, in CD
audio, the discrete pressure levels are defined with 16 bits—that is, there are
216 (which is about 65,000) pressure ranges. The result is a representation
that can be thought of as turning the smooth pressure curve into a stepped
line, with very tiny steps—again, the diagram shows a rough picture. On
playback, the player has to recreate (to a close approximation) the smooth
curve from this digitised step curve.
This is pulse-code modulation, and is all we need to digitise a single
sound channel. For stereo sound (again as on CDs), we need two sepa-
rate channels like this (more on stereo sound in the next chapter). The in-
vention of the CD as a digital recording medium in the late 1970s allowed
the recorded music industry to make a relatively smooth transition into the
digital era—though the relationship between music more generally and the
digital world is more complex than this, as discussed further in Chapter 9.
Now let us turn back to photography and its developments.

Moving images

A photograph shows a static image, a snapshot in time. How do we turn

this into a moving image?
Probably you already know the answer to this question—and in any case,
it is very like part of what I described above for sound. Although time is,
in principle, a continuous variable, we can treat it as discrete by taking very
 7. Picture and sound 81

(a) Sound waves

(b) Pulse code modulation

Figure 6: Sound. Diagram: the author.
82 B C, Before Computers

small steps in time, and at each of these time steps, we take a photograph.
Actually the steps do not need to be nearly as small as for sound—film typi-
cally works at just 24 frames a second. If you see an image changing in small
steps 24 times a second, it looks pretty much as if it is moving smoothly.
Mostly, you probably aren’t aware of the step-changes.
This principle, on which film is based, was understood in Victorian
times—in museums you will sometimes see Victorian toys using the same
idea, for example a spinning drum with slits. If you look at it from the side,
each slit gives you a momentary view of a drawing; the next, which ap-
pears a moment later, is like its predecessor but with small changes. The
impression is of movement. Actually making a film camera was somewhat
tricky, but in the 1870s Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the idea with a
series of photographs of a galloping horse. The photographs were taken by
separate still cameras, on the side of the course, but the effect is of a single
film camera tracking the horse. Muybridge developed a device to show the
moving image, the Zoopraxiscope, very like the toy described above.
The first patent for a cine camera was due to Louis Le Prince in 1888,
and the process became practical in the 1890s. Notice that it is only the time
variable that we are treating discretely. Ordinary old-fashioned celluloid
film retains the ordinary analogue process for each individual frame.

Colour

In parallel with the challenge of recording moving images, Victorian inven-

tors concerned themselves with that of developing colour photography.
The basic principle is based on the idea of primary colours. This idea
had been around from at least the seventeenth century, and a specific the-
ory concerning human perception was put forward by Thomas Young in
1802, further developed by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1850, and proposed
for photography by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855. The idea was
that any colours can be made up from a small number, probably three, of
primary colours. The artists’ primaries are normally taken to be red, yel-
low and blue. Actually the idea of primary colours is somewhat complex
and messy; I will return to it below. But if we assume in the meantime that
the idea is good, then we have in principle a natural way to build a colour
photograph—take three separate photographs, with red, yellow and blue
 7. Picture and sound 83

filters, and then print the three resulting images, in red yellow and blue,
superimposed. In terms of the ideas discussed above, the full continuous
colour spectrum can be reduced to just three discrete components.
But once again, actually doing this is a little tricky. Maxwell’s attempt
in 1861 was not very successful: the idea had to wait until the 1890s to
be developed into an even remotely practical form, and till 1907 for a truly
commercial process. In the Autochrome system introduced by the Lumière
brothers in 1907, the photographic plate included an integral screen of small
dyed potato starch grains, distributed irregularly, but small enough that
the eye would not distinguish individual grains. The area of plate under a
coloured grain would respond to that coloured light, and not to the colours
that had been filtered out. When developed (including a reversal process to
get back from a negative to a positive image), each area of the image would
be seen through the correct coloured filter, the same that it had been exposed
through. Despite a number of disadvantages, this was a successful system
that lasted until the 1950s.
In the 1930s, two successful classical musicians working for Kodak de-
veloped a process (Kodachrome) with different light-sensitive emulsions,
responding to red, green and blue light respectively, all on the same plate.
This became essentially the dominant system of colour photography (both
still photography and cine film) until digital took over.

Other Victorian ideas

Another idea that emerged in Victorian times was that of 3D images. Here
the basic principle predates photography: Charles Wheatstone demon-
strated a stereoscope in 1838. It was a device that presented each eye with
a picture (he used drawings), the two pictures being slightly different, in
a way which caused the viewer to merge the two into a three-dimensional
scene. Although some of our depth perception comes in other ways, an
important component comes from our binocular vision, and Wheatstone’s
device both relies on and demonstrates this fact.
Almost as soon as it was possible to do so, various systems using two
cameras were developed, allowing the viewer to see commercially-prepared
still 3D photographic images of places and scenes. There are several differ-
ent methods of causing the images presented to the two eyes to differ, but
84 B C, Before Computers

the principle is the same, right up to and including modern 3D film and
television.
Another concern was to be able to print photographs in newspapers.
Newspaper ink is either on or off—it is not possible to print shades of grey
directly in the newspaper printing process. Newspapers of the time some-
times used etchings, which could be prepared with a lot of effort, and could
represent greys by hatching and other devices; but to produce an etching
from a photograph (essentially an artist’s copy of the photograph) was not
ideal. Already in the 1850s, Talbot had an idea for how to produce a printing
plate directly from a photograph, although once again it took a little while
to be made practical. The idea is to reduce the picture to a grid of black dots,
varying in size. In areas of the picture where the dots are small, the eye sees
mostly the white paper; in those areas where the dots are large, the eye sees
dark grey. The first printed halftone pictures appeared in the 1870s, and in
the 80s commercially successful methods were developed. Similar methods
are still in use, including for printing colour pictures.

Facsimile transmission

We have seen how. for some purposes to do with images, we need to discre-
tise some smoothly varying part of the image. We have already discretised
both time (for cine film) and the colour spectrum (for colour images); now
we need to turn our attention to other smoothnesses.
A (two-dimensional) picture or image has... well, two dimensions. If
you are at all familiar with graphs, then you might think of them as the x
and y dimensions. x is the left-right component, and y is the up-down com-
ponent. Thinking for the moment only of monochrome still images, over
each of these dimensions, the picture may vary anywhere between black
and white, that is it may take any shade of grey. This (brightness) repre-
sents a third smooth variable to add to the two dimensions.
If you want to transmit anything over a telephone line or a radio channel,
you have essentially only two smooth variables to play with: the level of the
signal, and time. For (single channel) sound, this is all you need: as we saw
above, a microphone turns time and air pressure variation into time and
electrical current variation, which can be transmitted over a telephone wire
or over a radio channel. But for pictures, we have a third variable. It follows
 7. Picture and sound 85

that we must do something different with one of them.

Once again, the Victorians identified the challenge—the first serious ex-
periments in fax transmission were by a Scotsman, Alexander Bain, in the
1840s (that is, well before the invention of the telephone!). His basic idea,
which remained the dominant method right up to modern fax machines,
was to scan the original, in a line from side to side, and then move down a
small distance and scan a new line very close to the previous one. The whole
image would be covered by a succession of lines.
Bain’s originals had to be specially prepared for this purpose, and would
only deal in black-and-white. It would take quite a few more years, to the
1880s, before one could scan an existing photograph, in shades of grey, and
longer still for any kind of commercial fax transmission. Nevertheless, there
were successful commercial systems in the 1920s.
We now see that what Bain did was to discretise the y dimension, leaving
the x dimension to be represented in analogue by time, and the brightness
in analogue by the level of the signal.

Television

So the next thing to invent is the transmission (along wires or over radio) of
moving pictures. But we already have the ingredients for this: if we discre-
tise both the y dimension and the time dimension of the moving image, we
are left with just two dimensions needing analogue representation.
The process of line-by-line scanning for moving images has a
name—raster scan. (For some reason this word is not usually used in the
fax context, though the principle is exactly the same.) In an old-fashioned
television tube, the cathode ray beam that causes the phosphor on the screen
to glow follows the same raster process to regenerate the image.
The idea of using such a method for television transmission is also Vic-
torian. An electromechanical method of raster scanning was patented (but
not actually developed) in the 1880s. Again, development of commercial
systems (as opposed to demonstrations) took a little longer; the name most
closely associated with the invention of television is John Logie Baird, in
the 1920s and 30s. The BBC made its first television transmission in 1929,
and began regular transmissions in 1932. Initially the raster scan was based
on electromechanical processes, and used 30 lines per image, building up
86 B C, Before Computers

to 240 lines in 1936. But electronic methods were already in the air, and in
the same year the BBC switched to a 405-line electronic system. This was
replaced in the 1960s by a 625-line version.
How about colour television? Again, we already know in principle how
to do it—we need three colour components, so each frame has to be trans-
mitted three times, once for each colour. Various schemes were devised to
do this, but commercial systems started in the 1950s.
There is an interesting problem at the display end. We now have a cath-
ode ray tube with three separate cathode ray guns constructing a raster pat-
tern on the screen, which now has to have three different coloured phos-
phors. How to ensure that the right ray hits only the right phosphor? The
usual way to do this is to have the phosphor in closely packed dots, and a
metal filter screen just behind it, with a pattern of holes. These are aligned so
that the ray corresponding to red can only reach the display screen where
there are red phosphor dots, and so on. We can think of this as a sort of
last-minute discretisation of the x dimension.

Full digitisation

Now, of course, almost all of our sound (recorded and/or transmitted), and
almost all of our still and moving images (ditto), are fully digitised. Digital
cameras, both still and moving, contain grids of tiny photo-receptors, which
record light intensity digitally in three colours. Display and printing devices
turn pixel-based data back into visible images. In between, all sorts of pro-
cessing can take place, entirely in the digital domain. Telephones, radio,
and recorded sound are similarly treated. Your mobile phone digitises the
sound itself, and received digital sound from the other end. Your landline
probably doesn’t yet—it sends an analogue signal to the exchange, where it
is probably digitised, and receives an analogue signal back.
If you go back in your time machine to the 1840s, to fetch Talbot and bring
him forward in time, stop first in the 1980s. At this point he would be totally
astonished by many things, including miniaturisation and mechanisation,
although if you showed him the machine at your local pharmacy which was
used to develop and print your photos, he would be able to get some grasp
of the chemical and optical processes involved. But if you bring him here
to the third decade of the twenty-first century, he would recognise nothing
 7. Picture and sound 87

whatever of any part of the process, at any stage between the camera lens
and the display on your screen.
 8. On physics and physiology

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, written in the 1940s but about the dis-
tant future, he describes a device that plays a recording of a 3D moving im-
age with sound. The display device is a glass cube, in which the viewer sees
a human figure talking—something like a talking head on television, but in
3D. Asimov does not explicitly say this, but the impression is that the image
inhabits the 3D space inside the cube; people can watch from all around,
but the people at the back will see only the back of the figure. Asimov was
a biochemist, but one might describe this as a physicist’s version of 3D film.
This is in complete contrast to Wheatstone’s original 1838 stereoscope, and
to modern 3D film and television, and indeed to virtually everything tried
in between these two dates, which might be described as relying on physi-
ology—on the fact that we perceive depth through our binocular vision.
In this chapter I want to explore this space a little. I will return to 3D
vision later, as in the previous chapter, I will start with sound.

3D sound

Our sense of the location of the source of a sound depends in part on the
fact that we have two ears. The difference between what our ears hear and
report to the brain allows us some degree of directional sense of where the
sound is coming from. This is the basis for stereo sound systems. Given
different sounds from two separated loudspeakers in a room, our ears can
have some illusion of sound location.
However, this illusion is not very good. The sounds delivered to our two
ears by two loudspeakers (in a room with its own aural character) are only
a very rough approximation to what might be heard in a real environment
with real sound sources, and of course real echoes from whatever else is in
that environment. So what might be a better way?

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

90 B C, Before Computers

There are two ways to go. One of them is to have many more loud-
speakers, potentially with different signals to each one. ‘Surround sound’
systems, used for example in cinemas, are a move in that direction. But it
could go further. I once came upon a public performance of a recording of
a 40-part motet. In a large empty hall at the back of a church, there were
40 loudspeakers, each mounted on a stand at head height, distributed in a
rough circle around a room. I could wander around and in and out while
the music was playing, hearing in different ways, for example concentrating
on one or a small group of parts, with the rest in the background. Exactly
what I heard at any point depended on which way I was facing as well as
my location. In addition to the different relative location of the ears as one
turns, our ears are themselves each to some extent directional, and one’s
head casts an aural shadow.
That’s a true physical attempt at a solution to the problem. However, it’s
not a feasible general approach to hi-fi in the living room!
The other direction would be physiological. We can take much more
seriously the idea of delivering different signals to each ear—in fact good
headphones make for a much cleaner aural environment, each ear hearing
only its own signal, with no interference or cross-over and no echoes. How-
ever, in order to do this properly, the recording should be made in a similar
fashion. That is, one should use a pair of microphones, each in its own shell-
like mount, on either side of a head-shaped object.
This is known as binaural or dummy head recording, and is quite different
from normal stereo recording. It is seriously difficult to do well. For one
thing, everyone’s head is a different shape, as are their ears and ear canals.
For another, if the listener moves or turns their head while listening, the
dummy head that was doing the recording did not move in the same way at
the corresponding time during recording, so at this point the listener’s ex-
perience will be distorted. Binaural recording cannot be a general solution,
any more than multiple speakers can be.
Thus ordinary stereo and surround sound occupy a slightly uneasy place
somewhere in between a true physical solution and a true physiological
one. This is not to say that sound recording and playback is necessarily
bad—some things come across wonderfully. But it is, necessarily to some
degree, a distortion of the original sound.
 8. On physics and physiology 91

The physics of colour

If you pass a bright white light through a prism, onto a white surface, you
get a display of the spectrum of colours, as in a rainbow. This phenomenon
was studied by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century, but was not fully
understood until the the nineteenth. The visible light spectrum is now un-
derstood to be a part of a much larger spectrum encompassing all electro-
magnetic waves, including radio, microwave, x-rays, and gamma rays, as
well as those just outside the visible range, called infrared and ultraviolet.
Light and the rest are wave forms, which can be characterised by their
wavelengths; the spectrum shows all the different wavelengths. Visible light
has wavelengths between approximately 380 nanometres (violet) to 750nm
(red). White light normally contains a full range of colours. A surface may
reflect light of different wavelengths to different degrees—then the surface
may be perceived as coloured. Usually this would be a smear across some
range of the spectrum. Also a light source may generate different mixtures
of colours. Old-fashioned filament lightbulbs typically produce light that
is stronger at the red end of the spectrum than daylight. Modern bulbs
can often be made to emulate the old-fashioned ones or to be close to day-
light—these are currently referred to as warm white and daylight respectively,
with cool white somewhere in between.
One case that will be useful for further discussion is the sodium lamp,
often used for streetlights. It’s unusual in that the light it produces is (to a
close approximation) strictly monochromatic—that is, of only a single wave-
length, around 590nm, pretty well at the yellow-orange boundary. If the
only light source in a scene is a sodium lamp, it is impossible to distinguish
the colour of any surface, because however much or little light is reflected
from a surface, all of it is this single colour.

The physiology of colour perception

The light-sensitive cells in our eyes are of two types, rods and cones. Rods
do not distinguish colours; however, cones are further subdivided into three
types with different colour sensitivities, which enable us to see colour. These
are called red, green and blue cones, which is an approximate way to describe
their respective sensitivity to different colours of the spectrum. But actually,
92 B C, Before Computers

each type responds to a smear of different wavelengths, and these smears

overlap considerably.
If our eyes are presented with monochromatic light (such as from a
sodium lamp), the response of each type depends on whereabouts in its
smeared response the monochromatic light lies. Sodium light lies quite
close to the peak of the response-smear of the red cells, but with a sig-
nificant green-cell response as well (very little blue-cell response). Our
colour perception depends on the ratios or proportions of these different
responses—the brain says ‘this much red, together with this much green,
but very little blue, looks like a particularly virulent yellow-orange’. It is
only through these proportions that we perceive colour.
If the light hitting our eyes were not monochromatic, but smeared over a
range of wavelengths towards the red end, we might nevertheless get a very
similar effect: that is, a very similar proportional response from the three dif-
ferent types of cones. There are actually very many different combinations
of the basic wavelengths that our eyes are quite incapable of distinguishing.

Three-colour theory

Given that our eyes only have the three types of cones to distinguish colours,
it seems plausible that we can construct colours using three primaries. That
is, it should be possible to fool the eye into thinking it is seeing any particular
colour by presenting it with suitable combinations of the three primaries.
What do we need for primary colours? The colour cones suggest some-
thing like red, green and blue. Indeed this is what is normally used for what
is called additive colours. If you start with red, green and blue light sources,
you can generate white light and more or less a full range of colours. Exactly
this is done in some projection systems, with three separate projectors for
the three colours, all focussed onto the same white screen. Something sim-
ilar also happens in computer and television screens, with closely packed
dots of colour. In each case, there is no interference between the colours—if
the red light is projected, adding green or blue will not affect the red light
itself, and the eye is free to see the mixture.
For printing on white paper, we have a different situation. Here we start
with white light, but the printing ink filters some colours out—the more
ink we add, the darker the result (this is called subtractive colours). For this
 8. On physics and physiology 93

purpose it is best to use not red/green/blue but the complementary colours,

cyan/magenta/yellow. However, it is much more difficult to get the colours
looking right. Most printers also use black ink (because overprinting the
three primaries doesn’t produce a good black); some do much more com-
plicated adjustments.
For an artist, mixing coloured paints, the situation is different again.
Mixing paints is closer to subtractive than to additive colours, but does not
work exactly like subtractive printing ink. A more usual set of primaries for
this purpose would be red/yellow/blue, but most artists use a much wider
range of colours to mix.

Problems

The three-colour approach to images has proved successful, but it’s worth
exploring some of the issues around it.
First, let’s think again about sodium light, and about taking pho-
tographs. If I photograph a sodium lamp, the three primary colour recep-
tors in my camera will respond in a way which is similar to the response
of the three types of cones. Then, if I display the resulting photograph on
my computer screen (which uses LED technology), the image on the screen
will be made up of a combination of red, green and blue LED cells. The
challenge of displaying an image that looks good to me is the challenge of
reproducing in my eyes roughly the same proportional responses that the
original sodium lamp produced. The system might achieve this, though if
we think in terms of the spectrum, it is very clear that the smear produced
by my screen is hugely different from the monochrome sodium light itself.
Does this matter? Well, it might matter a lot.
For one thing, not all animal species are trichromatic as we are. Some
have only two different colour receptors; some have four (specifically birds,
reptiles and some fish). A tetrachromatic animal will see colour distinctions
that we cannot see. Thus even if the screen image looks good to me, it would
fail to satisfy the birds!
One interesting suggestion, not yet demonstrated, is that actually some
humans have tetrachromacy—or at least that some of us have four different
types of cones, which might give us effective tetrachromacy if we knew how
to use them. I say ‘us’, but actually it’s much more likely in women than in
94 B C, Before Computers

men, for genetic reasons. It may even be the case that some women are able
to make use of them, and thus see a wider range of colours than most of us.
But even if this does not happen, the responses of individuals may differ.
It is well known, of course, that some people are less sensitive to certain
colour differences than the majority—this is normally referred to as ‘colour
blindness’. But if some people are more sensitive, or even if some people are
differently sensitive, this means that something that I see as a good colour
match might to these people seem a poor match.
Could there be a physical solution to this problem? Ideally, we might
like to represent the full colour spectrum with many different finely graded
colours. It would be possible to have more than three ‘primary’ colours, but
it’s very unlikely that we could go far in that direction with (say) cameras
or display screens. Thus once again, what we have is a compromise.

Dots, lines, frames, pulses

Most discretisations of smooth variables in the world (but not all, as we

have seen) involve dividing the continuity up into very many small steps.
This works (when it does) because our perceptions do some of their own
smoothing, and thereby restore some smoothness to something that is ac-
tually not at all smooth. This process probably involves not only the sense
organs themselves, but also the neural processes that follow when sensory
input is transmitted to the brain. In some cases, the sensory organ itself gen-
erates discrete signals even from smooth input, and these discrete signals
must be interpreted smoothly. We have already seen how our eyes generate
discrete signals for different colour ranges; it is also the case that brightness
(or intensity) is conveyed in the eye-brain by the number of rods or cones
that fire; in a given time interval, each one fires or does not, so at some level
the internal process is digital anyway.
So some smoothing is natural, and this suggests that there is no prob-
lem about presenting data to the senses in discrete lumps, provided they
are small enough. But it does raise the question of what ‘small enough’
means, and whether there are any other effects from such discretisation.
The pointilliste artists like Seurat had a theory that their method of paint-
ing, building up colour shades from small dots of primary colours, actually
enhanced our colour perception, making the images seem brighter.
 8. On physics and physiology 95

Some recent films have been shot and played at 48 frames per second,
rather than the usual 24. Although 24 fps is fast enough that the viewer
is not normally aware of flickering, it seems that the smoothness of 48 fps
causes some people to feel sick, from something like motion sickness. So
there may indeed be effects of a rather oblique kind.

Three dimensions

Now let’s return to 3D display, where we started this chapter.

A physical solution to 3D display would be to create a model image in
3D space, which one could walk around and see from different angles, just
as much as if it were real. But this does not seem like a very good solution
for (for example) 3D movies. It might work for scenes involving people in a
room, but outdoor scenes with buildings would have to be greatly reduced
in size, and those with distant vistas would not work at all.
The binocular method pioneered by Wheatstone is a much more plau-
sible solution. As I have mentioned, it depends on the fact that a lot of our
depth perception comes from our binocular vision, with the two eyes turn-
ing a little inwards to focus on something close. There are other effects—it’s
also the case that each eye does its own focussing—in something like the
way a camera is focussed, by adjustment of the lens. However, this is really
only important for very close objects. In the far distance, binocular vision
doesn’t help much either—one useful clue here on earth is what artists know
as tonal perspective, where the intervening atmosphere causes distant objects
to look hazier and slightly bluer than they would look close to (on the moon,
with no atmosphere, it is impossible to tell how far away or how high the
mountains are). And of course there is the usual kind of geometrical per-
spective—because we know what sort of heights humans typically have, one
good clue to how far away they are is their perceived size.
In movies and still photographs, both kinds of perspective are present
anyway, of course—and indeed, when watching a film, one is normally well
aware of the three-dimensionality of the scene. The present 3D film technol-
ogy does not attempt to adjust monocular focus, but does add the binocular
vision component to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality.
This illusion has some interesting components. For example, suppose
you are watching a 3D film, and you see a post in the foreground and some-
96 B C, Before Computers

one passing behind it at some distance. Someone watching the same film
from across the other side of the room will see the same thing—the person
and the post will line up with her eyes at the same instant that they line up
with yours. This makes no sense geometrically!
Nevertheless, as with sound and colour, the illusion is what is important.
A pragmatic mixture of physics and physiology may be quite sufficient to
achieve a good illusion.
In the next chapter, I will consider other ways to represent particular
kinds of images and sounds.
 9. On perspective—and music

Apart from brief references to mosaics and weaving, I started Chapter 7

with the beginning of the mechanisation of image-making, the invention
of photography. However, just as much as language itself (and probably for
longer), the language of images has been developed over thousands of years
of human history and prehistory. Our ability to understand, make sense
of, interpret photographic images when they came along did not come out
of thin air, nor was it entirely intuitive. It grew out of our earlier under-
standing, developed through art, of the possible relationships between the
three-dimensional world and a two-dimensional representation of it. While
I could not begin to chart all the ways in which painting and the other arts
have contributed to the way we see photographs, there is one aspect that
illustrates this contribution very well.
If you studied art at school, or perhaps later, you might have learnt about
the rules of perspective (this might depend on your age, however!). This set
of rules, this idea of a formal system of perspective, was an invention of the
early Italian Renaissance. It is often presented as the ‘correct’ way to rep-
resent the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional piece of paper.
However, there are different ways of doing this, equally valid but with dif-
ferent characteristics. So before tackling perspective, I will look at two other
domains.

Architecture

If you look at an architect’s elevation drawing of a building, consider first

the base of the building. It seems that you are looking at this with your
eye at ground level. Now look at the roof: it appears now that your eye is
at roof-level. You can see the same phenomenon at both sides, and indeed
everywhere in the picture: your eye is always directly opposite the part you

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

98 B C, Before Computers

are looking at. An engineering drawing, of a machine part for example, will
normally have the same characteristic.
This is sometimes known as parallel projection. Imagine a piece of pa-
per held vertically beside the three-dimensional object. From each point of
the object, imagine a line perpendicular to the paper; where it hits the pa-
per is where that point of the object is represented. Of course in the case
of a building, that would seem to require a piece of paper as large as the
building! But such drawings are normally reduced in scale to a more man-
ageable size—the important thing is that this rescaling happens after the
parallel projection stage, when the image is already two-dimensional.
Architects and engineers employ such drawings for views of, say, the
sides of a building based on a rectangular plan. They may also use them for
angled views; to many people, such angled views look a little strange, be-
cause they do not follow the usual perspective rules. Parallel lines in the real
world remain parallel in the drawing; while an artist working in perspective
would expect parallel lines seen from an angle to appear to aim for a van-
ishing point. Figure 7 shows a cube in two different projections. You might
find my perspective view slightly strange, because I have assumed that my
sheet of glass is not vertical but angled down very slightly, so that even the
vertical edges of the cube are not parallel in the projection. However, you
would see such an effect as normal in a view looking up at a tall building,
or (let’s say in a horror movie) down a lift shaft.
The reason that parallel projection is common in architecture and engi-
neering is that it has many advantages for those fields. In particular, mea-
surements can be made on the drawing and translated, unambiguously and
accurately, to measurements in the three-dimensional world. This is simply
not true of perspective drawing.

Cartography

The problem with maps is not so much the three-dimensionality of the

world (though that is interesting too) as the curvature of the earth’s surface.
One would like to represent any part of the world on a flat map, while pre-
serving many of the properties of the real world in the representation—for
example straight lines, direction and distance. For relatively small areas,
this can be done accurately enough for most purposes. But for large areas
 9. On perspective—and music 99

(a) Parallel projection

(b) Traditional perspective

Figure 7: Views of a cube. Diagram: the author.

100 B C, Before Computers

(such as large countries, continents, oceans), it is impossible.

Once again, it is a question of projection—of projecting a part of the
curved surface of the earth onto a flat plane. Cartographers have studied
the question of what projection(s) to use since at least the second century
CE (the Greeks, of course, already understood that the earth was round).
One of the major reasons for such study is navigation. Many different projec-
tions have been proposed and used, and because it is impossible to preserve
all the properties that one would like, each is a compromise.
Perhaps the best known is that of Mercator, which preserves bearings
(that is, lines of constant bearing on the earth’s surface are straight lines on
Mercator), but makes for extreme variations of relative size. Figure 8 shows
a map of the world in the Mercator projection (Google’s map of the world
is similar). Have a look at Greenland. Because Greenland is near the north
pole, it looks huge on the Mercator projection. Now look at Australia, quite
near the equator—it looks much smaller. Actually the land area of Australia
is more than three times the land area of Greenland. The nearest equivalent
to a straight line on the earth’s surface is a great circle (a circle that divides
the sphere exactly in half); in general, great circles look not at all straight
on Mercator. And don’t ask Google Maps to show you a map of the North
Pole, or a proper map of the continent of Antarctica. The poles simply do
not exist on the Mercator projection.
Figure 9 shows the world in the Peters projection. This projection distorts
the shapes of the countries badly, but instead preserves their relative land
areas.

Art

Have a look at a reproduction of a picture of a human figure taken from

the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Probably you will see the following.
The head is in profile, seen from the height of the head. The feet are also in
profile, seen from ground level. The torso is also seen from its own height,
but full frontal. An example can be seen in Figure 10.
Now look instead at a human figure from a classical Greek vase (again,
there is an example in Figure 11). Here again, probably each part of the body
is seen from its own level, although without the changing view from front
or side. Such a view seems to the modern eye much more ‘realistic’, but the
projection is more akin to architectural projection than to perspective.
 9. On perspective—and music 101

Figure 8: World map according to the Mercator projection

[Link]
CC BY-SA 3.0.

Figure 9: World map according to the Peters projection

[Link]
Public domain.
102 B C, Before Computers

Figure 10: Ancient Egyptian art: Drawings of the gods

Nebt-Het, Anubis, and Seb
[Link]
Nebt-Het._AND_Anubis._AND_Seb,_or_Keb._(1902)_-_TIMEA.jpg
From Travelers in the Middle East Archive. CC BY 2.5.

Now look at a medieval picture with multiple figures. Very likely, the
central figure or figures are large, and peripheral or less important figures
are smaller. The relative location of the figures does not determine their
relative size; quite possibly there are foreground figures, nearer the artist
than the central figures, but smaller on the canvas. Figure 12 shows a small
section of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Now look at some paintings from the Edo period, 17th –19th centuries, of
Japanese art. Distant objects (like Mount Fuji) will be small, and there may
be closer perspective effects, but the foreground may well be represented,
from an angle, in something like architectural projection (see for example
the painting by Katsushika Hokusai, Figure 13). Now look at the paintings
of the Cubists in 20th century Europe. You may see a figure or object from
multiple angles simultaneously (see for example the portrait by Juan Gris
of Pablo Picasso, Figure 14).
All of these artists are choosing to represent the world in particular ways.
 9. On perspective—and music 103

Figure 11: Drawing of an ancient Greek vase painting.

[Link]
EB1911_Greek_Art_-_Vase_Drawing_(Fig._2).jpg
Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.), v. 12, 1911, p. 474—Public domain.

In the latter two cases, the artists concerned were probably well aware of the
rules of perspective as laid down early in the Renaissance. But even in the
earlier cases, the artists knew perfectly well that more distant objects look
smaller: that if your friend walks away from you down the road, there comes
a moment when you can cover her with your thumb stretched out at arm’s
length. You do not, of course, imagine that her size actually changes; nor do
you assume for a moment that a person whom you first see at a distance is
very small. Actually, with the help of other clues, you can probably judge
fairly accurately the height of a person, whether he or she is right next to
you or 100 yards away.
Some artists of the ancient world, particularly in classical Greece,
thought seriously about how to represent 3D in 2D, and there are some pic-
tures that reveal strong perspective aspects. But the real triumph of perspec-
tive had to wait until the Renaissance.
104 B C, Before Computers

Figure 12: A banquet—detail from the Bayeux Tapestry

[Link]
Bayeuxtapeten,_Nordisk_familjebok.png
Nordisk familjebok—Public domain.

Perspective in Western art

The artists of the early Italian Renaissance, such as Masaccio, Mantegna, and
Piero della Francesca, wanted to create a variety of realistic art that would
represent the world consistently, in some sense as we see it. They devised
a set of rules for doing this—rather mathematical in nature. In fact Piero
(a true Renaissance man!) was a mathematician as well as an artist, and
wrote a mathematical treatise on the matter. The earlier diagram of a cube
in perspective shows one aspect of this mathematical analysis: the way that
any number of parallel lines in the real world appear in perspective to line
up with a vanishing point—in the case of horizontal lines, this vanishing
point is on the horizon.
We can think of the rules as follows. The artist places a flat sheet of
glass vertically on a stand, and looks at the world through it. In order to
do this properly, the artist has to fix the viewpoint—the point from which
she looks through the glass—and not move while painting. Then she paints
 9. On perspective—and music 105

Figure 13: Hokusai—Chushingura, Act XI, Scene 2

[Link]
Public domain.

on the glass, placing every part of the image exactly in line with the part
of the world that she is representing. In other words, she projects the
three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional sheet of glass, using
the (fixed) viewpoint as the point of projection. Figure 15 shows Albrecht
Dürer’s diagram of this process, showing how the artist has a fixed view-
point.
The theory of perspective quickly became one of the staples of Western
art. For several hundred years, artists were taught the rules of perspective,
and by and large followed them. And the rest of us learnt to appreciate
perspective, and to regard it as natural and, in some sense, the correct way
to paint or draw.

The problem with perspective

Perspective is how the eye sees the world. And therefore painting a picture
in perspective is the right way for the artist to convey to the viewers how she
sees the world. Right?
106 B C, Before Computers

Figure 14: Juan Gris—Portrait of Pablo Picasso

[Link]
Juan_Gris_-_Portrait_of_Pablo_Picasso_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Public domain.

Well, in truth, there are interesting problems with perspective, and the
major one is revealed by the description above of how to do it. Remember
the fixed viewpoint? If the artist follows the rules, and if the viewer then
places his or her eyes in relation to the sheet of glass, exactly where the artist
was looking from when doing the painting, then the viewer will see what
the artist saw (or at least will see everything in the same geometric relation-
ship). But if the viewer looks at the painting from any other position, the view
is distorted. Nonetheless, we have become so used to perspective pictures
that we no longer see the distortion.
Actually, even if they are painting in perspective, artists take some liber-
ties with the rules. For example, if the painting contains a full moon at the
top left of the canvas, an exact application of the rules requires the moon to
be an angled ellipse on the canvas, rather than a circle. Seen (only) from the
correct position, the ellipse looks like a circle. But because we typically do
not look from the right place, because we are also aware of the plane of the
painted surface as well as of the 3D world being portrayed, and because we
think we know what shape the moon is, the ellipse would tend to jar with
 9. On perspective—and music 107

Figure 15: Perspective drawing—From Albrecht Dürer’s

Institutiones Geometricae (1532)
[Link]
Courtesy of the Erwin Tomash Library.

us. As a result, many artists would simply disobey the rules at this point,
and give us a moon that is circular on the canvas.

Optical projection

Long before photography, it was known that a pinhole or lens could be used
to project an image onto a screen. The pinhole idea was known in antiquity
(since at least the fifth century BCE), and it was understoood that the im-
age it produces is upside down because light travels in straight lines. In fact,
although it is in reverse, with the reference point for projection in between
the world and the image instead of the other side of a glass screen, the pro-
jection principle in the camera obscura is mathematically identical to that
of Renaissance perspective. The first clear description of a camera obscura,
a darkened room with a small hole in one wall, was by Leonardo da Vinci,
but the principle was well known by then.
The principle of the magnifying glass lens was also known in antiquity,
although lenses did not come into widespread use until around the 13th cen-
108 B C, Before Computers

tury CE, particularly with the invention of spectacles. Sometime in the 16th
century, it was realised that a lens could be used instead of a pinhole in a
camera obscura, gathering much more light to make a much better image.
A lens and a mirror, mounted in a turret on top of a building, could be used
to project an image (which could be viewed the right way up) into a dark-
ened room below. Modern versions of this may be seen in various places,
including the observatory at Greenwich.
A camera obscura with a simple lens follows the same projection princi-
ple, as does a photographic camera. Thus, when photographs came along
in the 19th century, the images were instantly recognisable as using essen-
tially the same kind of perspective that had been common in painting for
several hundred years. Such images are indeed in ‘correct’ perspective, al-
though the same qualification applies: they are only correct from a single
viewpoint.

Camera lenses

Actually, most camera lenses are more complex than single magnifying
glasses. In particular, many cameras have somewhat wide-angle lenses,
while some have the opposite, telephoto lenses. Images created by such
lenses are not in true perspective. We don’t usually notice this—except in
extreme cases. Such extreme cases include, in particular, very wide-angle or
fish-eye lenses. We see the image produced by a fish-eye lens as distorted,
simply because it does not follow perspective rules. In truth all 2D images
of the 3D world are distortions—one cannot project 3D onto 2D without dis-
torting it. But once again, we are so used to Renaissance perspective that we
do not see it as distortion, even when we view it from the wrong position
(which is almost always!).

Twenty-first century perspective

There is now, of course, a major industry in games for computers or

games consoles. These games often present three-dimensional worlds, seen
through the 2D computer screen, in which the player can move and operate.
In general, games designers use exactly the same perspective rules that we
are now so used to.
 9. On perspective—and music 109

It is becoming more and more difficult to get away from the idea that
these perspective rules give us the ‘truth’ about how we see the world
around us. Renaissance perspective has become a universal in the lan-
guage of images. The fact is that it is just as much an invention as writ-
ing—something that we had to learn about. One might argue that artists no
longer need to learn how to do it—they can now leave it to the cameras. But
all of us need to learn how to interpret perspective images. We do so very
early in our lives, probably before we learn words, and certainly before we
learn how to write. But it is a technological choice that we made, and not so
very long ago.

Text, again

How do we see the relation between written and spoken language? In

the several millennia since the invention of writing, our view of the sta-
tus of written text, in comparison with spoken, has changed hugely. These
changes occurred gradually, so that it is now difficult for us to reconstruct in
our imagination what the relation might have been like in the distant past.
In classical Greece, for example, although they had a relatively well-
developed writing system, they would not generally regard a book as it-
self an object of study. Rather it was an aide-memoire, to the writer or to
someone else—an expert reader who would interpret the script and speak
aloud, probably to an audience—in something like the way a modern mu-
sician interprets a musical score. We might also note that written material
was much harder to read then; the ancient Greeks had little in the way of
punctuation, and normally wrote without spaces between the words—as we
have already seen in Chapter 5. The oral tradition remained the true source
and method of propagating knowledge; writing played a strictly subservient
role. Socrates, in particular, disdained writing, and all the written evidence
that we have of the thought and work of Socrates was written by others,
principally Plato.
The contrast with today could hardly be stronger. We know perfectly
well that spoken and written languages are different, and play different
roles, but we are entirely happy with the notion that a written document has
its own validity, is to be understood and evaluated on its own terms. This
statement applies not only to books, but to magazines, pamphlets, letters,
110 B C, Before Computers

emails, text messages, posters, notes, and so on. In many cases, we regard
the written form as pre-eminent—for example, in laws and contracts. In an-
cient Greece, a contract was oral, requiring witnesses who could attest to it
orally—any written form was simply a reminder, with no legal or contrac-
tual status.
If you were to come to one of my talks, and I were to attempt to convey
the same or similar information to you orally, as I am currently trying to
do through text, I would do it quite differently. But the fact is that this is
unlikely to happen. This book will have to stand on its own as my message
to you: I have to get everything I want to say to you into this written text.

Coding and digital text

When Morse devised a scheme for transmitting messages over electrical

wires, he probably thought of his codes as instructions. That is, the send-
ing operator is given a message, let’s assume on paper, and the first letter
is ‘A’. The operator turns this into dot-dash, and transmits this signal. The
receiving operator hears it, and writes down ‘A’, as instructed. The dot-dash
is merely a way of getting the ‘A’ from one piece of paper to another.
A similar attitude is evident when the ASCII coding scheme was in-
vented in the twentieth century, with the human operators replaced by ma-
chines. As we discovered in Chapter 5, ASCII codes include both codes for
letters and codes for machine operations. ASCII code number 65, which
is 1000001, says to the machine at the other end “print an ‘A’”, while code
number 13, which is 0001101, says “return to the beginning of the line”.
However, we are moving away from this notion. One view, which is
probably common now, is that the coded form of a text (inside a machine or
traversing a wire) is as valid a representation of the true text as is a printed
document. Another view, which may seem extreme but has some advan-
tages, is that the coded form is the true document, while a printed form is
just a representation.
Why would that have advantages? Well, while such things as formatting
(fonts, layout etc.) seem to be intrinsic to a printed or displayed text, these
things are not normally seen as part of the essence of a text. We are usually
entirely happy with the notion that, if a document is printed on different
sizes of paper, or in a larger font for people with poor eyesight, such things
 9. On perspective—and music 111

as the line breaks in each paragraph and the spread of text over successive
pages may be adjusted to fit, without altering the essence of the text. The
same applies to a screen display in a window—and indeed it is very annoy-
ing when the text in a webpage is set up (pre-formatted) with a fixed width
that is wider than the window you are trying to read it in. Thus the un-
formatted digital file seems to capture the essentials of the text, while the
printed or displayed version mixes up the essence with more superficial as-
pects.
All this is quite aside from all the advantages of manipulation and pro-
cessing that can follow from having a coded text, such as cutting and past-
ing, or searching for words or phrases, or counting words.
These days, it is quite possible for a page of text to be represented in a
machine as a (scanned) image, rather than as coded text. But this repre-
sentation has all the limitations of the printed page itself. The true text now
seems to reside in the coded version, not in the scanned image, nor on paper.

Images

Thinking about photographs, as we have seen in Chapter 7, we seem to have

made a similar transition. Within a period of about 30 years, from the mid-
1980s to 2010, we came to accept that a ‘photograph’ is a digital file. Forty
years ago, if you had said “send me a photograph”, I would have inter-
preted that to mean a chemically-produced print on paper, to be sent by
old-fashioned post. Now (it does not even occur to me to question this),
you mean a digital file sent by email or MMS or placed in the cloud for you
to download. The digital file is the photograph—how you choose to display
it is another matter.
But this is not true of all images. Artists still paint pictures onto canvases,
and in such cases the picture is the physical object. If we subsequently pho-
tograph it, the photograph (in its digital form or printed or displayed) is
an attempt to represent the painting, which we may regard as more or less
successful, but at best a partial substitute for the real object.
It’s true, of course, that some artists (for example David Hockney), and
most designers, now create directly in digital form. Hockney’s wonderful
iPad art is created directly on the tablet, and once again the digital file is
the picture. Nevertheless, both the activity of painting and the resulting art
objects retain their status outside the digital world.
112 B C, Before Computers

Music

In a similar fashion, there are alternative ways to represent music. Of course

these have existed for a very long time: musical notations can be found on
cuneiform clay tablets from around 2000 BCE, and the ancient Greeks had
a more developed notation from around the 6th century BCE.
The stave notation with which we are familiar today developed gradually
over a number of centuries, from about the 11th century CE. Its ability to
indicate pitch and duration of individual notes, their relative timing, and
the overall rhythm came at different times. It is most strongly associated
with western classical music, though it is also used in other musical genres
and contexts.
Here the question of how it relates to the real musical sound is quite
complex. At one level, we see it again as a set of instructions to a singer
or instrumentalist—in order to make this music, this is what you have to
do. But we expect a player to interpret the music—and therefore the sound
that this player produces is not necessarily the same as another player of the
same music. Indeed, we find the differences important and interesting. This
view is actually not far from the ancient Greek view of written text—it was
there for a human reader, reading out loud, to interpret. In most musical
environments outside of classical music, the sound is developed and learnt
through performance, and written musical notation, if used at all, is treated
as an aide-memoire.
Nevertheless, in western classical music, the power of this abstraction of
sound to musical notation might be seen to take us a little nearer to the mod-
ern view of text, if not quite there. In the case of a late work by Beethoven, for
example, we might almost see the score as being the real music, and a per-
formance of it as a (maybe flawed) ‘display’. The knowledge that Beethoven
was deaf when he composed it, so that the paper version is the only indica-
tion we have of what he heard internally, reinforces this view.

Digital graphics and music

In the computer age, the kind of pixel-based image associated with pho-
tographs and scanned images is not the only way in which graphical in-
formation can be represented in digital form. For example, there is an al-
 9. On perspective—and music 113

ternative that is commonly used in design and engineering applications,

where the designer creates graphics directly on a computer, or where the
computer itself builds the image from something more abstract still, like a
three-dimensional model. This is known as vector graphics—the basic idea is
of describing the shapes to be displayed. For example, the digital represen-
tation might specify that there is a point here, and another here, and they are
joined by a straight line of this colour and thickness.
Vector graphics does not predate computers, but was developed in the
very early days of computing.
Similarly, we have different ways of representing music in digital files.
Just as vector graphics attempts a more abstract representation of certain
types of image than using pixels, we have ways of representing some kinds
of music that are more abstract than the pulse-code-modulation representa-
tion of sound. The best-known example is the MIDI system. MIDI was de-
veloped in the 1980s, well into the computer era, to allow digital control of
the playing of instruments. It allows the specification of notes to be played,
including pitch, onset and duration, all of which, of course, are represented
in the traditional stave notation of a musical score. But it can also include
further elements, such as envelope (the way the note fades or develops over
time).
Thus within the computer era, there has been a proliferation of ways to
represent and manipulate different kinds of text, still and moving images,
and sound. Part of the point of such representations is to extend the pos-
sibilities for the computer manipulation of data. Thus, for example, vector
graphics allows a relatively simple computer operation to extend a line or
move its endpoint—much more difficult if the line is represented only by
its pixels. Such computer manipulation is beyond the scope of this book.
However, in the next three chapters, we will consider further kinds of data
where the idea of machine manipulation predates computers.
 10. Calculation

Let us now return to numbers.

After the invention of the zero and positional notation by Hindu mathe-
maticians, and the systematisation of the rules of arithmetic by the Arabs, it
was only a matter of time before we would turn our attention to calculating
by machine.

Machines that calculate?

In one sense, a kind of mechanically-aided calculation had existed for far

longer, in the form of the abacus. In fact, the abacus involves a kind of ver-
sion of the positional notation of the later Arabic system—a column or row
of the abacus is still there, even if it has no beads in it, so the zero is repre-
sented. And the Arabic rules were embodied in the knowledge of trained
abacus-users long before they were codified.
The abacus helps the human to calculate (and also to remember the fi-
nal result of a calculation)—it does not do the calculation itself. The Hindu-
Arabic system (both the representation of numbers and the rules of arith-
metic) allowed the use of pen and paper with the same speed and accuracy
as the abacus, with the added advantage of retaining a permanent record of
the calculation. Machines that calculate? That would be revolutionary, but
this system also gives us the foundations of such a revolution. Given that
each column of a number is to be treated in exactly the same way as all the
others, and the rules have been codified, mechanisation is invited.
One person who first made serious inroads into this idea was Blaise Pas-
cal. In the first half of the seventeenth century, as a precocious teenager,
Pascal developed a calculating machine to help in his father’s financial cal-
culations. Numbers were dialled on a series of wheels. The machine could
be used to add, and, by a process of making subtraction look like addition,

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

116 B C, Before Computers

also to subtract. It could not yet multiply or divide. A similar machine,

which has not survived, was invented by Wilhelm Schickard about the time
of Pascal’s birth, and another famous mathematician, Leibniz, devised an-
other such machine shortly after Pascal.

Logarithms and the slide rule

Pascal’s and Leibniz’s machines represent, in direct mechanical form, the

Arabic rules of arithmetic, whereby numbers are made up of discrete digits
arranged in columns. This makes them the forerunners of the digital elec-
tronic calculators of the late 20th century.
But this is not the only approach to mechanical aids to calculation. A very
different method takes what might be described as an analogue approach to
calculation (as before, we can regard analogue and digital as opposing prin-
ciples). This was happening in parallel with the work of Shickard, Pascal
and Leibniz. It is clear that the time of mechanical calculation had arrived,
even if the methods were still in dispute.
The principle of the logarithm was developed by Napier, around the be-
ginning of the seventeenth century. The characteristic of logarithms is that
they convert multiplication into addition. That is, in order to multiply two
numbers, you take their logs (that is, you look up in a table the logarithm of
each number). Then you add them together, and then you take the antilog
of the result (that is, do the reverse lookup in the table). Great efforts were
made to compile accurate log tables over the next two or three centuries.
An alternative is to have the numbers represented on a scale (like a ruler
or measuring tape—see Figure 16), but spaced according to their logarithms
rather than in the usual equal spacing. Then two numbers can be multiplied
by adding their lengths on this scale. Initially this was done by having a
single scale and using dividers, but subsequently the idea of two scales that
could be slid against each other replaced the single scale. The slide rule was
born—see Figure 16.
In setting up a multiplication on a slide rule, you move B scale so that
the 1 (on B) lines up with one of the numbers you want to multiply (on
A). Then you look up the second number on B and read off the result from
the corresponding position on A. So a number is a position; you can set it
more or less accurately (just as you can measure with a ruler more or less
 10. Calculation 117

(a) Logarithmic scale

(b) Slide rule multiplication

Figure 16: Slide rule. Diagram: the author.

accurately). The digits that you might use to write down the number are
not involved. This is why we might describe it as analogue; the position is
an analogue representation of the number, not a digital one.
Provided that some degree of approximation was acceptable, the slide
rule principle was an effective method for multiplication and division for
three centuries or so before digit-based calculators could compete in this
domain, and remained in use for most of another century. But in the late-
twentieth-century IT revolution, when digital principles ran riot over vast
regions of human endeavour, the slide rule lost its status as the pre-eminent
method of calculation favoured by scientists and others.
However, I jump ahead. First, we have to see how the digital triumph
began.

The comptometer

Many inventors (or would-be inventors) of mechanical calculators, from the

mid-nineteenth century on, had in mind the idea of a key-driven device.
That is, one would key in the number on some form of keyboard. This looks
like a different principle from the Pascal system of setting dials. However, it
shares with Shickard, Pascal and Leibniz a digital view of calculation.
This idea took some time to become a reality. Essentially, the difficulty
lay in precisely those rules of arithmetic that the Arabic mathematicians had
given us, and which had inspired the quest for mechanical calculators in
the first place. The particular rule that causes difficulty in the design of
key-driven calculators is the carry rule: carrying from one column to the
next. Part of the problem is the recursive nature of carry: a carry to a second
118 B C, Before Computers

column might trigger a carry to a third, and so on. (Pascal had, and resolved,
the same problem with his wheel-based calculator.)
It is interesting to speculate here, as in the discussion of the typewriter,
why keys were regarded as so important. We have of course the very con-
siderable history of keyboard musical instruments, and later, while the key-
driven calculator was still struggling, we have the successful development of
the Hughes telex-like machine and later the typewriter. It seems that some-
thing about the keyboard as a transparent method of controlling a mechan-
ical device really appealed to Victorian inventors—a sort of Platonic ideal of
fingertip control which one can see reflected in many 20th and 21st century
approaches to design.
At any rate, the mechanical problem was eventually solved, and by about
1890, there were full-function key-driven comptometers for standard arith-
metic operations—‘full-function’ implies that they could be used to multiply
and divide as well as to add or subtract. In fairly short order, there were also
printing calculators, and then, in the twentieth century, electrically powered
and eventually electronic devices.

Babbage

A different view of mechanical calculation is due to Charles Babbage, the

nineteenth-century mathematician and inventor (active from the 1820s un-
til his death in 1871). His name is associated with two machines that are
seen as the ancestors of modern computers, the Difference Engine and the
Analytical Engine. Actually, he failed to produce a working version of either
machine, although forms of the Difference Engine were made subsequently.
The design of the much more ambitious Analytical Engine anticipated mod-
ern computers in many interesting ways.
These machines, like comptometers, can be described as digital (the rep-
resentation of numbers used decimal digits rather than the binary form
common today). The Difference Engine was a calculator on a grand scale,
but aiming at automating the repetition of many similar calculations, rather
than just a single calculation at a time. Thus it can be seen as anticipating
the idea of programming a machine to do many calculations. The Analytical
Engine would have been programmable to undertake many different kinds
of tasks, by implication going well beyond what was seen as arithmetic cal-
culation.
 10. Calculation 119

The ostensible purpose for developing these engines was an odd throw-
back. Babbage did not imagine them, or at least did not sell them to his
backers, as serving general calculation purposes. Rather they would be used
specifically to calculate the tables—tables of logarithms and the like—that
would be published and distributed, in the already established way, to allow
people to do their own, unmechanised, calculations and computations. A
major reason for the work was the known fact that existing tables contained
many errors, primarily because of the involvement of people doing tedious
repetitive tasks at all stages of their construction.

Input and output

This aim, generating printed tables, led Babbage to think about other issues
than calculation, in particular the input and output stages. For output, he
sought to automate part of the printing process: in particular, to have the
machine construct the plates for printing, thus avoiding typesetting errors.
(Plates for printing, as opposed to movable type, have a long history, briefly
discussed in Chapter 4.) This anticipated by more than a century the revo-
lutionary effect of the computer on the printing industry.
He also addressed the question of input—both of numbers and (in the
case of the Analytical Engine) instructions to the machine as to what to do.
The notion of keyboard input, so important to the comptometer inventors,
was of no interest to him. Instead, he proposed making use of Jacquard’s
invention of punched cards, which we encountered in an earlier chapter.
Jacquard successfully used punched cards to control looms; Babbage would
set them the task of controlling his Analytical Engine. In the event, the
punched card idea would be taken up at the end of the nineteenth century
for another purpose altogether, as we shall see in the next chapter. But even-
tually, in the 1950s, they would be used in much the way envisaged by Bab-
bage.

Computability

Babbage and his collaborator Ada Lovelace began to develop some general
notions of what might be ‘computable’, in other words, what kinds of task
might be susceptible to being delegated to a machine. Arithmetic calcula-
120 B C, Before Computers

tion was clearly in this category, having been reduced to sets of rule-driven
steps (“algorithms”) by the tenth-century mathematicians of the House of
Wisdom in Baghdad. But Babbage and Lovelace believed that the possibili-
ties went far beyond calculation.
Although a working Difference Engine was eventually constructed, Bab-
bage’s ideas mostly died with him. The twentieth-century inventors who
brought the modern computer into being were largely unaware of Babbage’s
work.
Nevertheless, the notion of computability, what might in principle be
computable, would be taken up by twentieth-century mathematicians such
as Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing. In the 1930s, Alan Tur-
ing described (as a mathematical abstraction) a general-purpose computing
machine—and subsequently made major contributions to the code-breaking
effort in the Second World War which, as we shall see in Chapter 12, led on
to the development of actual computers.
But something else happened in the 1890s, which brought machines into
a rather different form of work in a very practical way. This is the subject of
the next chapter.

On numbers and machines

Depending on your age, you (or perhaps your children) may well have
learnt at school about binary numbers and binary arithmetic. Using basi-
cally the same positional notation system as bequeathed to us by the Arabs,
but only two digits, 0 and 1, we can represent any numbers and perform any
arithmetical operations. In this scheme, the rightmost digit represents the
units, but the next to the left represents the twos rather than the tens, and
the next after that the fours (22 = 4) rather than the hundreds.
You will probably also know that computers operate with bits (bit is an
abreviation of binary digit), and you may well associate the digits of binary
arithmetic with the bits in the computer. Thus inside computers, numbers
are in binary, because that’s what computers know about and work with,
right?
Well, no, not quite. Actually, it is entirely possible to hold all numbers
and do all arithmetic inside a machine in the traditional decimal Arabic sys-
tem. The system is called BCD (binary coded decimal); it involves a direct
 10. Calculation 121

representation of each of the decimal digits, and rules for arithmetic opera-
tions on them that would be familiar to a primary-school child. Further-
more, retaining the conventional decimal structure has some advantages
over converting to pure binary—for one thing, it is difficult to approximate
a number according to the rules usually applied to decimal numbers, if you
are operating in the pure binary representation. Babbage’s machines were
to have worked in something akin to BCD; modern electronic calculators
usually work in BCD.
In fact, there is more than one pure binary version. There is a form of
representation, slightly different from the one described above though us-
ing essentially the same arithmetic, called two’s complement. This has some
advantages, including simplifying dealing with negative numbers, and is
often used in computers. Thus we have at least three different forms of rep-
resentation and two different forms of arithmetic. There are also different
ways to represent fractional numbers, very large or very small numbers, and
numbers that require great accuracy.
As a general rule, machines can convert numbers from one representa-
tion to another, internally, and back again. Thus we do not see all these vari-
ous representations or methods—we just see the results in the usual decimal
system.
 11. Data processing

In the United States, a census of the population is undertaken every decade.

The 1880 census took 8 years to analyse fully, and the Census Office badly
wanted to be able to complete the analysis of the 1890 census in a very much
shorter time. The solution to this problem was developed by Herman Hol-
lerith.

Tabulation

Every analysis of the census data involved sorting returns into categories,
counting the number of returns in each category, and recording the result-
ing numbers. Any of the answers to the census questions, singly or in com-
bination, might be the basis for categorisation. This process of sorting and
counting can be described as tabulation, the creation of (printed) tables.
Hollerith’s system involved punched cards—using ideas from Jacquard,
whom we encountered in Chapter 7 (he probably did not know Babbage’s
work). Each individual census record (representing a person) would be en-
coded onto a punched card. Each census question would be associated with
a group of punch positions, and the individual answer encoded as holes
punched in some of these positions. Thus for example the age question had
positions for different age-bands. For the gender question there were two
positions, M and F, and a hole was punched in one of them. You might
think that this datum needs only one position, where the absence or pres-
ence of a hole would indicate male or female. But this would assume (a)
that this question is always answered one way or the other, and (b, more
seriously for the Hollerith system) that the counting mechanism is just as
able to count absence as presence of holes. Well, alternatively you could
do something involving subtracting numbers in the final table. At any rate,
Hollerith did use two positions for this and other yes-no questions, despite

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

124 B C, Before Computers

the limited number of hole positions at his disposal.

Hollerith developed a machine called a tabulator, into which an op-
erator would insert each card in turn. The machine would automatically
operate a number of counters, incrementing them as appropriate for each
card. A counter could be associated with a single punch position, thus
recording the number of cards with holes in that position—for example,
a counter for each age range. But the machine also allowed questions to
be cross-tabulated—counters could be set up for combinations of holes. In
the first version of the machine, these combinations were pre-set, but sub-
sequently Hollerith developed a plugboard that allowed new combinations
to be set up. This effectively made the machine, at least to some degree,
programmable.

The operator places each card in turn in the machine, and the appropriate counters
(dials) are incremented, according to the holes punched in the card.

Figure 17: Hollerith tabulator,

From Scientific American, 1890.
[Link]
Courtesy of the Erwin Tomash Library.

The cards that Hollerith used for this purpose were the same size as the
then US banknotes. This was a deliberate choice by Hollerith, partly because
it enabled him to get cheap boxes for his cards! Although the size of US
 11. Data processing 125

banknotes has been reduced since then, the card size remained the same,
and is enshrined in an international standard.

The uses of tabulation

Hollerith’s invention allowed the 1890 US census analysis to be completed

in two years, and under budget. It was very quickly taken up for many other
national censuses. But it also became clear that it could be used for many
other purposes, allowing the analysis of different kinds of data in ways that
would not have been feasible when everything was done manually. The in-
vention begat an industry, which became known as the tabulator industry;
the analysis of data using tabulators and all the associated machinery be-
came known as data processing.
The system was adopted by insurance companies and others. Already
in the mid-1890s, one of the US railroad companies used the Hollerith sys-
tem to compile statistics relating to freight traffic, and to audit the accounts.
Other businesses followed suit. The range of applications included account
transactions, payroll accounting, inventory management and billing.
For over half a century, tabulator-based systems were used for a huge
variety of data-processing purposes, by a huge variety of companies and
organisations. When I started working in the field of information retrieval
at the end of the 1960s, there were still companies using tabulator systems
for searching scientific databases (in something akin to the way we search
the web using a search engine such as Google)—though inevitably by that
time they were being replaced by computers.
In the meantime, punched cards had developed a new lease of life as an
input mechanism for computers—as we shall see below.

Unit records

Back in Chapter 6, we discussed the idea of a database. A collection of data

of the kind for which tabulators were used, such as a set of census returns,
is a kind of database. It’s worth exploring its character in database terms.
In my description above of census data, I talked about records relating to
each individual: one punched card represents one person. In this case, we
might consider it to be a flat database, that is one with just a single type of
126 B C, Before Computers

record. However, census data is typically a little more complex than that. In
particular, data is normally (at least currently in the UK) actually collected
by household, rather than by individual. A single household with a single
address quite likely includes more than one individual.
In a modern computer database, the organisation of the data would
probably reflect this, by having each individual record linked to a separate
household record. So the database would have (at least) two different types
of record, together with a linking mechanism. The household record would
contain data such as address, and the individual record would give age,
gender, etc. Whether or not census data is actually analysed in this way, it is
easy to imagine questions one might ask that cut across these record types:
for example, ‘tabulate households by the number of school-age children in
each’.
A flat database of unit records of a single type, such as that built on Hol-
lerith punched cards for the 1890 US census, may serve very well for certain
kinds of analysis but does have limitations. It would certainly be possible to
derive two different sets of unit records from the same basic data: for exam-
ple, by punching a card representing each household—and keeping these
separate from the individual cards. But the linking would be difficult, and
some analyses would not be possible.
All the many applications of tabulator technology, from the invention of
the Hollerith system until they died out in the 1960s, had to be approached
with these limitations in mind. Thus each depended on a choice of a unit as
the basis for the unit records. Separate sets of unit records might be created
for different kinds of unit, to be analysed separately, but not to be linked
subsequently, except by hand.

The business

Despite such limitations, tabulator systems were adopted widely. Hollerith

formed a company to exploit his invention. Hollerith’s company merged
with three others to form CTR in 1911; in 1924, the merged company was
renamed as International Business Machines—IBM. In the fifties and six-
ties, IBM redefined itself as a computer company; in the 80s it developed
the PC (not the first personal computer, but one of the most successful com-
mercially). But before that, still in the first quarter of the century, other rival
 11. Data processing 127

tabulator companies were formed, and developed in other ways. For exam-
ple James Powers, who had taken over the construction of census-analysis
equipment within the US Census Bureau, formed the Powers Tabulating
Machine company in 1911. This eventually merged with the typewriter com-
pany Remington, which we have already encountered, as Remington Rand.
The development of new business and commercial rivalry went hand-in-
hand. JoAnne Yates, in the article Co-Evolution of Information Processing Tech-
nology and Use, has a fascinating discussion of the relationship between the
insurance industry and the tabulator companies. Many technical innova-
tions were driven by the demands of the insurance companies, who tended
to play off the rival tabulator companies against each other, in order to get
the developments they needed.
Some of these particular innovations are:

• the ability to accumulate (sum) numbers encoded on cards, as well

as simply counting them (this eventually evolved into full-function
arithmetic);

• the ability to sort a deck of cards into categories (Hollerith’s tabula-

tor included a rather simple aid to human sorting, but the insurance
companies wanted a much faster process);

• the ability to print, generating reports automatically (Hollerith’s de-

sign required a human operator to transcribe the numbers indicated
by the counters); and

• the ability to encode, and therefore print, alphabetic characters (e.g.

names and addresses) as well as numeric ones.

In the third case, for instance, the Powers company had a working print-
ing device considerably before IBM. However, IBM would eventually catch
up with a good product, and its considerably greater commercial muscle
enabled it to dominate the industry for many years. The last case was initi-
ated when one of the UK insurance companies took over the UK arm of the
Powers company.
Naturally enough, the first (and virtually all subsequent) alphanumeric
keypunches used the Sholes QWERTY keyboard with which we are already
familiar. And indeed, in 1928, IBM bought up one of the earliest electric
128 B C, Before Computers

typewriter companies, Electromatic, and became a major player in the type-

writer business, eventually coming to dominate the market in high-end of-
fice electric typewriters, which effectively carried it over the transition to
computers.

The transition

The continuity between the tabulator-based data-processing world and the

computing world is remarkably strong. For one thing, at least as far as IBM
computers were concerned, punched cards were used for data input, both
for the data to be analysed and for program instructions. This meant that the
keypunches and the card feeders and the card readers, as well as the cards
themselves, could be repurposed, and trained keypunch operators could be
reassigned.
But even outside the IBM environment, the conception of the business
uses to which a computer might be put started from what data processing
had done before computers came along. Of course companies innovate, de-
vise new ways of using the resources that they have, including computers.
But these innovations seldom come out of thin air, and often involve do-
ing something that you are doing already, but in a better or more flexible
or more reliable way. And besides, those functions that are most suscepti-
ble to mechanisation using tabulators are also those functions that are most
obviously computerisable.
In the late 1940s, after the end of Second World War, academics took up
the idea of developing computers—some sense of what might be possible
having survived the total destruction of Bletchley Park (see the next chap-
ter). They of course had many ideas about what might be done with com-
puters, to what uses they might be put—many of them revolving around cal-
culation, since the people who worked on the computers were often math-
ematicians, physicists and engineers. Applications included astronomical
calculations, weather forecasting, mathematical modelling of engineering
structures or chemical processes, and so on.
But as a business, operating in the world of business, computing could
only take off by starting somewhere that other businesses might recognise
as useful. That starting place was the existing tabulator industry and its
existing applications. As we have seen, these applications were not primar-
 11. Data processing 129

ily about calculation. They were about sorting, storing, manipulating and
managing records.

Data

I have talked about databases, but it is worth thinking a little more about
data. In the Jacquard loom, a hole in a card represents a control mechanism
for a machine, and it is really only in hindsight that it looks like a coded
representation of the woven pattern. Babbage’s notion (which of course was
never made concrete) was that such holes could encode not only numerical
data (to be operated upon), but also the arithmetic operations that might be
applied to them, and indeed therefore the sequence of operations and the
rules for branching, which we would now call the program.
Such abstract considerations were probably far from Hollerith’s mind
when he developed his system, but he did have a notion that they could
encode characteristics of people. One of his sources of inspiration was a
system in use on the railways, where the conductor would punch each ticket
with codes to identify the passenger. Another source was the piano roll, a
continuous roll of paper in which slots were cut to represent and reproduce
notes played on the piano, an almost-digital representation of music (it’s
not properly digital—the length of each slot is an analogue representation
of the time for which each note is held). Thus there is the beginning of an
idea that there is some kind of abstraction that we might call data.
Over the next half century or more, this notion will develop slowly. In
particular, the idea is centred around the association with characters that
may be typed or printed. And we know about characters—we have letters
and digits. Oh, and special symbols and punctuation marks. Oh, and we
discover that we need to extend the notion a little, to include first spaces,
then carriage returns and line feeds (the ability to print a three-line address
from an IBM card came really late in the day). In fact, basically anything that
can be a key on a typewriter—as typewriters were electrified, they were also
given a key for carriage return, as opposed to the lever on the left-hand-end
of the carriage, which was the norm for manual typewriters.
Despite Morse and more than a century of telecommunications, it was
not until the 1960s, well into the computing era, that the idea would emerge
that we might need a standard form of encoding for all these characters, for
130 B C, Before Computers

all the different data processing and telecommunications purposes. Then

two different standards appeared: ASCII, which was explicitly designed to
be a standard, and EBCDIC, which became a de facto standard because of its
use by IBM (we encountered these in Chapter 5). Both standards take as
their basis the kinds of characters that one sees on a typewriter keyboard.
As with numbers, the internal storage and manipulation of such data in
computers does not necessarily retain the direct link to printable characters.
We have already seen that numbers may be converted and then stored and
manipulated in a number of different ways—the same applies to other kinds
of data. This was already true of the original Hollerith card—the gender
question is represented by two hole-positions called M and F, rather than
by the words Male and Female. But many other such transformations may
be made inside a computer, even if the external representation (input from
a keyboard, or output to a printer or a display) is always made using the
words with which we are familiar.
Now, finally, we can think of all text and all numbers as data, and in
particular as digital data, storable, transmittable and processable in a large
variety of ways, but essentially all by the same kinds of machines. It will
take a little longer for the idea of data to encompass images and music as
well, but that will happen eventually, as we saw in Chapter 7. Furthermore,
not only can we think of text and numbers and photographs as data, in some
sense we have to think of them this way. As with so many other influences
of technology, there is no going back.
 12. Ciphers

It is easy to think of computers as giant calculators, and indeed the task of

calculation and its mechanisation contributed both to the idea of construct-
ing such a machine and to the conception of the tasks to which it might
be addressed. Difficult calculation tasks such as those involved in ballistics
(particularly in wartime) provided some of the stimulus towards the post-
Second-World-War development of computers. But we have just seen, in
the previous chapter, how a really rather different kind of task stimulated a
form of mechanisation that brought us close to the computer era. The major
stimulus for the actual invention of computers came from another domain
again.
The challenge was that of breaking the codes used by enemies in order
to be able to read their supposedly secret messages, in the technological
hothouse that was the Second World War. In order to see how this came
about, we again start much earlier.

Codes and ciphers

Throughout history, people have felt the need to write messages (point-to-
point messages, in terms of our previous discussion) that would be unread-
able to anyone other than the intended recipient, specifically to anyone who
might intercept it en route. Military commands, intelligence reports, in-
structions to agents, love letters, arrangements for meetings, plans for any
kind of action or activity that could prompt counter-measures of any kind by
any third party—all these and many more might be deemed by the sender
to need encryption.
Since the word code is somewhat overloaded in present-day usage, I will
use the word encryption to indicate putting some message into code, in such
a way that it can only be read by someone who has the key to the code, and

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

132 B C, Before Computers

cipher for the method or rules for doing so. The original message is plain
text and encryption results in the encrypted or cipher message. Recovering
the plain text (given the key) is decryption. Discovering the key, or even
the complete cipher system I may still refer to as code-breaking, in deference
to popular usage. The whole subject, of designing ciphers and of breaking
them, and of studying their properties (such as whether in principle they
are breakable) is cryptography.
A book with a marvellous account of the different kinds of ciphers that
have been used through history, and of the efforts of opponents to break
them, is Simon Singh’s The Code Book. Much of the rest of this chapter is
drawn from Singh’s book.

The alphabet and encryption

From the beginning and to this day there has been some use of word-based
coding systems. A report in a newspaper on my table today describes a
case in which some alleged terrorist plotters “used code words” for some
possibly suspicious-sounding words, like firearms. But such systems are
really intended to disguise or camouflage a coded message, rendering it less
suspicious and therefore less likely to attract attention. Another approach
is to hide the existence of a message altogether.
However, most of cryptography addresses the question of how to render
a message unreadable even when the adversary is in possession of what he
or she suspects or knows to be a cipher message. Once again, it is hard to
conceive of much of the history of encryption without the alphabet. Most
encryption systems throughout history have been alphabet-based. Ciphers
typically involve either or both of: re-arranging the letters of the message,
and/or substituting different characters for those in the message. Even in
Japan and China, we see evidence of the use of alphabets or alphabet-like
symbol sets for encryption. Japanese ciphers tend to be based on one of the
phonetic alphabets (kana), while a Chinese cipher might use, for example,
either a phonetic alphabet or the so-called Four Corner method of encod-
ing each character into four or five numbers, which is also used as a sort of
substitute for alphbetical order, for sorting and then looking up characters.
Given an alphabet, one of the simplest kinds of encryption is to substitute
for each letter in a message the letter three places further on in the alphabet
 12. Ciphers 133

(this was a cipher used by Julius Caesar). If I do this with the heading of
this section, I get

Wkh doskdehw dqg hqfubswlrq.

Or I could choose a different shift, or I could rearrange the cipher alphabet

in some way. My intended recipient needs to know what cipher system I
have used, a key that will enable him or her to decrypt the message: both
the principle (‘alphabet shift’, for example) and the number of characters
shifted.
But as we shall see in a minute, such ciphers, in which a plaintext e is
always represented by the same symbol in the cipher message (in this case
an h) are normally very easy to break. To make a stronger cipher, we might
use all 26 possible shifts of the alphabet, and a key that tells us which shift
to use for which letter. The key is a word, whose first letter tells us which
shift to use for the first letter of the message, second for the second, and so
on. When we reach the end of the codeword, we return to the beginning.
This is the basis for a Vigenère cipher, invented by Blaise de Vigenère in the
sixteenth century.
The Vigenère cipher makes use of the Vigenère square, showing all pos-
sible shifts of the alphabet (see Figure 18). Suppose that we again want to
encrypt the heading of this section, and the codeword is revolution. We write
out the plain text, and underneath it the codeword, repeated as many times
as are necessary to match every letter of the plain text. Then we look up each
plain text letter in the top row of the Vigenère square, and encrypt it with
the corresponding letter in the row identified by the codeword letter. The
first lookup (column T row R) is circled in the figure. Given the codeword,
decryption is equally simple—but you need the codeword.

THE ALPHABET AND ENCRYPTION plain text

REV OLUTIONR EVO LUTIONREVO repeated codeword
KLZ OWJAIPRK EIR PHVZMCKMJB cipher text

The Vigenère cipher is much stronger than the simple substitution of the
alphabet shift, and was thought to be unbreakable. In the example, you
can see that the two As in alphabet are represented by different letters in
the cipher text. But it can be broken—the man who established this fact is
134 B C, Before Computers

Figure 18: Vigenère square. Diagram: the author.

someone we have already encountered in Chapter 10: the nineteenth cen-

tury mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.

Code breaking

Suppose that I am in possession of a cipher message, or a set of such mes-

sages from a single source—but that I am not the intended recipient, and
do not know the cipher. If I have any reason to believe that the cipher is a
simple alphabet shift, or indeed any simple one-for-one substitution, then it
should be easy for me to discover the key and thus decrypt it. In particular,
the number of occurrences of each letter will provide a clear clue as to which
letters might have been substituted for, say, E or T or A (the most common
letters in English). The longer the message the easier this is, but in the above
short message I have three each of E and T, and also N, and only two As
Even so, we see immediately that breaking is a different kind of task from
 12. Ciphers 135

encryption and decryption. Encryption, and decryption for the recipient

in possession of the key, both involve following a very simple set of rules.
Breaking the cipher, however, is a little more complex. The code-breaker
may have to do some counting and statistics, and then try out a number of
possibilities.
Babbage’s method of breaking the Vigenère cipher involves looking for
repeated sequences of characters in the cipher message. The distances be-
tween such sequences will give good clues as to the length of the keyword
used, after which an extended form of the analysis of the statistics of let-
ter occurrence, as used to break simple substitution ciphers, is likely to be
effective.
However, using a longer key (for example a phrase or an entire poem)
makes it more difficult to break. The final stage of this development was
to construct a whole series of long random keys, each printed on a separate
sheet of paper, forming a pad, of which sender and receiver would each have
a copy. The sender would encrypt a message using the first sheet, and would
then discard the first sheet so that it would never be used again. The receiver
would decrypt it also using the first sheet, and then discard the sheet. This
cipher, the one-time pad, was invented by Joseph Mauborgne for the US Army
at the end of the First World War, and is known to be unbreakable by anyone
not in possession of the one-time pad. Its major limitation is the necessity
for producing and securely distributing the pad.
In fact the process of inventing better ciphers (by those trying to send
and receive secure messages) and devising ways of breaking them (by their
enemies) is a game people have played for millennia.

Methods and machines

Given that the processes of encryption and decryption are normally based
on well-defined rules, it’s a little surprising that the use of mechanical aids
was relatively slow to get going. Simple substitution ciphers require no
more than a two-row table: plain-text letters on the top row and substitutes
on the bottom. The Vigenère cipher requires a square table, with each of
the 26 possible alphabet shifts on its own row. Even the one-time pad is
essentially paper-based.
However, it is also possible to make a simple mechanical device to help
136 B C, Before Computers

with either the simple substitution or Vigenère-style encryption and decryp-

tion, in the form of a pair of disks, one inside the other. The letters of the
alphabet are written around the edge of each disk, and the inner disk is ro-
tated relative to the outer disk to set up a single substitution table. If it is
further rotated during encryption, a Vigenère-style cipher is produced.
Such a disk was invented by Leon Alberti in the fifteenth century, and
similar devices were in use for a long time, including during the American
Civil War. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not until the twentieth century that
the use of machinery for encryption and decryption advanced much further.
However, the application of a complex cipher system really does suggest or
even demand machinery: the more complex the rules to be applied, the
more important it is to delegate their operation to a machine, which might
be expected not to make mistakes.
Mechanisation of encryption and decryption did not really take off until
the invention of the Enigma machine. The German military famously used
Enigma as their preferred cipher device during the Second World War, both
for encryption and decryption, with daily changing keys; and the British,
equally famously, had at Bletchley Park an establishment devoted to read-
ing German cipher messages, which did in fact repeatedly and successfully
break these daily ciphers.

Enigma

Enigma generates a letter-by-letter substitution of the clear message, but the

substitution table effectively changes with every letter. But unlike the orig-
inal keyword-based Vigenère system, the table does not repeat itself every
few letters. It is more comparable to the one-time pad.
It is a fascinating machine in its own right. Developed in 1918 by Arthur
Scherbius, it looks very much like a typewriter—in fact the keyboard is
closely based on Sholes’ keyboard described in Chapter 5 (which by 1918
was well established as the standard form of keyboard for typewriters). But
instead of paper, the back of the machine has a replica of the keyboard in
a lampboard, an arrangement of lettered disks each with a lamp behind
it—see Figure 19. (You might note in passing that this keyboard differs a lit-
tle from the Scholes typewriter keyboard (Chapter 5), although obviously
derived from it. In particular, the offsets differ—having only three rows,
 12. Ciphers 137

the offsets are one-third of the key width. Experienced touch-typists would
have noticed this!)

The letter L is pressed, and the D lamp is on.

Figure 19: Enigma machine

[Link]
Enigma_Machine_A16672_open,_letter_L_pressed.[Link]
CC BY-SA 4.0.

The clear message is typed in, as it might be on a typewriter, but at each

keystroke, instead of printing, one of these lamps is illuminated, indicating
a new letter—the cipher code to be used for the letter just typed in. The
illuminated letter then has to be recorded somehow—written down or typed
or transmitted directly.
The mechanisms that allow the continually-changing table of substitu-
tions are several and ingenious, and I will not attempt to describe them here.
They depended on initial settings, which were changed daily; once into a
message, the settings were changed automatically by the process of typing
the message. That is, every keystroke resulted not only in the coding of one
letter of the message, but also in re-arranging the table of correspondences
for the next keystroke.
The resulting cipher was extremely complex and difficult to break, but
138 B C, Before Computers

the complexity arose not so much from complex rules, as from a combina-
tion of many applications of simple rules. This is exactly the province of the
machinery of the time, and it is no surprise that encryption and decryption
should have succumbed to some such form of mechanisation, not long after
the typewriter and the comptometer.

Breaking Enigma

As I have indicated, code-breaking is a different order of task altogether.

Almost inevitably, given a series of cipher messages, breaking the cipher
system involves a combination of knowledge or guesswork as to the mech-
anisms involved in the cipher (or rather the rules which they mechanise),
knowledge or guesswork about some key settings, and trial and error. There
is a very strong sense in which code-breaking is an art-form. Like any art
form it has its supporting technology (both in the form of machinery and
in the form of know-how, methods and ways of doing things, sets of rules
that may be applied), but it needs inspiration as well. This is certainly not
true of encryption or decryption. It could be said to be true of devising new
cipher systems—and indeed there are a couple of late-twentieth-century in-
ventions here that look truly inspired—but as a hothouse for developing
new ways of thinking, it is hard to beat Bletchley Park.
Bletchley Park was the Second World War UK Government establish-
ment in charge of attempts to read any intercepted cipher enemy messages.
Many messages to or from military units of all kinds, of the German or other
Axis powers, were intercepted and sent to Bletchley Park. And for much of
the war many of these messages were successfully decrypted. There was al-
ways a challenge at the beginning of the day, because the keys were changed
each day and the new key had to be discovered from some of the early mes-
sages intercepted. Then for some longer intervals, weeks or months, a par-
ticular cipher might become unreadable because of a change in some part of
the encryption procedure by the Germans—until the Bletchley Park people
had discovered how to deal with this new variant.
 12. Ciphers 139

Post-war cryptography

In the subsequent history of cryptography, following the end of the Second

World War, the computer has loomed large. Most modern cipher systems
are computer-based, in the sense that computer programs are used for en-
cryption and decryption as well as by the code-breakers. In fact most sys-
tems make use of the fact that a message in a computer (necessarily in one of
the binary codes discussed in Chapter 5) looks very much like a number, to
which arithmetic operations can be applied. Of course it isn’t really a num-
ber, but with certain safeguards we can pretend that it is. We can encrypt
by applying arithmetic operations to it such as addition and multiplication;
decryption then means reversing these operations.
One of the great discoveries of cryptography in this period is the princi-
ple of asymmetry. This is based on the fact that some arithmetic operations
are easy to perform in one direction, but much harder in the other (it’s easy
to multiply two large prime numbers; it’s much harder to factor the prod-
uct and rediscover the original two primes). The resulting cipher system
is known as Public Key Cryptography. It allows the person who wants to
receive a message in cipher to make public an encryption key; anyone who
wants to send him/her a message can use this key to encrypt it. However,
the decryption key is different. Only the recipient of the message knows this
decryption key—it need never be made available to anyone else. In princi-
ple, this makes for a much more secure setup—in almost all previous cipher
systems, sender and recipient would have to share a key, and the necessity
for sharing is a major source of insecurity.

Bletchley Park and its legacy

Despite the fact that cryptography really entered the machine age only after
the First World War, the challenge of cryptanalysis and code-breaking must
really be credited with kick-starting the IT revolution of the second half of
the twentieth century. In the end, we did not invent computers in order to
control machinery, as Jacquard might have done; we did not invent comput-
ers in order to do repetitive numerical calculation, as Babbage tried to do.
We did not invent them to analyse censuses; nor to organise our accounts or
do payroll; nor to do weather forecasting; nor to do word processing; nor to
140 B C, Before Computers

facilitate telecommunications; nor to play our music or look after our pho-
tographs—though they are very useful for all of these things and more. We
invented computers in order to break codes.
The operation of Bletchley Park depended very heavily on people: col-
lecting, transcribing, analysing the intercepted cipher messages. Initially,
all analysis was entirely by people, using essentially pencil and paper, and
human effort remained central to the code-breaking task. However, early
in the war the great Alan Turing designed a machine called a bombe, which
greatly helped in eliminating many possible initial settings (given a crib, a
human guess as to the plaintext version of a particular section of the cipher
text). This invention allowed Bletchley Park, for much of the war, to discover
the day’s new key settings early in the day, enabling the decryption of any
further messages that day as soon as they were received.
Later in the war, the Bletchley Park effort had serious difficulties with
another German system, the Lorentz cipher. This was similar to Enigma
but more complex, and it typically took weeks to break one day’s messages.
Max Newman, another Bletchley Park mathematician, started developing
plans for a new machine that would be much more adaptable than the
bombe—in fact, it was what we now describe as programmable. This was
much more difficult to build than the bombe, but eventually in late 1943 the
engineer Tommy Flowers designed and constructed a working version, us-
ing thermionic valves (as used in early radios). It was called the Colossus,
and with its help, the keys for Lorentz-ciphered messages could be discov-
ered quickly.
Colossus was the clear forerunner of the modern computer. It was elec-
tronic, digital, and in some sense programmable, and used many of the ideas
and principles and methods that a modern computer scientist would regard
as essentially those of a computer.

An act of vandalism

Then, at the end of the war, the entirety of what had been the Bletchley
Park operation was eliminated. Winston Churchill, who had been the chief
backer of Bletchley Park, ensuring funding for it against opposition from
some quarters, demanded that all evidence of the UK’s cryptographic abil-
ities should be utterly erased. Not only was Colossus itself destroyed, but
 12. Ciphers 141

all the blueprints for it were burnt. All Bletchley staff were required to keep
silent about anything at all that went on there.
Despite my heading, vandalism is a poor word to describe Churchill’s ac-
tion. It was a 2000-year throwback to the first emperor of China, in the sec-
ond century BCE—burning the library, in order to suppress the subversive
knowledge held therein.

The next phase

But it’s hard to kill an idea like that. In the world of the 1940s, outside
Bletchley Park, some of the necessary ideas were already coming together.
A project between IBM and Harvard University, masterminded by Howard
Aiken, developed the Harvard Mark 1, a giant programmable calculator
with many computer-like features, which first ran in 1943. The destruction
of Bletchley Park left behind, in addition to the handful of eccentrics who
believed in the possibility of building a computer, another handful who had
actually seen one in operation. Within a year or two immediately following
the war, academics in the UK (at Manchester and Cambridge) and in the
US (in Pennsylvania and elsewhere) started building computers. Within a
very few years, the computer age had taken off.
But that’s another story.
 Epilogue

We have seen a skein of different ideas, developing over the course of hu-
man history, interacting with and feeding off one another, brokered by peo-
ple with a wide variety of different motivations. We have seen the notion of
data emerge gradually and gradually absorb many other concepts. Informa-
tion, which might be seen as an abstraction like matter or energy, is in some
sense “carried” by data, or perhaps may be extracted from it. Numbers are
data, text is data, pictures are data, music is data. But that’s just the begin-
ning—now everything we do, every interaction we have with any part of the
world around us, is data.
Of course this is all absurd. Music (just to take one example) is a human
experience, or rather a whole raft of human experiences, and to regard it as
data is to ignore or put aside both the nature and the validity of the experi-
ence, whether of composing or of performing or of listening. Nevertheless,
it is convenient to pretend that music is data, because there is so much we
can do with it on the back of that pretence. Not only can we record, store, re-
trieve, transmit, broadcast music-as-data, we can also make use of any num-
ber of digital tools (as well as the slightly older analogue electronic ones) as
part of the process of creation, in both composition and performance.
In the twenty-first century, data, data processing and manipulation, and
all the raft of technologies around data, are central to how we see the
world. In these days of data protection and privacy, of laws and regulations
around this domain, of data mining, of data theft, of people and organi-
sations who relentlessly collect data about us and who manipulate us by
manipulating our data, and so on—in these days, it is hard to re-imagine
the world as it was before the notion of data took hold. The digital com-
puter—together with all the other information and communication tech-
nologies—is of course at the core of this data-centred world. Which is why
it is tempting to speak of the invention of the computer having ushered in a

© Stephen Robertson, CC BY 4.0 [Link]

144 B C, Before Computers

revolution.
So, was it a revolution? Did the arrival of computers result in an over-
throw of the existing order of things and its replacement by something fun-
damentally new?
Certainly, the effect on our lives of the developments in the domain of the
information and communication technologies, subsequent to and at least to
some extent consequent upon the invention of computers in the 1940s, has
been immense, arguably revolutionary. The world of email, the internet,
online shopping, online management of bank accounts, mobile phones dou-
bling as cameras, digital radio and television, downloaded recorded sound
and films, satellite navigation, ebooks, Google, Wikipedia, social media—all
this would have seemed utterly extraordinary, something in the realm of
fantasy, to my parents at the time I was born.
Nevertheless, the existing order is seldom so easily cast aside. What this
book has demonstrated, I hope, is the extraordinary amount of stuff—of
knowledge, understanding, invention, ways of thinking and doing, ideas,
methods and techniques—we have brought with us over this journey. In
many significant ways, the IT world not only draws on the past, but is rooted
in it. This past is not just (though it very much includes) the couple of cen-
turies following the industrial revolution, but goes way back—to the Renais-
sance, to the invention of printing, to the ninth-century Arabic and seventh-
century Hindu mathematicians, to the Roman empire, to the Greeks and the
Phoenicians, to the invention of writing itself.
 Bibliography

What follows is a short list of books and essays (and one film) that have in-
spired me and that I have mentioned in this book for one reason or another.
But I must give one reference pride of place as my go-to source of first and
often only resort:
Wikipedia: Many articles, by many authors.
—
Jim Al-Khalili, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science (Penguin, 2012).
Isaac Asimov, Foundaton Trilogy (Gnome Press, 1951).
Antonio Badia, The Information Manifold: Why Computers Can’t Solve
Algorithmic Bias and Fake News (MIT Press, 2019).
[Link]
The Venerable Bede, On the Reckoning of Time (c. 723).
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953).
Vera Britain, Testament of Youth (Victor Gollancz, 1933).
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the
Information Age (Oxford University Press, 2004).
Luciano Floridi, Information: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2010).
[Link]
James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Fourth Estate,
2011).
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The Panda’s Thumb of Technology’, in Bully for
Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (Penguin, 1992).
146 B C, Before Computers

GPO Film Unit, Night Mail (1936).

Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Allen Lane,
1999).
John Man, Alphabeta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World (Headline,
2000).
John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution: The story of a genius and an invention
that changed the world (Review, 2002).
Cyril Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress
(Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind
(Harper, 1994).
Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and
Pictograms (Thames & Hudson, 1995; 2nd ed 2007).
David Rothenberg, Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature
(University of California Press, 1995).
Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford
University Press, 2000).
Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ The Bell
System Technical Journal XXVII, No. 3 (July 1948), pp. 379–423.
Adam Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to
Quantum Cryptography (Fourth Estate, 1999).
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph
and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (Walker, 1998).
JoAnne Yates, ‘Co-evolution of Information-Processing Technology and
Use: Interaction between the Life Insurance and Tabulating Industries’
The Business History Review 67, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 1–51.
 List of illustrations

1. Ancient Egyptian writing—stela of Senusret III, Altes Museum Berlin

[Link]
Ancient_egyptian_stela_Senusert_III.JPG CC BY-SA 3.0. . . . . . . 9
2. Basic QWERTY keyboard (with the interleaved bars of a traditional
typewriter). Diagram: the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3. Ancient Roman mosaic, featuring a panther—detail from Pompeii,
National Archaeological Museum, Naples
[Link]
MANNapoli_SN_mosaic_Panthere.jpg Public domain. . . . . . . . . . . 76
4. Georges Seurat’s Honfleur, un soir, embouchure de la Seine (detail)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
[Link]
Georges-Pierre_Seurat_-_Honfleur,_un_soir,_embouchure_de_
la_Seine_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Public domain. . . . . . . . . . 77
5. A modern Jacquard loom
[Link]
India_-_Sights_%26_Culture_-_Hand-loom_pattern_cards_for_
silk_sari_weaving_(2507306023).jpg CC BY 2.0. . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6. Sound. Diagram: the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7. Views of a cube. Diagram: the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
8. World map according to the Mercator projection
[Link] CC
BY-SA 3.0. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
9. World map according to the Peters projection
[Link]
Peters_projection,_blank.svg Public domain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
10. Ancient Egyptian art: Drawings of the gods Nebt-Het, Anubis, and Seb
[Link]
Nebt-Het._AND_Anubis._AND_Seb,_or_Keb._(1902)_-_TIMEA.jpg
From Travelers in the Middle East Archive. CC BY 2.5. . . . . . . . . . . 102
148 B C, Before Computers

11. Drawing of an ancient Greek vase painting.

[Link]
EB1911_Greek_Art_-_Vase_Drawing_(Fig._2).jpg Encyclopædia
Britannica (11th ed.), v. 12, 1911, p. 474—Public domain. . . . . . . . . 103
12. A banquet—detail from the Bayeux Tapestry
[Link]
Bayeuxtapeten,_Nordisk_familjebok.png Nordisk
familjebok—Public domain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
13. Hokusai—Chushingura, Act XI, Scene 2 https:
//[Link]/wiki/File:[Link]
Public domain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
14. Juan Gris—Portrait of Pablo Picasso
[Link]
Portrait_of_Pablo_Picasso_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Public
domain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
15. Perspective drawing—From Albrecht Dürer’s Institutiones Geometricae
(1532) [Link]
Courtesy of the Erwin Tomash Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
16. Slide rule. Diagram: the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
17. Hollerith tabulator, From Scientific American, 1890.
[Link] Courtesy of
the Erwin Tomash Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
18. Vigenère square. Diagram: the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
19. Enigma machine [Link]
Enigma_Machine_A16672_open,_letter_L_pressed.[Link] CC
BY-SA 4.0. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
 Index of topics

Aachen, 51 binary numbers, 120

abacus, 115 binocular vision, 83, 95
abjad, 12 bit, 54, 120
abugida, 11 Bletchley Park, 136, 138
account number, 73 blueprint, 43
address, 31, 71 bombe, 140
administrators, 19 broadcast, 35
algorithm, 16
calculation, 115
almanac, 66
calculator
alphabet, 10, 27, 49
keyboard, 117
consonant, 12
calendar
analogue, 79
Gregorian, 66
Analytical Engine, 118
Julian, 66
ANSI, 53
calotype, 79
Arabic alphabet, 53
camera, 75
Arabic numbers, 13
cine, 82
architecture, 97
Carolingian minuscule, 51
arithmetic, 16
cartography, 98
ASCII, 53, 110, 130
catalogue of stars, 65
astronomy, 65
CD, 80
at sign (@), 60
census, 67, 123
Australia, 100
Chapar Khaneh, 20
author index, 70
character, 10, 27
Babylon, 65 character case, 61
Baghdad, 37 character code, 52
Barı̄d, 20 China, 35, 37, 39, 132
BCD (binary coded decimal), 120 Chinese characters, 39, 53, 59, 61
150 B C, Before Computers

Chinese writing, 11 decryption, 132

church, Christian, 35, 42, 66 Difference Engine, 118
cinema, 41 digital/analogue, 79
cipher, 132 Domesday book, 68
Alberti disk, 136 dummy head recording, 90
Lorentz, 140 Dvorak keyboard, 57
one-time pad, 135
Easter, 66
public key, 139
EBCDIC, 53, 130
substitution, 132
Egypt, 18, 67, 100
Vigenère, 133
Egyptian writing, 9
clay tablet, 18, 37
electricity, 27
code-breaking, 132
Elizabethan theatre, 42
Colossus, 140
email, 31
colour, 82
encryption, 131
additive, 92
Enigma, 136
physics of, 91
Europe, 102
physiology of, 91
primary, 82 facsimile, 84
subtractive, 92 fire, 37
communication, 17 first world war, 24
comptometer, 117 forms, 70
computability, 119
Germany, 138
computer games, 108
Gilgamesh, 37
computers, 73
government, 20
Computus, 66
GPO Film Unit, 146
copying books, 38
great circle, 100
cryptography, 132
Greece, 42, 51, 68, 100, 109, 112
cubism, 102
Greek alphabet, 53
Cursus Publicus, 19
Greek writing, 12
Greenland, 100
daguerreotype, 78
Greenwich, 108
data, 2, 129
catalogue, 69 halftone, 84
forms, 70 Harvard Mark 1, 141
data processing, 73, 125 Hindu numbers, see Arabic
database, 73, 125 numbers
 Index of topics 151

history, 68 monochromatic, 91
Holy Roman empire, 21 spectrum of, 91
House of Wisdom, 15, 120 lightbulbs, 91
literacy, 23, 36
IBM, 126 log tables, 116
IBM golf-ball typewriter, 58 logarithms, 116
image, 111 London, 21, 23, 72
3D, 83, 95
information, 5 mail train, 24
information technology, 3 mailing list, 46
international post, 22 medium, 18
Ireland, 50 message, 17
Italy, 97 messenger, 17
metadata, 69
Jacquard loom, 78 microphone, 80
Japan, 102, 132 MIDI, 113
Japanese characters, 53 monastery, 38
hiragana, 12 Morse code, 27, 52
Japanese writing, 11 mosaic, 75
music, 112, 113
keyboard, 29, 54
musical score, 51, 109
language, 6
navigation, 66, 100
language instinct, 6
Nineveh, 36
Latin, 50
number, 13
lenses, 107
Arabic/Hindu system, 13, 15
letter of the alphabet, see
Greek systems, 14
character
Roman system, 14
letter writing, 23
library, 36, 69 offset lithography, 44
Alexandria, 37
House of Wisdom, 37 papyrus, 18, 37
monastery, 37 Parkinson’s Law, 4
library catalogue, 69 Penny Post, 22
library classification, 69 perspective, 97
ligature, 62 Phoenician writing, 12
light phoneme, 11
152 B C, Before Computers

photocopying, 43 Rome, 18, 50, 68

photography, 78 Russian alphabet, 53
photostat, 43
piano roll, 129 satellite navigation, 72
pictures, 75 science, 3
pixel, 75 shift key, 61
pointillism, 76 slide rule, 116
political rally, 42 sodium lamp, 91
post, 17 soldiers, 19
Post Office, 24 sound, 79
postal system, 20 binaural, 90
postcode, 72 stereo, 80, 89
poster, 35 spaces between words, 50
printing, 39 stereoscope, 83
processing information, 54 syllabary, 10
proclamation, 35 syllable, 10
programming, 118
tabulation, 123
projection
tabulator, 124
Mercator, 100
tax, 67
parallel, 98
technology, 3
Public Key Cryptography, 139
telegraph, 27
publishing, 40
printing, 29
pulpit, 35
telephone, 30
pulse code modulation, 80
telephone exchange, 30
punched cards, 77, 119, 123
telephone number, 30
punctuation, 51, 60
television, 35, 85
QWERTY keyboard, 127 text messaging, 32
three-colour theory, 92
radio, 30, 35 Thurn und Taxis, 21
raster, 85 Times, 23
recipient, 18 tonal perspective, 95
Remington, 55, 127 tradesmen, 19
Renaissance, 97 two’s complement, 121
residence, 68 typewriter, 29, 55, 128
revolution, 1, 144
road, 19 unicode, 53
 Index of topics 153

Universal Postal Union, 22 Wikipedia, 145

word, 8
vanishing point, 98
writing, 7
vector graphics, 113
vowels, 12, 62
xerography, 43
wax stencil duplication, 43
weaving, 76 Zoopraxiscope, 82
 Index of names

Aiken, H., 141 Church, A., 120

Al-Khalili, J., 16, 145 Churchill, W., 68, 140
Al-Khuwārizmi, 16 Cyrus II, Emperor, 20
Alberti, L., 136
Alcuin, 51 Daguerre, L., 78
Archimedes, 4, 15 Darwin, 7
Asimov, I., 89, 145 Dickens, C., 41
Assur-bani-pal, 36 Dionysius Exiguus, 66
Auden, W. H., 24 Dockwra, W., 21
Augustus, Emperor, 20 Dürer, A., 105

Essinger, J., 78, 145

Babbage, C., 22, 118, 134
Badia, A., 145
Feynman, R., 70
Bain, A., 85
Floridi, L., 5, 145
Baird, J.L., 85
Flowers, T., 140
Baudot, É., 52
Fox Talbot, see Talbot
Bede, Venerable, 66, 145
Beethoven, L. van, 112 Gleick, J., 6, 145
Bell, A. G., 30 Gödel, K., 120
Bradbury, R., 38, 145 Gould, S.J., 57, 145
Braille, L., 52 Goya, F., 44
Britain, V., 24, 145 Gray, E., 30
Britten, B., 24 Gregory I, pope, 66
Gris, J., 102
Caesar, J., 14, 66, 133 Gutenberg, J., 39
Callimachus, 69
Carroll, L., 8, 145 Hapsburg emperors, 21
Charlemagne, Emperor, 51 Helmholtz, H. von, 82
156 B C, Before Computers

Herodotus, 68 Piero della Francesca, 104

Hill, R., 22 Pinker, S., 6, 146
Hitler, A., 42 Plato, 109
Hockney, D., 111 Powers, J., 127
Hokusai, K., 102 Ptolemy, 36
Hollerith, H., 123
Reeves, A., 80
House, R.E., 29
Hughes, D., 29 Robinson, A., 8, 146
Rothenberg, D., 5, 146
Jacquard, J.-M., 77, 119
Saenger, P., 51, 146
Kaplan, R., 15, 146 Scherbius, A., 136
Schickard, W., 116
Le Prince, L., 82
Seurat, G., 76, 94
Leibniz, G., 116
Shannon, C., 6, 146
Leonardo da Vinci, 107
Sholes, C., 55
Longley, M., 57
Silverstein, A., 20, 146
Lovelace, A., 119
Singh, S., 132, 146
Lumière, A. & L., 83
Socrates, 109
Standage, T., 146
Man, J., 10, 39, 146
Stephan, H. von, 23
Mantegna, A., 104
Masaccio, 104 Talbot, W.H.F., 79
Mauborgne, J., 135 Thucydides, 68
Maxell, J.C., 82 Traub, L., 57
McGurrin, F., 57
Turing, A., 120, 140
Morse, S., 27, 51
Muybridge, E., 82 Vail, A., 51
Vaughan Williams, R., 71
Napier, J., 116 Vigenère, B. de, 133
Newman, M., 140
Newton, I., 91 Wheatstone, C., 83, 95
William I, king of England, 68
Parkinson, C.N., 4, 146
Pascal, B., 115 Yates, J., 127, 146
Picasso, P., 102 Young, T., 82
 About the team

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book.

Lucy Barnes performed the copy-editing and proofreading.

Anna Gatti designed the cover using InDesign. The cover was produced in
InDesign using Fontin (titles) and Calibri (text body) fonts.

The author typeset the book in LATEX. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella. The
author generated the PDF from which the paperback and hardback were
produced, as well as an ebook version.

Luca Baffa created the remaining versions (epub, mobi, HTML) from
the ebook version. The conversion is performed with open source
software freely available on our GitHub page ([Link]
OpenBookPublishers).
 This book need not end here. . .

Share
All our books — including the one you have just read — are free to access online so
that students, researchers and members of the public who can’t afford a printed edi-
tion will have access to the same ideas. This title will be accessed online by hundreds
of readers each month across the globe: why not share the link so that someone you
know is one of them?

This book and additional content is available at:

[Link]

Customise
Personalise your copy of this book or design new books using OBP and third- party
material. Take chapters or whole books from our published list and make a special
edition, a new anthology or an illuminating coursepack. Each customised edition
will be produced as a paperback and a downloadable PDF.

Find out more at:

[Link]

Like Open Book Publishers

Follow @OpenBookPublish

Read more at the Open Book Publishers BLOG

You may also be interested in:

Engaging Researchers with Data Management

The Cookbook
by Connie Clare, Maria Cruz, Elli Papadopoulou, James
Savage, Marta Teperek, Yan Wang, Iza Witkowska, and
Joanne Yeomans

[Link]

Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers

A Primer for the Non-English Speaker
by Gabor Lovei

[Link]

The Essence of Mathematics Through

Elementary Problems
by Alexandre Borovik and Tony Gardiner

[Link]