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Exploring the Early Digital pp 87–99Cite as

Switching the Engineer’s Mind-Set to Boolean: Applying Shannon’s Algebra to Control Circuits and Digital Computing (1938–1958)

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Abstract

It belongs to the lore of computer science that Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis (1937) revolutionized the design of (relay) switching circuit design. However, as often is the case when taking a closer look at the historical records, things were slightly more complex. Neither was Shannon’s paper an isolated result in switching theory, nor was it immediately absorbed into the engineers’ daily practice. It proved to be only usable in a small number of situations and had to be used in conjunction with other techniques and the engineer’s know-how. Boolean algebra would only become more important and more generally useful once standard situations were created.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The paper was a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science” (Goldstine 1972, p. 120).

  2. 2.

    One of the major biases is the heroifying of John von Neumann, to the point of neglecting or underplaying contributions by others (especially in the context of ENIAC or the EDVAC design). But the most incorrect statement in the book may very well be “the state of numerical mathematics stayed pretty much the same as Gauss left it until World War II (p. 287),” for this alone the author should have deserved to be haunted by the ghosts of all mathematicians that have worked on numerical mathematics for the military, for industry, or for government well before World War II.

  3. 3.

    Today, most authors will not use this particular Boolean algebra but rather another one where 1 + 1 = 0. In that case, a closed relay corresponds to 1 and open to 0, with a serial circuit corresponding to multiplication and a parallel circuit to addition. Hartree 1949 was the first to suggest using this algebra.

  4. 4.

    For a rich documentation of early publications in algebraic switching theory, see the second part of (Stankovic and Astola 2011).

  5. 5.

    Note that this paper focuses on US reception, or more correctly, only a small part of it, mostly using materials coming from Bell Labs , MIT, and Harvard. The current paper, however, gives the general drift of Shannon’s reception in the USA. A more ambitious story (work in progress) should include not only a selection of East Coast sites but also other players in the field such as IBM or West Coast developments. Another restriction of the paper is that its sources used are mainly published papers, complemented with technical reports and patents. No use was made of Bell’s engineers’ notebooks or similar documents, which did not circulate.

  6. 6.

    The main results of the paper date from 1940, but the paper was only published after the war in 1949.

  7. 7.

    The team of Stibitz and Williams who developed the Bell relay calculators proceeded in a similar way, developing basic units for their calculators, but they never published on the topic.

  8. 8.

    See (Stankovic et al. 2016) for its reception in the Soviet Union .

  9. 9.

    The work of Moore, Mealy, and Huffman also sparked a new rapprochement between circuit design and information theory, especially coding theory. This constitutes another chapter in the history of (theoretical) circuit design, where automata theory, information theory, and circuit design meet. M. Mahoney’s work on the emergence of theoretical computer science provides an angle on that particular chapter, but his studies are based on theoretical publications, not on the actual practices.

  10. 10.

    Including von Neumann himself who used the notation in his lectures on probabilistic logic and the synthesis of reliable circuits from unreliable components.

  11. 11.

    Quine would later contribute an important result in logic directly useful for simplifying Boolean functions that were used in circuit design (Quine 1952).

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  1. Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

    Maarten Bullynck

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Correspondence to Maarten Bullynck .

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  1. Department of History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Thomas Haigh

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Bullynck, M. (2019). Switching the Engineer’s Mind-Set to Boolean: Applying Shannon’s Algebra to Control Circuits and Digital Computing (1938–1958). In: Haigh, T. (eds) Exploring the Early Digital. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8_5

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