Information Technology Reference
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from which digital technology and digital culture developed.
Turing's thought experiment is of particular importance for the
development of modern computers in that it was intended to be a
universal machine. Though a number of electronic calculators had
been produced these were mostly dedicated devices, capable only
of specific hardwired operations. In contrast, Turing's imaginary
device was, in theory at least, able to be programmed to undertake
any mathematical problem. The idea of a universal machine had
already been imagined by predecessors such as Charles Babbage and
Ada Lovelace, and work by George Stibitz, Konrad Zuse and Claude
Shannon and others made its practical realization more feasible,
but Turing's particular vision had a conceptual coherence lacking
before. As mentioned before, Turing was able to conceive of the
idea of the universal machine through the example of the typewriter,
which can be configured in two different states, upper and lower
case, using the same keyboard. On one level Turing's use of the
typewriter was merely expedient: it was a readily available tool
that Turing himself used, albeit erratically.
3
He was undoubtedly
concerned simply to find some device that could act as a model
in conceptualizing a solution to the problem he was addressing. It
is almost certain that Turing had little interest in the social and
cultural implications of his choice. Yet the technology he chose,
and that was so readily available to him, was in fact deeply embed-
ded in a network of social and cultural meaning, one derived from
contemporary capitalism. Thus it is possible to see how capitalism
offered the context in which the computer could develop.
the division and abstraction of labour and capital
Invented in the late nineteenth century, as a response to the bur-
geoning information needs of business, the typewriter standardizes
and mechanizes the production of language, reducing the elements
out of which it is composed to abstracted signs (illus.
1
).
4
In this it
