Existence Precedes Essence - Meaning of the Stored-Program Concept - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 176

The SSEC was provided with extensive fast table look-up facilities, including doz-
ens of potential tape drives for tables in paper tape form. This is understandable as
Wallace Eckert who oversaw its design had a long history of using tables in his work
in astronomy. He had pioneered the use of punched card machines in scientific com-
putation at Columbia in the 1930s and made use of mathematical tables in punched
card form. Eckert had chosen as the first problem for the SSEC a computation of
some positions of the Moon. The position was given by the summation of a long se-
ries of trigonometric functions. In the original incarnation of the program high preci-
sion values of the sine and cosine function had been obtained from a table punched
onto tape. However, the program for this calculation was later reworked and the high
precision values of sine and cosine found via calculation of an arithmetic series. [20]
With the rise of the electronic computer extensive mathematical tables would fade
from use in complex scientific computation, computers could use such tables, but
special provision was rarely made for their use as in the SSEC.
Mathematical tables had been a vital component of computation in subjects like
mathematics where extended calculation was done. The investment in these methods
existed not only in physical copies of the tables, but in the extensive methods of tabu-
lar interpolation developed by practitioners. [21] As mentioned at the beginning of
this paper Leo Vernon had predicted in 1939 that the “dream machine” would be able
to read in tables with lightning speed. Yet the use of tables or not was dictated by the
economies of speed in calculation versus reading off values from storage. Electrome-
chanical punched card machines could read faster than they could carry out arithme-
tic, but not so early electronic machines.
Also, while the computer's nature may be protean, individual computers were not.
Mahoney acknowledged this when he gives a definition of the history of computing as
“the history of what people wanted computers to do and how people designed com-
puters to do it.” [19] However, it bears emphasis that individual computers were
designed to be better suited to some tasks over others and so were not protean. For
example, in the 1950s IBM marketed some of its computers as scientific machines
and others as business machines. Thus the first IBM computer, the IBM 701, was
designated for science, while the IBM 702 was designated a business machine. As a
result the IBM 701 used a pure binary representation to store and manipulate values,
while the IBM 702 used binary coded decimal and this trend continued for several
later iterations of machines at IBM. [8]
The distinction between a binary and decimal machine may seem of little import,
since it is trivial to convert input and output. However, many would-be operators who
had to program in machine code did not see it that way. Decimal was seen as more
congenial to the less technically learned business users. Coding in binary seems to
have been a worry even for some scientists. For example astronomer Paul Herget did
his own programming on the decimal Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC),
but was unwilling to do the same on the binary IBM 704. He suggested the engineers
have their pay made out in binary until they saw the error of their ways. [22] In prin-
ciple a binary and decimal machine might not be much different because after all the
stored-program meant they could perform all the same calculations. Again human
practice helps define the nature of a machine beyond its hardware.