Information Technology Reference
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narratives that accompany most textbook introductions to a scientifi c
discipline. Their purpose is to provide aspiring practitioners with a sense
of participation in a heroic and coherent disciplinary tradition. They do
so not by celebrating revolutionary developments but instead by conceal-
ing them. By emphasizing only those details of past discoveries that
contribute directly to present-day understandings, highly selective histo-
ries situate contemporary theories and practices in a larger tradition of
continuity and cumulative discovery. In doing so, they allow practitio-
ners to locate themselves within a disciplinary tradition more mythical
than realistic. The construction of such inherently selective histories is
an essential move toward the development of what Kuhn called “normal
science.” The practice of normal science is what defi nes and perpetuates
a discipline. Without normal science, there is no discipline.
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Computer science became normal science in the late 1960s. In the
same year that the ACM defi ned the fi rst standard curriculum in com-
puter science, one of its most noted practitioners published its fi rst offi -
cial history. In 1968, the Stanford University computer scientist Donald
Knuth opened the fi rst volume of his canonical
The Art of Computer
Programming
with a survey overview of the history of computing. As
Kuhn would have anticipated, Knuth's history closely mirrored his
theory. It located the origins of the discipline in a treatise by the ninth-
century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. It
is from al-Khwārizmī that we derive the modern word algorithm, and
for Knuth it was the study of the algorithm that defi ned the modern
discipline of computer science. A history of computing in which the
algorithm was fundamental was the ideal companion to a volume subti-
tled
Fundamental Algorithms
.
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As Paul Ceruzzi has convincingly demonstrated, by the beginning of
the 1970s Knuth and his colleagues had successfully established the
algorithm as the fundamental unit of analysis of computer science.
66
In
his compelling interweaving of history and mathematics, Knuth not only
defi ned for computer science an intellectual lineage worthy of the most
basic and fundamental of sciences but also skillfully distanced electronic
computing from its origins in mechanical computation and electrical
engineering. One of the most common objections raised against com-
puter science was that it was a technical rather than a scientifi c enter-
prise, the study of local particularities rather than fundamental entities.
Despite what Herbert Simon might suggest about the legitimacy of the
sciences of the artifi cial, computing still seemed to many to be the domain
of the engineer and accountant rather than the theoretician or scientist.
