NDLI: Programming and Planning

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Grier, D.A.
Copyright Year	1992
Description	Some 15 years ago, I argued in the Annals that the word program entered the vocabulary of computer developers from the ENIAC project. Within the ENIAC, the term referred to the control signal that synchronized and directed the actions of the machine's individual units. "It is convenient in discussing the ENIAC to distinguish between the numerical circuits (which operate on signals representing numbers) and the programming circuits (which recognize when and how a unit is to operate and which then stimulate the numerical circuits to operate)," wrote Adele and Her mann Goldstine in their initial published paper on the ENIAC. Eight years would pass before the field would shift the usage of the word program away from the electronic circuits that controlled the machine toward the symbolic instructions that describe a set of opera tions to be set in motion by those circuits. In the intervening time, engineers more commonly used the word planning to describe the process of preparing a list of instructions for a computer. Konrad Zuse called his programming language PlanKalcul. The Mathematical Tables Project, which operated on the cusp of the electronic computing era, was gov erned by a planning committee. The initial articles on programming techniques by John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine were called "Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computer." The term plan derived from the production engineer ing field, a discipline that developed in the 1920s in England in response to the production demands of World War I. The story of its usage shows how the con cept of programming started to develop and suggests, as authors such as Michael Mahoney have argued, that programming owes much to production engineering and the fields that derived from it, notably systems engineering.
Sponsorship	IEEE Computer Society
Starting Page	86
Ending Page	88
Page Count	3
File Size	69342
File Format	PDF
ISSN	10586180
Volume Number	33
Issue Number	1
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2011-01-01
Publisher Place	U.S.A.
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Planning Programming Computers Encoding Production engineering History quality control History of computing John von Neumann Herman Goldstine Institution for Production Engineering Frederick Winslow Taylor planning programming production engineering Walter Shewhart
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Computer Science History and Philosophy of Science

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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