[ih] SDC networking; Marill report

[Craig Partridge]

I'm going to push back a bit here against Williams' statement.  I fear his
sweeping "there is no such thing" as first is, perhaps, simply the opposite
of people claiming too many firsts.  The former excludes some real firsts,
the second ignores that the common case is that innovation is often an
accumulative process in which there's rarely a clear "first" as much as a
soup of ideas that crystalize (sometimes in more than one expression).

So we're familiar with the ideas that crystalize:  Newton and Leibniz on
calculus, Darwin and Wallace on evolution.  The sun at the center of the
solar system.  Cracking the Mayan hieroglyphs.  Inventing the cell phone.
Many many innovations in computing.  Classifying ideas this way does not
diminish the tremendous intellectual effort to crystalize the ideas in a
workable form.  To my mind it recognizes an important form of innovation.

Other ideas are truly first -- there's no obvious antecedent and, indeed,
contemporaries viewed them as out of the blue rather than a progression
from the known.  Einstein's theory of relativity.  From what I've read, the
concept of zero in arithmetic and Galois' group theory.  And, from a more
engineering slant, the discovery of high temperature superconductivity
(recall the guys who found it were [a] looking for something else; and [b]
physicists thought they'd proved that superconductivity happened only at
very low temperatures).

In short, "first" is super rare, but does happen.

Craig



On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 2:11 PM David Hemmendinger via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>         Thank you for the citation!  The Charles Babbage Institute has
> a copy of the 1966 Marill Preliminary report: Box 701, folder 8 (Computer
> Corporation of America).
>         To echo the comment about "firsts": Michael Williams, a former
> Computer History Museum curator, wrote "What does it mean to be the first
> computer?" in the IEEE John Vincent Atanasoff 2006 International Symposium
> on Modern Computing (DOI 10.1109/JVA.2006.54), in which he argues that
> depending on precisely how one specifies "first", there are 18 candidates.
> And in his introduction to Rojas and Hashagen, eds, _The First Computers_
> (MIT Press, 2000), sec. 2, he wrote:
>
>    Let me emphasize that there is no such thing as "first" in any activity
>    associated with human invention. If you add enough adjectives to a
>    description you can always claim your own favorite. For example the
>    ENIAC is often claimed to be the "first electronic, general purpose,
>    large scale, digital computer" and you certainly have to add all those
>    adjectives before you have a correct statement.
>
>         David Hemmendinger
>

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