91685 - History of Informatics and Computing Systems

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students know where the logical and formal basis of informatics come from. More specifically the aim of the course in brief is: to show how every scientific discipline came out in the melting pot of problem solving and knowledge research; ii) to point out three fundamental dimensions for evolution of the informatics: time dimension to keep up with times, linguistic dimension to understand the basis of the discipline, technological dimension which is needed to sustain development in any discipline.

Course contents

The course will present some milestones in the construction of the current form of computer science. It will present the main ideas, thought patterns and principles that contributed to the birth and evolution of certain areas of computing, without dwelling too much on the details of individual architectures, machines or languages.

The prehistory of computing: computation and computational tools; mechanography. The precursors: Babbage, Couffignal, Hollerith, Zuse, Aiken, etc.

The programmable electronic computer: ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC.

The evolution of architectures.

The evolution of operating systems.

The evolution of programming languages.

The second part (approximately the last third of the course) will be devoted to some in-depth topics, chosen mainly in the area of programming languages.

Readings/Bibliography

To be decided.

Two possible textbooks:

1. Thomas Haigh, Paul E. Ceruzzi. A New History of Modern Computing. MIT Press, 2021.
2. Martin Campbell-Kelly, William F. Aspray, Jeffrey R. Yost, Honghong Tinn, Gerardo Con Díaz and Nathan Ensmenger. Computer–A History of the Information Machine (Fourth Edition). Routledge, 2023.

Some sources in: Brian Randell (a cura di). The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers. Springer, 1982.

Other texts:

1. Tedre, Matti (2014). The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline. Chapman Hall.
2. Mark Priestley (2011). A Science of Operations. Springer

Teaching methods

Lectures, seminar discussion of documents

Assessment methods

Oral examination.

Depending on the time and availability of the students, it may be possible to supplement the examination with an in-depth seminar on a topic agreed upon with the lecturer.

Office hours

See the website of Simone Martini