> On Sep 6, 2017, at 1:25 PM, Fred Jan Kraan via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> While reading a biography of Claude Shannon, I try to get a picture how
> computers were seen and used before Information Theory emerged. It might be
> something like this:
>
> Before Information Theory, computers were mainly calculators; processing
> programs from numbers put into the machine, much like programmable, but
> non-graphic calculators. Information Theory states that almost any digital
> encoded data can be processed, as long as you can teach the computer how to
> interpret the data.
>
> Any more insights on this?
It seems to me that Turing's 1936 paper clearly takes the information theory
route. Whether Babbage did I'm not sure.
paul
