Technology and Culture

With all the hype surrounding information technology in the United States, including the burgeoning “information superhighway” and skyrocketing Internet stocks, it is easy to forget that institutions in both the public sector and countries other than the United States have made significant contributions to the development of computer technology. One of these is Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). From World War II to the present, NPL’s string of achievements has been noteworthy but not well noted. Turing’s Legacy sheds a welcome ray of light on these achievements, but also leaves much to be desired.

This is to a certain extent a firsthand account of computing at NPL, as the author was a staff member for a majority of the period covered. One therefore might naturally expect a special degree of insight into both NPL and its people. Such expectations, unfortunately, are mainly in vain. So concerned is the author with avoiding anything that might be considered “opinion” [End Page 172] (what professional historians would view as interpretation) that the final section of the book (all three pages of it) is explicitly identified as “opinion rather than history” (p. 285). While it is not particularly unusual for nonhistorians to take this kind of tack when doing history, Yates takes things a step further by organizing the majority of the book as virtually stand-alone descriptions of specific technical projects undertaken by NPL. This is less history as chronicle than history as technical report. Indeed, the chapters are “sections,” and the subsections are numbered. Each project summary is followed by a list of relevant references. With the exception of the final section containing the author’s carefully, though not entirely, hoarded opinion, the book is broken down according to division administrations. The resulting periodization—1945–56, 1957–66, 1966–78, 1978–87, and 1987–95—is therefore not terribly useful from an analytical perspective.

In all fairness, many of the projects are not without interest. In particular, NPL’s work on computer networks, including the development of packet-switching, is a bit of a revelation and deserves much greater recognition. Also notable were NPL’s efforts to provide electronic digital computing services to researchers throughout the laboratory, beginning with the Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) in 1951. Important research was conducted in a variety of other areas, including adaptive control (neural nets), pattern recognition, machine translation, data security, numerical methods, multiprocessing, and human-computer interaction. Psychologist Christopher Evans was a particularly prominent figure associated with this last area, while the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing was responsible for most of the conceptual (but little of the practical) work on the ACE. (Turing left NPL in 1948 for Manchester University.)

Welcome respites from the technical summaries are the all-too-brief section overviews that constitute the author’s minimal attempt to situate NPL and its work in some larger context. In particular, he notes the impact of changes in the British political climate on the perceived mission of NPL and on its research agenda. Over the years, NPL went from largely determining its own research agenda to having to “sell” its proposals to its government “customer” to competing with private sector firms for government work, resulting in a “public” institution driven increasingly by short-term commercial concerns. The management of NPL itself was contracted out to a private firm in 1995. While these insights are certainly better than nothing, they are frustrating both in their brevity and in the propriety that the author seems to feel he must maintain. (Neither Thatcherism nor the Conservative Party, for example, is even mentioned in the later sections.)

Back-cover blurb notwithstanding, this book is far from “very readable,” although it is comprehensible by nonspecialists. Aside from the brief section overviews and the “Retrospective Postscript” that is the final section, Turing’s Legacy is essentially a compendium of project summaries stretching over half a century. As...