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    L The Quantity Surveyor and The Computer-A Short History: Objectives

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    Hopeton Austin

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    L The Quantity Surveyor and The Computer-A Short History: Objectives

    Uploaded by

    Hopeton Austin
    24 views2 pages

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    978-1-349-10857-2_1

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    24 views2 pages

    L The Quantity Surveyor and The Computer-A Short History: Objectives

    Uploaded by

    Hopeton Austin

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    l The Quantity Surveyor

    and the Computer- a Short


    History
    Objectives

    At the end of this chapter you should be able to:


    • Outline the history of commercial data processing.
    • Outline the major developments which have taken place in the use of
    computers by quantity surveyors during the past 25 years.
    • Outline the ways in which quantity surveyors are most likely to use
    computers today.

    Early developments in computing and data processing

    The first consideration when discussing the development of early computer


    systems is to decide exactly where to begin. Most histories of computing,
    for example Evans (1981 ), begin with the development of mechanical
    counting machines by people such as Pascal and Babbage, but whilst these
    machines have much to do with the use of computing 'engines' to solve
    mathematical problems they have little or nothing to do with either the
    development of electronic computers or the use of such machines to
    process data.
    The first electronic, as opposed to electro-mechanical, computers are
    now generally acknowledged to have been the 'Colossus' machines first
    described in Michie (1973), which were built by the Post Office Research
    Station for the Department of Communications of the British Foreign
    Office, the first of which was delivered to the Government Code and
    Cypher School, Bletchley Park in December 1943. A fuller account of
    Colossus following the release of further information by the Ministry of
    Defence in 1975 is given in Randell (1980).
    Most of the developments in computers at this time were, of course,
    highly secret and it was not until after the end of the Second World War
    that the use of computers for commercial data processing was considered.
    Considerable use had however been made of the electro-mechanical
    punched card sorting equipment, developed around the turn of the century
    by Hollerith and his contemporaries, for accounting, processing of census

    A. J. Smith, Computers and Quantity Surveyors


    © A. J. Smith 1989
    4 Computers and Quantity Surveyors

    data and the like. By the end of the second world war the use of such
    machines was commonplace and companies such as IBM were already
    well established in the data processing field. The origins of data processing
    can therefore be said to pre-date the development of the electronic computer
    by almost half a century.
    It was then against this background of data processing experience and in
    the spirit of new optimism just after the war that J. Lyons & Co. began, in
    1947, to investigate the use of computers for commercial data processing
    and eventually, in consultation with computer specialists from the com-
    puting laboratory at Cambridge University, installed LEO, the Lyons
    Electronic Office. LEO finally became operational towards the end of
    1953, although Lavington (1980:p. 35) points out that LEO was really a re-
    engineered version of the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic
    Calculator) originally developed in Cambridge in 1949.
    Although LEO was the first computer in the world to be used for
    commercial data processing, Lavington (1980:p. 41) claims that the world's
    first commercially available computer was the Ferranti Mk.1 based on the
    Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADM) developed at Manchester
    University, the first of which was delivered in February 1951. Evans
    (1980:p. 92) however claims that the first commercially successful computer
    was the UNIVAC 1 the first of which was delivered in March 1951.
    It should be pointed out that by no means everyone viewed the future of
    the computer with the optimism shown by Lyons. Fisher, McKie and
    Mancke (1983:p. 14) quote Cuthbert Hurd, then IBM Head of Applied
    Science, as stating that he was told, in 1949, by IBM president Thomas
    Watson Snr. that the single IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator
    then in existence could solve all of the important scientific problems in the
    world requiring calculation. Hurd is also reported as saying that a sub-
    stantial body of opinion within IBM at the time:
    ... could not imagine that enough problems or applications could ever be
    proposed by IBM's potential customers to keep a computer busy because
    such machines were to have the capability of processing several thousand
    operations per second.

    The quantity surveyor and data processing

    In the beginning...

    The origins ofthe quantity surveyor's love-hate relationship with computing


    can be traced back to the mid 1950s, when an article, Stafford (1957), was
    published in The Builder magazine. In the article the author, a practising
    quantity surveyor, advocated the use of punched card sorting equipment

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