The Off Topic Thread

The evolution of computer science from mathematical logic culminated in the 1930s, with two landmark papers: Claude Shannon’s “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and Relay Circuits,” and Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” In the history of computer science, Shannon and Turing are towering figures, but the importance of the philosophers and logicians who preceded them is frequently overlooked.

Another way to characterize Shannon’s achievement is that he was first to distinguish between the logical and the physical layer of computers. (This distinction has become so fundamental to computer science that it might seem surprising to modern readers how insightful it was at the time—a reminder of the adage that “the philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.”)

Since Shannon’s paper, a vast amount of progress has been made on the physical layer of computers, including the invention of the transistor in 1947 by William Shockley and his colleagues at Bell Labs. Transistors are dramatically improved versions of Shannon’s electrical relays — the best known way to physically encode Boolean operations. Over the next 70 years, the semiconductor industry packed more and more transistors into smaller spaces. A 2016 iPhone has about 3.3 billion transistors, each one a “relay switch” like those pictured in Shannon’s diagrams.

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