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Abstract
This dissertation is about clock time’s role in electrified digital computing. With the rise of computing from the mid-twentieth century, clocking has become both increasingly ubiquitous and progressively more basic to structuring information and activity at high temporal resolutions. I use foundational episodes in clocking’s application to the new medium as a lens to examine the layers of ways in which the engineers and scientists involved in computer architecture, interaction, and network design and development negotiated the temporal virtues and challenges that these novel machines presented. The first section, “Calculating,” juxtaposes distinct approaches to clocked control that found expression amidst emergent and evolving computer architecture design principles during and in the immediate aftermath of WWII. The roots of synchronous and asynchronous methods developed in work on the ENIAC and IAS machines set the terms of computer construction for the years that followed and helped to invigorate two phenomena that would help to animate the future of computer design: an epistemologically pragmatic — or what I call “schematic” — approach to clocking, and the emergence of “machine time” as a distinct temporal resource to be martialed.The second section, “Interacting,” traces multiple novel styles of time-based interaction that emerged as clocked machine time was leveraged to birth and shape “real-time” in the 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, I focus on a contrastive analysis of two different systems in the emergent design tradition of Graphical User Interfaces: the SAGE air defense system and its Situational Display Console and Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad system. The final section, “Networking,” focuses on two “minor” but exemplary clock-based technologies that have facilitated aspirations for seamless networked computing: interrupts and timestamps. I elucidate their role in a variety of networked contexts, from the circumscribed case of MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, through to applications that concerned broad-based content sharing and synchronization including the Network Time Protocol and multimedia streaming.An exacting look at clock time’s application in select, formative stages in the layered development of modern digital computing offers pathways to an expanded historical sense of clocking’s multiplicity and pliability as a mode of temporal objectification, qualities that have been near-completely neglected in the extant literature.
