On 28 October 1999 Bloomsbury Book Auctions will offer the largest privately assembled computer library ever to be sold at auction, the Weinreb Computer Collection. The late Ben Weinreb's remarkable collection of over 2000 books, pamphlets, patents, manuals and articles documents the origins and development of Computer Science from the early recording and analysis of statistics to the coming of the electronic digital computer.

The oldest book in the collection, London's Dreadful Visitation: or a Collection of All the Bills of Mortality..., 1665, estimated at £1200-1800, formed the basis of John Graunt and William Petty's early forays into statistics.

Other early highlights include autograph letters and published works by the versatile genius Charles Babbage. An inscribed copy of On the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables, 1824, the paper in which Babbage introduced the formula x2+x+41 for calculating prime numbers is estimated at £1500-2000; the Diving Bell, an excerpt from Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 1826, should realise £80-120; and a first edition of A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives, 1826, in which Babbage exposed "the disgraceful practices which prevail" in life assurance companies, is anticipated to bring in £500-600.

An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, 1854, by Babbage's fellow mathematician George Boole upon whose "Boolean Algebra" the structure of modern computers is based, should be highly contested since BBA's first edition copy once belonged to the inventor of the logical machine, the economist W Stanley Jevons, and features his signature. Estimated at £3000-4000, the volume also contains unpublished autograph letters from two of Boole's peers, Augustus de Morgan, the first president of the Mathematical Society, and Thomas Dyson, who relates anecdotes about Boole's early life.

Naturally the majority of items, such as Karel Capek's R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Roberts], 1923, date from the twentieth century. In this compelling work, the first to make use of the word "robot" which is derived from the Czech word robota- "forced workers," machines are created to perform the tasks which humans find distasteful. Eventually the robots rebel against their masters and attempt to destroy the human race. A second impression of this play has been tentatively estimated at £50-75.

His contemporary, the entrepreneurial astronomer L J Comrie, was quick to seize upon the usefulness, rather than the potential threat, of machines. In his Application of the Brunsviga-Dupla Calculating Machine and Double Summation with Finite Differences, 1928, estimated at £150-200, the author championed the new punch-card technologies. Comrie created the first commercial software house, Scientific Computing Service Limited, which boasted a staff of seventeen "computers." A promotional leaflet in which Comrie listed the names of his employees and claimed his company provided "for the first time in this country, if not anywhere in the world, the services of skilled and fully-equipped professional computers" will be available on 28 October and is estimated at £75-100.

The first book published by a man often more associated with the development of the atom bomb than with computing, Johann, later John, von Neumann, is estimated at £500-600. Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, 1932, inspired a generation of computer scientists who for a number of years after the Second World War referred to computers as JOHNNIACs in tribute to von Neumann.

One of these computer scientists was A M Turing, usually remembered for his contribution to the cryptanalytic team at Bletchley Park who cracked the German Enigma code in the Second World War. Turing penned his elegant On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem in 1936. By demonstrating that there was such a thing as an unsolvable problem, he created the idea of the Turing machine, the apparatus upon which the real computers of the 1940s were based. Turing's On Computable Numbers..., a first edition of which is estimated at £800-1000, is probably the most important single paper produced in the development of computers.

One of the most recent items in the collection, estimated at £75-100, is a signed copy of J E Thornton's 1970 Control Data Corporation publication on the design of the CDC 6600. It marks the moment that Computer Studies passed into a wider area of general knowledge and understanding.

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July 05, 2009