Crown jewel computers : On the Schickard-Pascal “ Priorit¨atsstreit ”.

Early history of computing and national interests – An essay. (Including translations of Rene Taton’s work.)

Without going as far as to say that Rene Taton's treatment of Pascal is akin to the histories given to rulers before official visits (e.g. the history of Chinese civilization and science offered to the Queen of England), his work does represent a certain state of the history of computing.
The controversies occurred at a time when Schickard's letters to Kepler had just been uncovered prompting a small revolution in historiography (late 50's).
" [Their] discovery has opened the issue of the origins of computing ", Taton admitted himself.
German scholars were now declaring Shickard as the certain inventor of the first mechanical computer relegating Pascal and the Pascaline, and with it French science, to a secondary position.
"C'etait pas Pascal, mais le professeur de Tuebingen qui a invente la machine a calculs"! (trans.) ["Not Pascal but Schickard, the Professor of Tuebingen, invented the computing machine" (trans.)] -wrote one of them. In other words, the predecessor of the modern, electronic computer -if not its origins -had been shifted and were hitherto to be found in Germany.
What Zuse is to the 20th c. and the history of computer science, Schickard was now for the 17th and early computing history.
It is no doubt in this context that Taton's vigorous re-appreciation of Pascal in his 1963 article (translated here) should be considered; coinciding with the publication of the second edition of his treatise on early computing 1 .
this astronomer can not be considered the true inventor of the calculating machine And elsewhere : ... even though soon recognized as an astronomer of some talent, his work remains of limited importance In "On the invention of mechanical arithmetic", he still left room for error conceding that more documents may be needed.
His book Histoire du calcul offers more insights. The introduction made clear that computations (and algorithms) had now permeated the entirety of society, but the interior pages reserved Schickcard and his ""calculating clock"" a single mention while Pascal's role in history was put on full display, in all of its grandeur. completely ignored, destroyed, Schickard's clock gave way to the additionmachine of Pascal in 1642.
And, was it not in this book -it was -that Taton went as far as putting Pascal in the same ranks as Shakespeare and Goethe... 2 A triple alliance remained better than German hegemony. How long until new letters are discovered: Russia or China, next? The history of computing would not be complete without its own history... "Even in a clear mind there are shadows. And, inside of us the 18th century continues to live a silent life" Bachelard wrote in one of the pages of The Formation fo the scientific mind.
Inside of these scholars, the second world war still raged on. And, perhaps the Franco-Prussian ones too.
These scholarly debates and disputes -now detached from us by the necessary historical distance (to say nothing of personal affiliations) -appear more and more as fights fought on some theoretical 'front'. *** In Pascal's engineering papers we find the unmistakable marks of the scientist who conducts their science as if part of some literary salon, constantly addressing the reader with "Mon cher lecteur" -as he did. Descriptions of his Pascaline included.

1
Our current understanding of Pascal reveals a man greatly concerned with patents, which he did end up obtaining after some uphill battles, and money.
No pious, and world-remote thinker this Pascal! In that way he does prefigure our modern computer scientists -Many of them carry on double employments, in academia and the private sector (sometimes simultaneously), or own investments in companies that are in conflict with what should be their neutral science. 2 Financial interests are never far away from science as are national ones. In fact, a recent discovery has revealed that a University of Tuebingen pro- There is no doubt that Pascal's adding-machine is at the origin of the modern calculator. (...) The history of the theory and engineering of Pascal's adding-machine remains complicated to establish in detail. It comes to us rather only in the form of two documents : the Letter to Monseigneur le Chancelier... and Recommendation to all those who may have the curiosity to see the arithmetic machine published in 1645.
Pascal himself points out that, from a purely theoretical point of view, it was in 1640 that he had started considering the difficult problem of the mechanization of computation.
[Trans. note : a discussion of various implementations follows, as well as HISTOIRE DU CALCUL.
The modern man lives in a world of numbers. Be it commercial exchanges, income, tax or insurance, time and temperatures, the lottery or wavelengths, at every moment numbers permeate his existence. And, so, this man now regularly operates calculations not too long ago only left to the learned specialist. This vulgarization of numerical computation is the ending point of a slow evolution to which various peoples have participated since the beginning of the historical period.
Long limited to arithmetic and algebra, it took a considerable turn in the 17th c. with the emergence of differential calculus...
(...) A genius thinker, brilliant writer, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was also a talented mathematician and physicist. At 16 he put down his first discoveries in Essay pour les coniques. In 1642 he invented the first computing machine ["machine a calculer"] and, with Fermat, created (the field of) probabilities.
(...) computing machines, depending on their functions, take on the names of addition-, multiplying-or mixed-machines.