German Encounters of Logic and Programming (1948–1958), Featuring Three Readings of Turing Machines

The early days of German and Swiss programming have been integrated into computing folklore as part of the prehistory of ALGOL. However, this narrative has bundled the many ways of trying to think about computing and programming in the German-speaking world into the royal main road leading up to ALGOL. This does not do justice to some interesting interactions between logic and programming happening in the 1950s. In particular, Turing's machines were read and interpreted in no less than three quite different ways during the short time span between 1952 and 1958. Using the institutional and personal context of this period, the encounters between logic and programming in these years are discussed.