Reckoning the Road
In 1960 a machine was installed at Turkey’s General Directorate of Highways. Its memory was a magnetic drum that never stopped turning. Back then people called machines like it electronic brains. It was the country’s first computer, and it had been bought for road calculations, because the roads were getting longer and hand calculation could no longer keep up. Most of the people who programmed it were mathematicians, but the ones waiting for its results were engineers who built roads.
What English calls civil engineering is “inşaat mühendisliği” in Turkish, literally the engineering of construction. The English name came into use in the eighteenth century, to set this work apart from the military engineers who built forts and bastions. John Smeaton, the first man to call himself a civil engineer, built a lighthouse on a rock in the English Channel. “Civil” comes from the Latin word for citizen, and so does civilisation. I have always read the name of this profession as the building of civilisation.
As the story goes, the first computer to come to a Turkish university was meant for METU, but a payment was late and it went to Istanbul Technical University instead. METU rented its own machine in 1965. It was an IBM 1620, and its memory would fit in a small corner of a photo taken on a phone today.
I read the memoirs of an alumnus who studied civil engineering at METU in those years. He bought his slide rule with a loan from a fund the department’s professors had set up, and paid it back in instalments. In his final year the programming assignments of the computer course landed on top of reinforced concrete and steel, and he describes how overwhelmed they all were. The part that stayed with me is about his military service. His discharge was close, and he had to get the structural calculations for a gendarmerie battalion building done in time. He finished them on METU’s computer, punching cards on a card punch.
Programmers use the word compile every day. The Turkish for it is “derlemek”, to gather. Its Latin root has two parts, one meaning “together” and the other “to ram down and pack tight”. The base of a road is built the same way, with material laid down in layers and compacted. The Romans mostly used the word for plunder, but that is a subject for another essay.
Civilisation is still being built, only now most things are built on a computer first. Before the first pile of a bridge is driven, the bridge has already been through earthquakes on a screen. The gates of dams and the water supply of cities are monitored from screens. And some of the software we write ends up back on construction sites.
I walked those corridors too, and I worked on software projects while I was a student. When people ask when I moved from civil engineering to software, I still don’t have a good answer, because I never felt I had moved from one to the other. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would once more choose METU Civil Engineering, and once more write software.