The intersection of computing history and the month of March reveals a number of interesting events. Born on the 19th of this month was Howard Aiken, recognized for designing the first large-scale operating relay calculator in the United States; it became operational in 1944. The Harvard Mark I (a.k.a. the IBM Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, or ASCC) was conceived by Howard Aiken in the late 1930s and implemented by Frank Hamilton, Claire Lake, and Benjamin Durfee of IBM. Sponsored by the US Navy, the machine was intended to compute the elements of mathematical and navigational tables--the task Charles Babbage had intended for the Difference Engine. Aiken, who in 1937 learned about the piece of the Difference Engine at Harvard, dedicated his early reports to Babbage. The ASCC was not a stored-program machine but was driven instead by a paper tape containing instructions. Aiken was among those officially recognized as computer pioneers by the IEEE Computer Society in 1980.

On March 30, 1951, the first Remington-Rand Univac was turned over to the US Census Bureau to help tabulate the census results. Five years in construction by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the machine had survived the near bankruptcy of the original company but was vastly over budget for a fixed-price contract. A year later, when the machine was used on television to predict the outcome of the 1952 presidential election, the name Univac became synonymous with the concept of the computer.

Allen Newell was born on March 19, 1927, in San Francisco. In 1957, with Herbert Simon and John Shaw, Newell first articulated a rule-based model of human and computer problem solving. The fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science grew in part from his idea that computers could process symbols as well as numbers and if programmed properly would be capable of solving problems the same way humans do. In the 1960s, Newell and Simon created computer models of human problem solving. This work was a major force behind the "cognitive revolution" in psychology.

Color it (Big) Blue

Ralph L. Palmer (1989) developed the IBM 604 Electronic Calculator, one of the machines that preceded IBM's entry into the computer business and which gave the company some necessary experience in electronics.

Cuthbert C. Hurd (1986) was a key leader within IBM in introducing computers to the corporation. He went on to become a remarkable computer entrepreneur.

Jerrier A. Haddad (1984) managed the development project that resulted in the IBM 701 Defense Calculator.

Nathaniel Rochester (1984) was chief architect of IBM's first scientific computer (the 701) and of the prototype of its first commercial computer (the 702), as well as the developer of symbolic assembly-language programming.

Werner Buchholz (1990) was a member of the IBM 701 design team and prolific documenter of those early designs, including the later Stretch computer (a.k.a. the IBM 7030).

Stephen W. Dunwell (1992) was primarily responsible for developing the first supercomputer, Stretch, following an earlier career in cryptography.

James H. Pomerene (1986) was the design engineer, with John von Neumann, for the IAS computer and also designed the IBM Harvest system, a supercomputer delivered to the National Security Agency.

Gerritt A. Blaauw (1994) started work with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark III system and later contributed to the IBM Stretch and System/360 computers.

Erich Bloch (1993) headed IBM's development of the solid logic technology program, which provided IBM with the microelectronics technology for its System/360. His Computer Pioneer Award was for his work on high-speed computing.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1980) discovered the bottomless software tar pit and revealed the man-month to be mythical in his now-famous book. He received the Computer Pioneer Award for his part as developer of OS/360.

Bob 0. Evans (1991) was an influential IBM manager committed to compatibility, a concept that led to the IBM System/360 family of machines.

Reynold B. Johnson (1987), as a high school teacher in the 1930s, devised a method for scoring multiple-choice tests by sensing conductive pencil marks on answer sheets. Later, as an IBM employee, he initiated work leading to the first disk storage device, RAMAC.

John Cocke (1989), an IBM computer scientist specializing in compiler optimization techniques, was given the Computer Pioneer Award for instruction pipelining and RISC concepts.

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