In this year marking both the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of the first electronic, general-purpose computer, ENIAC, and the establishment of the AIEE's Large-Scale Computing Committee, which eventually grew into the IEEE Computer Society, milestones relating to these two events occur each month. In April 1943, the proposal to develop the ENIAC, written by John Brainerd, dean of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, together with the machine's builders, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, was submitted to the Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG). Sponsored by Herman Goldstine, then an Army lieutenant responsible for liaison between the two institutions, the proposal was aimed at developing a machine that would replace the human "computers" (mainly women) who were calculating firing-table entries for the APG. Three years later, that machine changed the world.

April marks the birthday of J. Presper Eckert, who we all hoped would be present for this year's 50th-anniversary celebrations. Unfortunately, he died in June 1995. Together, Eckert and John Mauchly created the Edvac, Binac, and Univac computers, as well as the ENIAC. Both received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

Some of the concepts rediscovered in the ENIAC project had been the subject of a patent application in Germany in 1936. In the early stages of building the Z-1 computer in his parents' parlor, Konrad Zuse applied for a patent for the automatic execution of calculations. That application included a storage system that Zuse termed a "combination memory." Zuse realized that programs could be stored, provided they were composed of bit combinations. Thus, he later claimed that programmable memory had already been patented by 1936.

For many computer industry "old-timers," April is remembered as the month in which IBM announced System/360 and thus set the standard by which the competition would be judged for many years. Although data processing managers and computing center directors throughout the world heard the announcement on April 7, 1964, the first machines were not delivered until a year later, and the real flood of machines didn't come until 1966.

People and events

Another IBM employee was Frederick P. Brooks Jr., born April 19, 1931, a 1980 recipient of the Pioneer Award for his work in developing OS/360. Brooks also discovered the bottomless software tar pit and made us aware of the Mythical Man Month in his book of the same title.

Cuthbert C. Hurd, born April 5, 1911, joined IBM in 1949 and formed the Applied Science Department, which was responsible for introducing the 701, the 650, the 704, and Fortran. As the first IBM applied science leader, he pushed his reluctant management into using the IBM 701 to enter the world of computing. In April 1953, IBM dedicated the 701 (Defense Calculator).

Hurd also created the environment in which Fortran was developed and managed the language's development group, which included John Backus. Hurd was designated an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer in 1986.

The first Fortran program outside of the development group was run on April 19, 1957. Herbert Bright, a manager of the data processing center at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, received an unmarked box of cards from IBM. Expecting the binary deck for the Fortran compiler after several years of waiting, he loaded it into the IBM 704 and attempted to compile a simple program--and got the first error message: "Comma missing in computed GO TO statement." Eleven years later, in 1968, Edsger Dijkstra, a leading critic of programming without a mathematical proof of correctness, declared the GO TO statement to be "harmful" and began the move toward more disciplined programming. In 1980 Dijkstra, who also invented the guarded command and semaphores, was given the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for "multiprogramming control."

Joining Dijkstra in the charter group of Pioneer Award recipients was Seymour R. Cray, the Control Data Corporation designer responsible for the CDC 6600, perhaps the first modern supercomputer after Stretch. Cray subsequently led supercomputer design in his own corporation. Cray-designed machines still dominate the supercomputing field.

Another Pioneer Award charter recipient whose birthday falls in April is George R. Stibitz. Born April 30, 1904, Stibitz was the first to use the term "digital" as applied to the specialized form of circuits used in his relay computers. Moreover, he demonstrated the first remote computation. He set up a terminal at Dartmouth College at the fall 1940 American Mathematical Society meeting and allowed attendees, including Norbert Wiener, to use the Complex Number Computer in New York. During World War II, he developed several relay computers used in the war effort.

Alan Perlis was recognized in 1985 for his work in computer language translation, which began with his development of the IT (interpretive translator) for the IBM 650 in 1956. Later he was involved in the development of Algol. Born on April 1, 1922, Perlis was a leader in establishing computer science as a legitimate discipline and the author of many classic one-liners:

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