looking.back
Computer, Vol. 29, No. 5, May 1996

John von Neumann introduced the concept of the stored program in a 1945 draft of a report on the EDVAC design. However, the first machines em-bodying the concept, which many feel is the essence of the computer, were implemented elsewhere. The first operating machine was the "Baby" machine, built by Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester.

The first fully operational and productive stored-program computer was the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) at the University of Cambridge, built under the direction of Maurice Wilkes and based on "the principles expounded by J. Presper Eckert Jr., John W. Mauchly, and others." On May 6, 1949, the EDSAC completed its first program to compute a table of squares written by David Wheeler. EDSAC was the basis for one of the earliest commercial computers, the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office). The Computer Society presented Computer Pioneer Awards to Wilkes and Wheeler in 1980 and 1985, respectively.

When IBM announced the type-704 machine on 7 May 1954, delivery was contingent upon receiving sufficient orders to create a production line. Cuthbert Hurd, then Vice President for Applied Science, acquired 17 orders and the first large scale scientific computer became available to many universities and government agencies. The 704 was provided with extensive auxiliary storage capabilities and floating point hardware. John Backus had developed an early fixed format, numeric coding language named Speedcoding that took advantage of the floating point facilities and relieved the programmers from low level programming concerns for the 701, and for the 704 went the one step further by inventing the programming language Fortran. Backus and Hurd were designated Computer Pioneers by the Society in 1980 and 1986 respectively.

Alan M. Turing first revealed his thoughts about the complete computer with his publication in 1937 of a paper describing the concept of the "universal machine" which, when operable, would determine the computability of processes. During World War II, Turing was at Bletchley Park, UK, immersed in the effort to break the German codes. He influenced the design of the Colossus, a series of 10 machines that were the first electronic, special-purpose, symbol-manipulation computers. The Colossi were built by the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) under the direction of Tommy Flowers. Although the Colossi were unknown to the public until the mid-1970s, Turing took some of the ideas embodied in Colossus to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in 1945 and designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). (Perhaps he intended a tribute to Babbage in the use of the term "engine")

NPL finished building ACE, partly through Harry Huskey's work, and ran its first program on May 10, 1950. Huskey, having worked earlier with ENIAC, returned to the US and later built the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) and the Bendix G-15. Turing died in 1954. Huskey received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1982.

The microprocessor age started in the mid-1970s (see IEEE Micro, April 1996, and Computer, March 1996, pp. 99-100), but most machines were suited more for the enthusiastic hacker (in the old sense of the word) than for people who needed to compute. Something more than a Basic compiler or the CP/M operating system was needed to launch the broader personal computer era. Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston debuted VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program, on May 11, 1979. For the first time, users could program without having to write code in a strange language. Bricklin received the 1995 Computer Entrepreneur Award.

The Whirlwind computer designed and built under the direction of Jay Forrester at MIT, was the digital manifestation of an analog concept for a simulator, and was the project that developed a number of innovations that would be integrated into many later computers. Not the least of these was the matrix core memory, for which Forrester filed a patent application on May 11, 1951. Although An Wang had filed the fundamental patent for the ferrite core memory unit, Forrester's design of a wired matrix of cores to form a random-access memory was the significant step needed to make core memory a viable, fast internal memory system. The Whirlwind was the basis for the Cape Cod Air Defense System, later the SAGE system that led to the present day Air Traffic Control systems, and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line. While the original Whirlwind was decommissioned on May 27, 1959, several Whirlwind IIs on the DEW line were still operational in 1980.

The 1950s were a decade in which the means of programming a computer changed from "hand-to-hand combat" with binary or octal machine code to high level programming languages, and the background of a programmer changed from being an applied mathematician to a person who had a problem to solve. During this time, Grace Hopper championed business data processing, developing a series of codes culminating in Flowmatic for the Univac I. Other systems, such as Commercial Translator, had been developed in parallel, but there was no common standard across machine lines. On May 28, 1959, a committee, later named Codasyl, was formed to create a common business-oriented language, later called Cobol. Completed in 1960, Cobol became the language of most programs for the next two decades.

May birthdays

Herman Lukoff, born May 2, 1923 was a ENIAC, EDVAC and LARC design engineer. When Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania to form the Electronic Control Company, Herman went with them and remained with the company through its name change to the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, its purchase by Remington Rand, and the merger into the Sperry Rand Corporation. Herman worked for the same people and the same company -- at the time of his death, the Sperry UNIVAC Division of the Sperry Corporation -- for 35 years; he participated in and witnessed the entire metamorphosis of the company. Lukoff was one of the 1980 charter recipients of the Computer Pioneer Award, and one of the few posthumous recipients.

Ivan Sutherland, born May 16, 1938, launched the interactive computer graphics field 35 years ago. The many innovations of his Sketchpad included a display file for screen refresh, a recursively traversed hierarchical structure for modeling graphical objects, recursive methods for geometric transformations, and an object-oriented programming style. He cofounded Evans and Sutherland Computer Corp. and chaired the Computer Science Department at the California Institute of Technology from 1976 to 1980. Sutherland received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1985.

John Cocke, born May 25, 1925, an IBM T.J. Watson Research Center computer scientist specializing in compiler optimization techniques, invented the RISC concept. His interest in all parts of the computer business and his ability to "always find something a little different" to engage his attention resulted in some 22 patents. Besides those for RISC technology, his patents cover logic simulation, coding theory, and compiler optimization. A National Medal of Technology recipient, Cocke received his Computer Pioneer Award in 1989.

John G. Kemeny, born May 31, 1926, president of Dartmouth College from 1971 to 1980, was a mathematician and an assistant to Albert Einstein. With Thomas Kurtz he invented the programming language Basic and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS). Starting in 1959 with a Royal McBee LGP-30, Kemeny and Kurtz searched for a way to bring computing to undergraduates at Dartmouth College. With Fernando Corbató's development of time-sharing in 1961, they saw a way to reach their goal and conceived a system that would not only serve students' educational needs but also permit implementation by students. Choosing a GE system, they completed their work on DTSS and Basic in fall 1964; GE reprogrammed the system and created a time-sharing service-bureau operation that was the most successful portion of their short excursion into the computer business. Kemeny and Kurtz received Computer Pioneer Awards in 1985 and 1991, respectively.

| Computer magazine page | Publications page | Computer Society home page |

Copyright (c) 1996 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.

By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.