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Computer, Vol. 29, No. 9, September 1996

The IEEE Computer Society Press recently published a book by Homer R. (Barney) Oldfield entitled The King of the Dwarfs, his account of the almost 15 years during which General Electric built computers. Although the company had built several special-purpose machines prior to 1955 (the Omnibac and the Oarac), GE President Ralph Cordiner, averse to competing with IBM, had forbidden entry into the computer business. Thus in 1955, when GE bid on a contract to build 30 data processing systems for Bank of America, the product was called a process control machine to get around corporate restrictions.

When the bank accepted the first ERMA (electronic recording method, accounting) systems on September 14, 1959, Cordiner found himself with a winning computer department that had delivered the world's first electronic banking system and also pioneered check handling through the use of Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR).

The birth of time-sharing
The series of machines that resulted from GE's pioneering effort, allied with the company's expertise in communications, provided the hardware that John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz chose to support the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which first came on line in September 1964. That first system, using a GE 265 (a GE 235 and a Datanet 30 combined), provided simultaneous time-sharing access for 32 undergraduate student users who were primarily programming in Basic. The time-sharing innovation was shared with GE, which reengineered the code and turned it into a successful service bureau operation that outlived the computer department.

It was particularly appropriate that time-sharing began at Dartmouth College. Twenty-four years earlier at Dartmouth, on September 11, 1940, George Stibitz had first demonstrated remote computing. Using a Teletype connected via a telephone line to New York City, Stibitz was able to control the operation of his Complex Number Calculator at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Among those who used the system was logician Norbert Wiener.

Additional September milestones
On September 23, 1884, six years prior to winning the contract to provide punched-card processing services to the US Census Bureau, Herman Hollerith filed a patent application for his tabulating machine. That first commercially viable application of card processing, and the subsequent founding of the Hollerith Tabulating Company, led to the establishment of IBM and gave the company a technological base to become a world power even prior to its entering the computer business.

On September 9, 1945, Grace Murray Hopper managed to get the Harvard Mark II operating again after locating and removing a moth from the jaws of a relay. She was used to having Howard Aiken, designer of the Harvard series of machines, walk into the computer room and ask if they were "making any numbers." This time she responded that she was "debugging the computer." Though Thomas Edison was probably first to use the term, this actual bug gave the computer business its first entry in a dictionary of jargon that has been growing ever since. The original bug, carefully pasted into the logbook of the Mark II, sojourned at the Dahlgren Naval Surface Weapons Center Museum (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in Virginia before ending up at the Smithsonian Institution.

On September 15, 1947, the Association for Computing Machinery was chartered, comprising regional organizations from the East and West Coasts of the US. The Computer Society and the ACM will jointly celebrate their overlapping 50th anniversaries at the 1996 Supercomputing Conference in Pittsburgh this November.

September birthdays
John McCarthy, born September 4, 1927, in Boston was among the artificial intelligence pioneers who participated in a seminal conference held at Dartmouth College in 1956. Unhappy with the limitations of Fortran, in 1958 he created the programming language Lisp-- forever to be known to students as "Lots of Idiotic, Silly Parentheses." Student carping aside, in 1985 McCarthy received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for his work on Lisp and artificial intelligence.

Dennis M. Ritchie, born September 9, 1941, in Mount Vernon, New York, developed the operating system Unix at Bell Telephone Laboratories with Ken Thompson. With Richard Kernighan, he developed the programming language C. Ritchie and Thompson received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1994 for their work on Unix.

David Packard, born September 7, 1912, in Pueblo, Colorado, teamed with William Hewlett to create the high-tech electronics company that bears their names. He provided financial support and design expertise for the Monterey Aquarium. Packard received the IEEE Computer Society Entrepreneur Award in November 1995. .

Other computer pioneers
Peter Naur, born in 1928 in Fredericksburgh, Denmark, was secretary of the Algol 60 committee that modified John Backus' metalanguage to describe Algol (which became known as Backus-Naur Form). By judiciously using his secretarial powers, he introduced some of his personal preferences into the language. Naur received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1986.

Robert N. Noyce, born in 1927 in Denmark, Iowa, and Gordon Moore developed the integrated circuit (or microchip) and semiconductor chips. Noyce, Intel's chairman of the board, received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980 for his work on integrated circuit production technology.

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