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Computer, Vol. 29, No. 11, November 1996

The Tuesday after the first Monday in November is election day in the US. On that day in 1952, a Univac first predicted the results of a presidential election even before the ballots were counted (before some were even cast). The first built UNIVAC computer had been delivered to the Bureau of the Census in the summer of 1951, and a year later the fifth machine was intended for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but when delivery was delayed, Remington Rand's Univac Division staff programmed it to analyze partial election results and project the outcome.

A few minutes after East Coast polling places closed, Livermore's Univac, working on behalf of the CBS television network, was predicting a landslide victory for Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. But the CBS producers weren't prepared for such an early prognostication, so they made it appear that the Univac's forecast was not ready. Just after midnight, when the actual outcome matched the Univac's prediction, a spokesman for the network apologized on the air for not believing the analysis and for delaying the announcement. Four years later, an IBM 701 (the Defense Calculator) performed the same task and correctly prophesied Eisenhower's reelection.

Other November milestones
Birth dates of programming languages are often difficult to ascertain, since languages tend to evolve slowly rather than appear fully developed on a given day. Fortran, for example, evolved over about a year, starting in December 1954 when John Backus produced a short memorandum outlining the language's elements. It took another year to finalize the details of the language that would eventually lead to the first compiler for the IBM 704 that was delivered to Westinghouse-Bettis in Pittsburgh PA in April 1957. Similarly, successor languages like Algol and Cobol, designed by committee, evolved slowly, probably because committee members found it difficult to meet.

One programming language, JOSS (Johnniac Open Shop System), does have a specific birth date-November 7, 1960. JOSS was developed by J.C. (Cliff) Shaw at Rand Corporation to give users a hands-on connection to a computer at a time when operating systems had become the major management tool of computing center directors to speed up program turnaround and eliminate programmers' direct use of the console. JOSS allowed 12 (apparently) simultaneous users on a machine, preceding by a year Fernando Corbató's invention of time-sharing. JOSS was still operating in the early 1970s on IBM System/360 systems, and had been translated into several languages.
JOSS is a trademark and service mark of the RAND Corporation for its program and services using that program.

The ongoing debate to identify the "first computer" acknowledges, among other candidates, Alan Turing's definition of the "Universal Machine" in 1937. The paper entitled "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" first appeared on November 12, 1937, somewhat contemporaneously with Konrad Zuse's work on the first of the Z machines in Germany, John Vincent Atanasoff's work on the ABC, George Stibitz's on the Bell Telephone Laboratory relay machines, and Howard Aiken's on the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine provided the fundamental concepts of computers that the other inventors would realize independently. So Turing provided the abstraction that would form the basic theory of computability for several decades, while others provided the pragmatic means of computation.

On November 29, 1972, Atari announced Pong, just in time for Christmas shopping. This simple game of tennis, played on a standard television screen, was probably the first commercially available computer game, though by no means the first computer game per se. (The first game was probably the coding of Noughts and Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe) on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge in 1949.) The first arcade versions of Pong appeared in 1973, starting a revolution in entertainment for adolescents.

November birthdays
George Boole, born November 2, 1815, was the British creator of a logic and a number system that bear his name. Initially a schoolteacher in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, England, Boole developed his ideas about symbolic logic without the benefit of a formal university-level education. Queen's University at Cork, Ireland, recognized his contributions and offered him the chair of mathematics in 1848. To make up for his lack of formal training and diplomas, Dublin and Oxford Universities awarded Boole honorary degrees. One day late in 1864, he walked the two miles from his home to Queen's University in a rainstorm to give his lecture. He died of pneumonia on December 8 at the age of 50.

Adriaan van Wijngaarden, born 2 November 1916, died 7 February 1987, was a leader in programming linguistics and language translation, and a contributor to ALGOL 60. He led the recasting of ALGOL 60 into ALGOL 68 , a vastly different language that not only represented the state of the art of programming languages, but which included features that were far ahead of its time. He received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1986 for his work on ALGOL 68. .

Gene M. Amdahl, born November 16, 1922, was a primary designer of the IBM System/360 and of the line of machines that bear his name. Amdahl designed his first computer, the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC), as part of his PhD dissertation and successive generations of students built it. He was named a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980 and received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1987 and the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 1989.

Jack St. Clair Kilby, born November 8, 1923, invented the germanium-based integrated computer chip (the IC) in 1958. Texas Instruments filed a patent application and also a lawsuit against Robert Noyce and Fairchild Industries for infringement. In 1969 the courts ruled in favor of Noyce, whose version was silicon based. In retrospect, it is generally agreed that Kilby built the first integrated circuit, while Noyce provided a practical implementation that could be commercialized. Kilby received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1994.

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