looking.back
Computer, Vol. 29, No. 12, December 1996

Several significant events that profoundly affected the world of computing occurred in December, particularly during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Five have been selected for this month's column.

• The Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren, Virginia, was the primary site of US naval computing, beginning with the 1948 installation of Howard Aiken's Mark II, followed by the Mark III in 1951. The center's next machine, the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC), was built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace Eckert. Initially, NORC had been scheduled for delivery to the White Oak Naval Facility near Washington, D.C., but the Navy redirected it to the experienced crew at Dahlgren. Physicist Edward Teller had been trying to have it diverted to the Lawrence Livermore Nation-al Laboratory, arguing that the lab's nuclear calculations were more important than Dahlgren's ballistic calculations. The Navy won, and NORC was dedicated at Dahlgren on December 2, 1954. John von Neumann, who had just completed work on the IAS machine, was the keynote speaker.
• In 1965, Richard L. Wexelblat was the first candidate in a computer science program to complete a dissertation. Many doctoral candidates had performed computer-related work, but Wexelblat's diploma, presented on December 5 by the University of Pennsylvania--the home of ENIAC--was the first to carry the designation "computer science."
• December 8, 1947, marks the incorporation of the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. After a dispute with the administration at the University of Pennsylvania over ENIAC patent rights, J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995) and John Mauchly (1907-1980) started the company that, after several mergers, produced the Univac. Between the ENIAC and the Univac, the firm also produced the Binac for Northrop Aircraft Company, though it never was put to the use originally intended. BINAC did prove to a certain degree that the company was capable of building a computer commercially..
• In this same year, 1947, a team led by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley developed the transistor. Though primitive and initially unreliable, the device would make possible the second generation of computers, starting in about 1960. Subsequent miniaturization, from the ENIAC to the microprocessor, was due to the transistor, as were the integrated circuit and the computer chip. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley recieved the Nobel Prize for their work in 1956 - an increditably short time later compared to awards to other scientists.
• As we celebrate the Computer Society's 50th anniversary, we note this month's 45th anniversary of the Data Processing Managers Association, chartered on December 26, 1951. For many years DPMA and ACM were colleagues of the IEEE Computer Society in the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. Together they sponsored a highly successful series of joint conferences. At their zenith in the early 1980s, the National Computer Conferences drew up to 100,000 attendees.

December birthdays

John Warner Backus, born December 3, 1924, invented the metalanguage BNF, known variously as Backus-Normal or Backus-Naur Form, and led the IBM team that created Fortran. He was a proponent of improved programming methods, such as the functional approach. Backus received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980 and in 1994 was awarded the National Academy of Engineers' Draper Award. The academy cited Fortran as one of the "inventions of the century."

Grace Murray Hopper, perhaps the most frequently mentioned pioneer in this column, was born December 17, 1906. Eventually rising to the rank of rear admiral, US Navy, Hopper was the third programmer on the Harvard Mark I and the developer of the concept of the compiler. She also pioneered the development of automatic programming and high-level languages, and subsequently encouraged the Navy and other organizations to use Cobol as a standard language. Like Backus, she was a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

Kenneth E. Iverson was born December 17, 1920, in Alberta, Canada. With Adin Falkoff, Iverson invented and implemented the programming language APL, for which he received a Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

Augusta Ada Gordon (daughter of Lord Byron, later Lady Lovelace), sometimes recognized as the world's first computer programmer, was born on December 10, 1815. A student, friend, and confidant of Charles Babbage, and an interpreter of his work, she provided the first "readable" description of the Analytical Engine via her translation of, and annotations to, Luigi Menabrea's Italian publication on the subject.

Charles Babbage was born December 26, 1791, in Teignmouth, Devonshire, UK. Some consider him the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to basic computer design through his analytical machine. A version of his Difference Engine was built in his lifetime as a special-purpose device intended to produce math tables; a copy of the machine arrived in the US at the Dudley Observatory in 1857. The Difference Engine was rebuilt by the Science Museum (London), but no working model of the Analytical Engine has yet been constructed.

John Louis von Neumann was born December 28, 1903, in Budapest, Hungary. Building on a brilliant mathematical career, von Neumann moved into computer science during World War II, performing calculations relating to the atomic bomb. Later he promoted the stored-program concept. His logical design of the IAS computer--the von Neumann architecture--became the prototype for most succeeding machines.

Celebration draws to a close

This is the last looking.back column of the Computer Society's 50th anniversary year. Had space permitted, we could have included many other events, as letters about this column have indicated. We hope to maintain a WWW presence so that we can add new items as we learn of them. Reader input has been, and will continue to be, appreciated.

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