by Kurt W Beyer
From the start Aiken adopted and enforced formal Navy protocol. He was not a research “director” but rather a “commander,” and Mark I was his ship. According to Grace Hopper, he called the Computation Laboratory staff his “crew,” and, like any Navy crew, they wore the proper uniform of the day, addressed Aiken as “commander” or “sir,” followed a strict, hierarchical chain of command, and were on call seven days a week. “You were in the Navy,” asserted Hopper. “You were on duty 24 hours a day. You were lucky if you went home to sleep.”18
Seaman Robert Burns, one of the four original enlisted crew-members, remembered that the laboratory even used the operational protocol found aboard ship. Hopper was in charge of creating a monthly “watch list” that assigned personnel to eight-hour shifts. The officers took turns at 24-hour “Officer of the Day” shifts. The Officer of the Day spoke with the authority of Commander Aiken, but was held directly accountable for mishaps or problems during his or her watch. Burns recalled that discipline was so rigid that the Officer of the Day had to relieve operators for lunch, and that “even then when you relieved the operator you had to say ‘so and so properly relieved by Burns.’ ”19
Commander Aiken’s understanding of Navy mores and his early life experiences forged his work ethic. Years spent in school during the day and working at night trained him to function effectively with little rest. Hopper, Bloch, and Campbell all remembered his seemingly unending stamina. It was not uncommon to see Aiken work a 12-hour day, leave for a late dinner, and show up again at his office from midnight to 4 a.m. Aiken’s nocturnal habits could have detrimental consequences for the unprepared. Robert Burns recalled an incident when Aiken decided to show up unexpectedly at dawn one Sunday morning. Having forgotten his key, he pounded on the door, but there was no response from the night operator. “He finally got in and found the fellow was asleep,” Burns recalled. “There’s an entry in the log book that he was going to court-martial him. The fellow signed his own name as a witness.” Word quickly got to the other enlisted operators that, if found asleep on duty, one would be shot at dawn.20
Just as there was little empathy for those who did not display Aiken’s work ethic, he was loyal to those who did. “He was one of these individuals that you are either with him or against him,” crew member Frederick Miller recalled. “If you were with him, why, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you. If you were against him, why, there was nothing good that you could do.” Hopper remembered many nights spent sleeping on her desk in her attempt to keep up with the never-ending workload. Aiken came in early one morning, surprised to see his loyal lieutenant. “She’d been there most of the night struggling with Mark I,” Aiken recalled. “I said, ‘What have you been doing here all night?’ And she said, ‘Chaperoning these two damn computers!’ ”21
Hopper even braved a hurricane in the fall of 1944 to get to her post. “We held hands and one would hold on to the lamp post or a tree while the other two would string out and get to the next one and hang on,” she recalled.22 Richard Bloch kept up with the boss by drinking an unseemly amount of Coca-Cola each day. At one point during the war Bloch worked through the night two days in a row in order to meet a deadline. Recognizing that his subordinate was approaching physical exhaustion, Aiken escorted Bloch to his room on the other side of campus and would not leave him until Bloch had put on his pajamas and was safely tucked in bed.23
During his years as a plant operator, Aiken had developed an unbending ethic of efficiency, accuracy, and orderliness, which he later transferred to the Harvard Laboratory. Operators had to meticulously account for every minute of machine run time. Each day’s (and night’s) events were recorded in an operational logbook and on a publicly displayed operational chart. Aiken spent the first part of each morning reviewing the logbook and the operational chart and interrogating those responsible for any discrepancies. “He is probably one of the toughest bosses and also one of the best,” Hopper recalled. “You could always make the mistake the first time and nothing happened to you. You might get bawled out and you got told not to make it again but nothing happened to you until you did the same dumb thing over again.”24
Aiken’s emphasis on efficiency permeated his approach to technical invention and innovation. Despite his doctorate in physics, Aiken was at heart a hard-nosed industrial engineer. Deadlines were written in stone, and no matter what, Miller recalled, “he was going to run it and get it done.” Miller was impressed by Aiken’s discipline to stick with a given design plan. Engineers, according to Miller, usually pay lip service to simplicity and elegance, but often add complexity with multitude variations that often sabotage the coherence of the final product. According to Miller, Aiken would say “I’m going to have one kind of relay that has six double throw contacts that will make it easy to test them and fix them.”25
Aiken’s efficiency in matters of hardware design went hand in hand with his autocratic style of decision making. He kept the overall vision of the project in his head and more often then not just assigned the tasks to be accomplished. “We each had different problems that we worked on,” Hopper recalled. “Problems were assigned to us to solve.” This did not mean that Aiken did not consider other people’s ideas; they just had to be prepared to defend their position. “I am a simple man and I want simple answers!” would be his typical response when one of the crew did not explain an idea clearly or concisely. Further opaqueness usually resulted in a barrage of expletives.26
Members of the Harvard Computation Laboratory staff working on the backboard wiring for Mark II, 5 June 1946. Courtesy of Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
The British mathematician Maurice Wilkes remembered visiting Harvard in the summer of 1946 and recalled the difficulty he had discussing design ideas that differed from Aiken’s own. Once, when Wilkes asked about the potential of mercury delay lines, Aiken snapped back: “You are not committed to the mercury memory, are you?” Instead of defending himself, Wilkes avoided confrontation. “I was a little afraid of Aiken,” admitted Wilkes, “and I made the defensive reply that I was not committed to anything.”27 Paradoxically, the members of the original Harvard crew who developed an effective working relationship with Aiken learned quickly that the best way to earn his respect was to match fire with fire. “I remember one time telling him that I thought he was a son of a bitch,” Fred Miller recalled. “He considered that a real compliment.”28 Those who forged close bonds with the commander during those first years all had similar stories. One time when Burns and Aiken were in a heated discussion, Aiken yelled “Don’t I scare you?” “Hell no,” Burns replied. “You put your pants on the same way I do, one leg at a time.” Instead of retribution, Burns’s defiance generated a laugh and a pat on the back.29
Humor was Hopper’s preferred technique for dealing with her domineering boss. If Aiken began pushing the crew too hard, a strategically placed practical joke served to relieve the tension and to indirectly remind the boss of his transgressions. During a week when Aiken was pressuring the crew exceptionally hard to meet deadlines, Hopper and the crew decided to revise the operational charts to show that the machine had been “down” all night when in fact it had been operating fine. When Aiken arrived in the morning and went through his ritual review of the operating chart, he became infuriated when he saw the continuous line of red indicating that the machine had been down all night. Aiken stormed from one person to the next, demanding why he had not been notified during the night. No one had a clue what he was so angry about. By the time he had returned to the operating chart, the chart’s red lines had been replaced with blue. Aiken just stood there smirking, knowing that he had been had. Hopper, to the delight of the crew, then presented him with a medal she had made out of the chart’s red line material. Aiken wore the medal on his uniform proudly for two days thereafter.30
Humor and practical jokes became a central part of the Computation Laboratory’s culture, not only for the cathartic value of hum
or but also for its bonding power. “Any time off was very brief and usually it turned into pranks of one sort or another,” Hopper recalled. “Comic relief almost.”31 Burns remembered that Hopper was always playing jokes on people in the name of “morale building.”32 Besides pranks, the artistic lieutenant became famous for her cartoon collection that captured the idiosyncrasies of the machine and the people who ran it in the difficult wartime environment. Her assortment of “gremlins” and “bugs” were blamed when programs did not run or the machine acted up, thus adding lightheartedness to tense, frustrating situations.
As might be expected, not everyone thrived under Aiken. Robert Seeber, for instance, held ill feelings toward Aiken long after the war. Seeber was an expert on IBM punch-card equipment who worked as a civilian for the Navy during the war. After reading about Mark I in August 1944, he requested a transfer to the Harvard Computation Laboratory. Seeber’s wish was granted, but the unsuspecting technician immediately got on Aiken’s bad side by requesting vacation time before joining the laboratory. Seeber survived at Harvard until the end of the war, enduring 90-hour weeks as a coder in addition to Aiken’s constant pestering. He recalled trying to participate in the planning for Mark II during the spring of 1945, but Aiken ignored his ideas. The moment the war was over, Seeber quit and took his ideas to IBM. His experience under Aiken made him believe that “his aim in life must be to work for IBM and help them build a bigger and better computer than the Mark I.”33 That computer would be the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, a 120-foot-long colossus completed in 1948 and displayed in full view on the ground floor of IBM’s world headquarters in Manhattan.34
Problems with “fitting in” were not limited to civilian employees. Both officers and enlisted crewmembers had difficulty with Aiken’s heavy-handedness at times. “He was totally involved in getting a job done for the Navy,” Hopper recalled, “and if one of the enlisted men made a mistake during the night on the computer or went to sleep or something, he bawled the hell out of him. Well, Dick [Bloch] would say you shouldn’t treat a human being that way, and as far as the Commander was concerned he was supposed to be on duty and doing a job.”35
Among the officers, it was Bloch who had the most volatile relationship with Aiken, and Hopper usually found herself mediating between the two. “I used to argue with Dick Bloch because he was always getting in trouble,” she said. “I would try to explain to Dick that [Aiken] is just exactly like a computer, he’s wired a certain way [and] if you are going to work with him you must realize how he is wired.”36
Hopper believed that the root of the tension between Aiken and Bloch was their similar disposition. Their similarities resulted in a fiery working relationship, but also generated some creative technical solutions, for Aiken respected the ideas of his young protégé. When tempers boiled over, Hopper would remind the youthful Bloch that all of them were doing a job for the Navy and that their individual differences had to be suppressed in order to fulfill the mission. “I don’t think [Aiken] ever demanded any more of anybody, anything more of anyone then he would have aboard ship,” she asserted. “It’s true we were on dry land, but we needed this and required this same discipline. Once you realized that and realized what was going on and understood it, there was no difficulty.”37
Despite Aiken’s and Bloch’s differences, Hopper was able to keep the peace. This was not the case with the Computation Laboratory’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Hubert Arnold. Rather than play intermediary, Hopper’s actions appeared to have heightened the tension between Aiken and his second in command during the war. “Arnold never should well, I can’t say it that way. He wasn’t really a naval officer; he was still a college professor,” admitted Hopper. The challenge during wartime, according to Hopper, was finding mathematically qualified people who were also naval personnel. Arnold had a difficult time performing under pressure, and though he was a talented mathematician his limited aptitude for coding put a strain on the rest of the crew. “Every time his programs didn’t run,” Hopper recalled, “the Commander would come storming into my office and say ‘Find out what’s wrong with Arnold’s routine!’ ”38
To make matters worse, Arnold lacked the leadership skill to manage the crew in Aiken’s absence. Once, when Aiken was in Washington, tensions ran so high between Arnold and the crew that upon Aiken’s return the executive officer complained to Aiken that the crew had been insubordinate in his absence. “Aiken went up to the ceiling and said, if you can’t run the crew you shouldn’t be a lieutenant commander,” Hopper recalled. “You should be able to run, manage, your crew and discipline your crew, I’m not going to do anything about it for you.”39 Arnold was “reassigned” for the remainder of the war to the Widener Library, where he produced a bibliography for applied mathematics and numerical analysis that was included in Hopper’s Manual of Operation for Mark I. “I think the Commander wanted him out of the Laboratory because the crew was insubordinate to the executive officer,” Hopper recalled. “I’ll admit it, we were. We played all kinds of tricks on him. We were insubordinate I guess, except he just asked for it, I swear he did.”40
With Arnold physically removed from the Computation Laboratory, Aiken turned to Hopper to be in charge of Mark I. By the spring of 1945, Hopper had proved herself to be a talented coder, a dedicated member of the crew, and an enforcer of Aiken’s system. “I think we were more scared of Grace than we were of the old man,” the operator Robert Burns recalled. “They really didn’t pull any practical jokes on Grace.”41 Not only had Hopper overcome the technical challenges presented by Mark I; she had demonstrated her leadership skills in an antagonistic environment. Being placed in charge of Mark I “was a victory on my side because when I walked in there [Aiken] had not wanted a woman officer and I had said he was going to want a woman officer,” Hopper recalled.42 Years later, reflecting on his female lieutenant’s dedicated service during the war, Aiken said “Grace was a good man!”43
Aiken’s crew taking a break from the wartime pressures. From left to right: Ensign Bloch on piano, Commander Aiken, Lieutenant (j.g.) Hopper, Ensign Brendel, Ensign Campbell. Courtesy of Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
LABORATORY CULTURE AND THE REALITIES OF WAR
The war shattered life’s normal rhythms, and most Americans had to adjust to a variety of inconveniences. Restrictions on travel, rationing of food, and shortages of materials became the norm. If the pressures placed on the Harvard crew by Commander Aiken weren’t enough, they were also faced with the stresses of the wartime environment. “Getting food was a difficult proposition,” Hopper recalled. “We didn’t have ration stamps because we were supposed to eat at the main mess that we could never get to. We only got ration stamps when we were on leave, and it was rough rounding up food.”44 Once a week Hopper would send one of the enlisted men across town to the Navy Supply Building to get food, Coca-Cola, and cigarettes for the crew.
Locating supplies for the Computation Laboratory was difficult too. Furniture was “borrowed” from other buildings on campus, and items as basic as paper were held at a premium. “We discovered the backyard of the Army store room which was next to the area the computer was in, and they had lots of nice paper and stuff,” Hopper recalled. Periodically Hopper and Seaman Frank Verdonck would augment the Computation Laboratory’s supplies by siphoning off Army supplies. Hopper remembered that Commander Aiken caught the two when they were removing an entire carton of graph paper. “I can remember what he said,” Hopper recalled. “He said, ‘Well you better leave one pack. The Army may not be able to count but they can tell the difference between none and some.’ ”45
More stressful for the crew were the pressures associated with the operational aspects of the war. Even though things looked better by the summer of 1944, there was no end in sight to the conflict. “The entire nation,” Hopper recalled, “was operating on one idea. The whole drive was on, just one thing, just win that war.”46 Hopper and t
he rest of the crew believed that their work was instrumental to a successful conclusion of the conflict, yet that burden hung heavily on them. “There was one special phone,” Hopper recalled, “which was connected directly to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington. Well, we used to shake every time that darn thing rang.”47 Usually the Bureau was asking to have certain firing tables of calculations ahead of schedule, which put further strain on the laboratory. For the entirety of the war, Mark I was operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the staff working three 8-hour shifts. Free time and holidays were almost non-existent, and even Christmas leave was limited to 24 hours.48
The need for immediate results affected the technical choices Aiken and the crew made when designing Mark I and Mark II. Aiken was constrained by available materials and tended to choose standard components. “He had to build things out of what worked at the time,” Hopper recalled. “He couldn’t afford to fiddle around with circuits yet.”49 According to Hopper, the decision to use relay technology and not vacuum tubes in both Mark I and Mark II could be directly attributed to the pressures of the war. Aiken felt it was better to apply a tested and proven technology, such as switches. Vacuum tubes, though used in radios for years, had not yet been successfully applied to computation machines.
Early programming innovations also grew out of the intense pressure generated by the war. Hopper compared the experience to working in a long tunnel with only the problems to solve ahead of her. She and Bloch were constantly searching for ways to increase the speed of the coding process, and their solutions evolved out of expediency rather than intellectual curiosity. “There was,” Hopper recalled, “no theorizing, there was no higher mathematics. There was no future of computers, there was nothing but get those problems going, and what the computer was doing. The future in a sense did not exist.”50
