by Kurt W Beyer
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS
CHP Carl Hammer Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
COH-SI Computer Oral History Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Archive Center, National Museum of American History, Washington
EBP Edmund Berkeley Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
GHP Grace Murray Hopper Collection, Archive Center on the History of Technology, Invention, and Innovation, Archive Center, National Museum of American History, Washington
HAP Howard Aiken Papers, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
HCL Harvard Computational Laboratory, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
HOL Francis Holberton Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
HPL History of Programming Languages Conference Records, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
ISP Isaac Auerbach Papers: Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
JCPP James Conant Presidental Papers, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
JMP John Mauchly Papers, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
MFP Margaret Fox Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
NBS National Bureau of Standards Collection, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
OHC-CB Oral History Collection, Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Technology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
WFGP Women in the Federal Government Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. John Mauchly received 65,000 hits, J. Presper Eckert Jr. 29,000, John von Neumann 750,000, Howard Aiken 35,000, and Bill Gates 13 million.
2. Margaret A. M. Murray, Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America (MIT Press, 2000), 4–5.
3. Though the historian Jennifer Light charges that the differences in status between early hardware and software developers on the ENIAC project exemplify women’s discounted value in the history of science and technology, Hopper’s experiences at Harvard and at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation do not support her thesis. See Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 6.
4. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 118; Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 204–206;John Backus, “Programming in America in the 1950s—Some Personal Impressions,” in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, ed. N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and G.-C. Rota (Academic, 1980), 127–128.
5. William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1990); Nancy Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers (Digital, 1981); Paul Ceruzzi, Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer (Greenwood, 1983); Michael S. Mahoney, “The History of Computing in the History of Technology,” Annals of the History of Computing 10, no. 2 (April 1988): 113–125.
6. Michael S. Mahoney, “Software: The Self-Programming Machine,” in From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, ed. A. Akera and F. Nebeker (Oxford University Press, 2002).
7. It took place in Palo Alto and was sponsored by the Charles Babbage Institute (located at the University of Minnesota), an archive and a research center dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field. As a conference participant, I noted that historians of technology and computers were well represented, but pioneers in the field once again presented many of the papers.
8. Most early programmers were formally trained in mathematics. Furthermore, a number of these programmers were women. See Light, “When Computers Were Women,” 455–483.
9. Grace Hopper and John Mauchly, “Influence of Programming Techniques on the Design of Computers,” Proceedings of the I.R.E. 41, no. 10 (October 1953): 1250–1254.
10. Aiken, interview, 26–27 February, 1973 (COH-SI), 107.
11. EMCC was purchased by Remington Rand in 1950 and functioned from 1950 to 1955 as a semi-autonomous division of the parent company. Remington Rand merged with Sperry Gyroscope in 1956, and EMCC division was renamed the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand.
12. Grace Hopper, “The Education of a Computer,” Symposium of Industrial Applications of Automatic Computing Equipment (January 1953); Grace Hopper, “Compiling Routines,” Computers and Automation (May 1953); Grace Hopper and John Mauchly, “Influence of Programming Techniques on the Design of Computers,” Proceedings of the I.R.E. 41 (1953), no. 10: 1250–1254.
13. These advances include the use of pseudo-code, iterative routines, editing routines, interpreters, and compilers.
14. Thomas Hughes’s term “reverse salient” describes the critical lag point that hinders a given technological system from advancing. “Salient” is a military term for a bulge that occurs when, in the advance of a battle line, a segment of the army moves more rapidly than the surrounding units.
15. Jean Sammet, “Conference Chairman’s Opening Remarks: Organization of the Conference,” in History of Programming Languages I, ed. R. Wexelblat (ACM Press, 1981), xvii–xx.
16. A finding aid for the Computer Oral History Collection is available at http://invention.smithsonian.org.
17. See Francis Trevelyan Miller, Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind: The Romantic Life Story of the World’s Greatest Inventor (John Winston, 1931); Mervyn Kaufman, Thomas Alva Edison, Miracle Maker (Garrad, 1962); H. Gordon Garbedian, Thomas Alva Edison, Builder of Civilization (J. Messner, 1947); John McMahon, The Wright Brothers: Fathers of Flight (Little, Brown, 1930).
18. Hugh G.J. Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of the Radio (Wiley, 1976, 1985); Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
19. Among them were David Nye’s Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (MIT Press, 1990), Claude Fischer’s America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992), John Law’s “The Olympus 320 Engine: A Case Study in Design, Development, and Organizational Control,” Technology and Culture 33 (1992), 409–440, and Gabrielle Hecht’s “Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar France,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994), 657–685.
20. David Nye, The Invented Self: An Anti-Biography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (Odense University Press, 1983).
21. Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Harvard University Press, 1991).
22. For more on Grace Hopper’s military career from 1967 to 1985, see Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Naval Institute Press, 2004). Kathy and I worked closely through the years, sharing resources and insights as we uncovered the story of this remarkable woman, and I am happy with how we divided the historical terrain.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 24.
2. Murray, Women Becoming Mathematicians, 1–17.
3. Hopper, interview, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 7–8.
4. Murray, Women Becoming Mathematicians, 110–111.
5. Ibid., 5, 111. According to statistics gathered by the mathematician Margaret Murray, only 15.7% of the doctoral degrees awarded in mathematics between 1930 and 1934 went to women. More troubling, the percentage of women receiving doctorates in ma
thematics decreased for the next 60 years, not reaching 1934 levels until 1989 (16.7%).
6. Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, 11–12. Williams shared details via e-mail of her conversation with Grace Hopper’s sister, Mary Murray Westcote, before Westcote’s passing.
7. Hopper, interview, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 23.
8. Ibid, 16.
9. Ibid., 18–19.
10. Ibid., 19–20.
11. Murray, Women Becoming Mathematicians, 100.
12. Hopper, interview, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 21.
13. Ibid., 21–22.
14. Constance Reid, Courant in Göttingen and New York: The Story of an Improbable Mathematician (Springer-Verlag, 1976); Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1977). During the late 1930s, Courant also helped other mathematicians who were fleeing Nazi Germany to obtain positions in the United States.
15. Hopper, interview, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 28.
16. Ibid., 24–25.
17. Ibid.; Williams, Admiral of the Cyber Sea, 20.
18. Ibid.
19. Grace Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 9–10.
20. Elizabeth Allen Butler, Navy Waves (Wayside, 1988).
21. Hopper, interview, 15 July 1968 (COH-SI), 25.
22. Ibid., 25–26.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 26–27.
25. Ibid., 27–28.
26. Ibid.
27. For more on Aiken, see I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (MIT Press, 1999).
28. Grace Hopper, interview by Christopher Evans, 1976, 2 (OHC-CB); Anthony G. Oettinger, “Retiring Computer Pioneer—Howard Aiken,” Communications of the ACM 5, no. 6 (1962): 298–299.
29. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 146, During the dedication ceremony, on 7 August 1944, a rift developed between Aiken and IBM CEO Thomas Watson Sr., which would persist for the rest of their lives. For more on the strained relationship between IBM and Aiken, see Cohen, Howard Aiken.
30. Traditionally, ships are referred to as feminine. Aiken considered the Mark I to be a ship and thus used feminine pronouns when referring to it.
31. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, 27 July 1968 (COH-SI), 29.
32. Ibid.
33. Robert Campbell, interview by Henry Tropp, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 66.
34. Grace Hopper, “Keynote Address” (speech given at the History of Programming Languages Conference, Seattle, WA, 1–3 June 1978) (HPL, 3/8), 41–42; Hopper, interview, 27 July 1968 (COH-SI), 29.
35. In the summer of 1944 other computing projects were underway, namely the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania and the Colossus in Britain, but as of July 1944 these projects were classified and Lieutenant (j.g.) Hopper did not have clearance.
36. Maurice Wilkes, director of the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University, is credited with coining the term “programmer” in the late 1940s.
37. Hopper, interview, 1976 (OHC-CB), 6; Hopper, interview, 27 July 1968 (COH-SI), 29.
38. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 13–16.
39. All problems were given letter designations for security reasons.
40. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 112. As it turned out, King was unable to gain access to the generated results—the problem was completed after the machine came under the Navy’s jurisdiction, and King lacked the necessary security clearance.
41. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 11–13.
42. Grace Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 8.
43. Richard Bloch, interview by William Aspray, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 15.
44. Ibid., 7.
45. Ibid., 8.
46. Ibid.; Richard Bloch, interview by Henry Tropp, 12 April 1972, 3–5.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. “Technical style” is a concept developed by Thomas Hughes to describe the mental framework that a particular inventor operates from when creating new technical artifacts. Evidence of the inventor’s style is embedded within the artifact itself. See Hughes, Elmer Sperry: Engineer and Inventor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
2. Richard Bloch, interview by Henry Tropp, 12 April 1972 (COH-SI), 5–7.
3. For more on this, see Ceruzzi, Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer.
4. IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (GHP, 1–3); Volta Torrey, “Robot Mathematician Knows All the Answers,” Popular Science, October 1944: 87–89.
5. Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken, “The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Part I,” Electrical Engineering 65 (1946): 384–391.
6. Bloch, interview, 12 April 1972 (COH-SI), 13.
7. Ibid., 15.
8. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, November 1968 (COH-SI), 2–3.
9. Jennifer Light, examining the ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1946, has argued: “The ENIAC project made a fundamental distinction between hardware and software: designing hardware was a man’s job; programming was a woman’s job. Each of these gendered parts of the project had its own clear status classification. Software, a secondary, clerical task, did not match the importance of constructing the ENIAC and getting it to work.” Light does well to highlight the important contributions the ENIAC women made, but she overstates the gendered nature of computing and reads it into the difference in status between early hardware and software designations. See Light, “When Computers Were Women,” 6.
10. Note that the ENIAC was constructed before the concept of the stored program was invented.
11. Robert Campbell, interview by Henry Tropp, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 83.
12. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 4.
13. Hopper, interview, 1976 (OHC-CB), 10.
14. Ibid., 11.
15. Hopper, Interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 7.
16. Generally it is not possible to solve differential equations with exactitude. Courant’s method demonstrated that differential equations could be solved numerically by solving a related approximate problem.
17. Harry Goheen, interview by Henry Tropp, 1972 (COH-SI), 9.
18. Grace Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 46.
19. In his 1999 book Howard Aiken, I. B. Cohen dedicates an entire chapter to “the mystery of the number 23.” In this chapter he speculates why Aiken insisted on designing a machine capable of accuracy to 23 decimal places, suggesting that he intended to compute planetary orbits. Hopper’s simple explanation is that such accuracy is generally necessary when working with partial differentials. Hence, the mystery is a matter of mathematical practicality.
20. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 46.
21. Bloch, interview, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 9.
22. The Harvard Computation Laboratory staff included four enlisted personnel who were familiar with IBM punch-card machines. These “I” specialists were an official navy “rate” during the war and wore an “I” embroidered on their uniforms. A “rate” constitutes the job specialization of an enlisted person in the Navy.
23. The difference between officers and enlisted personnel runs deeper than dress and etiquette protocol. A Lieutenant (O-3) earns about three times more than a Seaman First class (E-3).
24. Sometimes the six women associated with the ENIAC are referred to as the first “programmers.” Not only is the term “programmers” anachronistic; on the basis of the descriptions in this chapter, the work done by the original “ENIAC Girls” correlates more with the “operators” at Harvard than with the coding work of Hopper and Bloch.
25. Robert Burns, interview by Henry Tropp, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 57.
26. Grace Hopper, Problem L Operating Instruction, 1944 (GHP, 1–9).
27. The “starting tape” could be thought of as the most rudimentary form of a “boot disk.”
28. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 2.
> 29. Ibid.
30. Time sharing, which originated at MIT, permits multiple users to use the same computer simultaneously.
31. Frederick Miller, interview by Henry Tropp, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 5; Miller notes that reliability of the ENIAC was about 20%. Robert Campbell also highlights the efficiency of Aiken machines as compared to the operational problems surrounding ENIAC; Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 60.
32. Hopper, “Keynote Address” (HPL, 3–8), 15.
33. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 10.
34. Because of how “hackers” have been depicted in recent movies and fiction, many equate the term with computer crime. In proper usage, however, “hacker” refers to a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.
35. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 5.
36. Ibid., 4.
37. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 6.
38. Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer (MIT Press, 1985), 145.
39. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 29.
40. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 2.
41. Ibid.
42. Bloch, interview, 12 April 1972 (OHC-CB), 11.
43. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 22.
