by Kurt W Beyer
3. Bureau of Ordnance Contract, 27 August 1945 (HAP); Cohen, Howard Aiken, 201–202.
4. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, 7 January 1969, 6 (COH-SI). The Harvard Symposium of 1947 was the third postwar conference devoted to large-scale computing machinery. The first took place at MIT from October 31 to November 2, 1945. The second was a six-week course during the summer of 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering in Philadelphia. The Harvard Symposium far outstripped the first two meetings in attendance.
5. “Day of Triumph,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (January 1947): 337–339 (HAP).
6. Edmund Berkeley, “Report on the Symposium of Large Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard Computation Laboratory,” 13 January 1947 (EBP, 8–52).
7. Joseph Harrison to Commander J. H. Carmichael, 14 November 1946 (HAP).
8. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 6.
9. Conference List (HAP); Howard Aiken, interview by Henry Tropp and I. Bernard Cohen, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 37.
10. Howard Aiken to Richard Babbage, 17 April 1946 (HAP).
11. Ibid.; Babbage to Aiken, 25 April 1946; Babbage to Aiken, 19 June 1946; Aiken to Babbage, 24 December 1946; Babbage to Aiken, 14 January 1947; Aiken to Babbage, 22 January 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 31 January 1947; Babbage to James Conant, 15 February 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 15 February 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 27 February 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 22 March 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 11 December 1947; Babbage to Aiken, 6 April 1948; Aiken to Babbage, 13 April 1948 (HAP).
12. Berkeley, “Report on the Symposium,” 13January 1947 (EBP, 8–52).
13. Robert Campbell, interview by Henry Tropp, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 35.
14. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, November 1968 (COH-SI), 5.
15. [Grace Hopper], Description of a Relay Calculator, 1–41.
16. Harvard Symposium program, 7 January 1947 (HAP).
17. Berkeley, “Report on the Symposium,” 13 January 1947 (EBP, 8–52).
18. Ibid.; William Blair, “Harvard Unveils Huge Calculator,” New York Times, 8 January 1947.
19. Howard Aiken, “Opening Remarks,” Harvard Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery, January 1947 (HAP).
20. Babbage to Aiken, 11 December 1947 (HAP).
21. Howard Aiken, “Opening Remarks,” 4–5; Berkeley, “Report on the Symposium,” 13 January 1947 (EBP, 50–8-52).
22. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 205–207.
23. Ibid.; “Harvard’s New ‘Brain’ Permits Social Studies,” Boston Herald, 10 January 1947; Cohen, Howard Aiken, 207.
24. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 6.
25. Berkeley, “Report on the Symposium,” 13 January 1947 (EBP, 8–52).
26. There has been much historical debate concerning who was responsible for the stored-program concept. See Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC.
27. Harvard Symposium program, 7 January 1947 (HAP).
28. “Calculation ad Infinitum,” Newsweek, 20 January 1947, 58; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1948); Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels”, The Atlantic, January 1947, 46.
29. R. C. Gibbs, Chairman, Division of Physical Sciences, National Research Council, to Members of the Committee on High Speed Calculating Machines, 18 November 1946 (HAP). Other members of the committee included Walter Bartky (Division of Physical Sciences, University of Chicago), S. H. Caldwell (Department of Electrical Engineering, MIT), E. U. Condon (National Bureau of Standards), J. H. Curtis (National Bureau of Standards), G. R. Stibitz (Bell Telephone Laboratories), and Warren Weaver (Rockefeller Foundation).
30. John von Neumann to Howard Aiken, 25 November 1946 (HAP).
31. Ibid.
32. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 7.
33. Ibid.; Aiken to Babbage, 22 January 1947 (HAP).
34. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 6–7.
35. Isaac Auerbach, interview by Henry Tropp, 17 February 1972 (COH-SI), 11.
36. On the interaction of government, academia, and business in the early history of the computing field, see James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market (Sharpe, 1993).
37. “Day of Triumph,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (January 1947): 337–339.
38. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 5.
39. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 175.
40. Paul Morton, interview by Robina Mapstone, 12 October 1972 (COH-SI), 14.
41. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 4.
42. Richard Bloch, interview by William Aspray, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 18.
43. Frederick Miller, interview by Henry Tropp, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 61.
44. Ibid., 24.
45. Richard Bloch, interview by Henry Tropp, 12 April 1972 (COH-SI), 11–12.
46. It also runs counter to I. B. Cohen’s account of Aiken’s selection of relay technology over vacuum tubes (Howard Aiken, 40–44). Cohen expresses astonishment that, in a 1973 interview, Aiken declared that he had never been “wedded” to any particular technology. As Hopper, Wilkes, Miller, Campbell, and Bloch recalled it, this does not seem to have been Aiken’s position in 1947.
47. Miller, interview, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 24.
48. William Blair, “Harvard Unveils Huge Calculator,” New York Times, 8 January 1947.
49. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 49.
50. Miller, interview, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 45.
51. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 57–58.
52. Ibid., 66.
53. Bloch, interview, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 20.
54. Ibid.
55. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 5–6.
56. Goheen, interview, 1972 (COH-SI), 20.
57. Grace Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 24.
58. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 2.
59. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 24.
60. Goheen, interview, 1972 (COH-SI), 11.
61. Robert Campbell, interview by William Aspray, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 55–56.
62. Henry Tropp, “The 20th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery: 30 August 1967,” Annals of the History of Computing 9 (1988), no. 3: 251.
63. Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 32–33.
64. Goheen, interview, 1972 (COH-SI), 14–15.
65. Ibid., 19.
66. Goheen’s account states that the election was very close between Berkeley and an IBM man for secretary (“Memorandum for the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery,” Report No. 2, 30 September 1947, MFP, 4–41).
67. Ibid.
68. Tropp, “The 20th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery: 30 August 1967,” 251.
69. John von Neumann to Edmund Berkeley, 15 September 1947 (MFP, 4–41).
70. Goheen, interview, 1972 (COH-SI), 16.
71. “Report to the Association for Computing Machinery,” Report No. 4, 30 January 1948 (MFP, 4–41).
72. Campbell, interview, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 57.
73. Ibid.
74. Upon his retirement, the Computation Laboratory was renamed the Howard Hathaway Aiken Laboratory of Computer Science.
75. Hopper, interview, January 1969 (COH-SI), 15.
76. Ibid.; Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 1–2.
77. Conference Program, Association for Computing Machinery, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 18–20 April 1949 (GHP, 5–5).
78. Hopper, interview, January 1969 (COH-SI), 16.
79. Ibid., 15–16.
80. Ibid.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7
1. Edmund Berkeley to Grace Hopper, 20 November 1949 (JMP, 3: B: 1–4). This four-page “intervention letter” was sent to Grace Hopper and to her closest friends and relatives, including her new boss at EMCC, John Mauchly.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. In 1946, apparently borrowing from the Harvard Mark I, von Neumann, with the assistance of ENIAC operator Jean Bartik, developed a paper tape/mechanical relay input system for ENIAC that alleviated some of the programming difficulties.
5. Mary, Mauchly’s first wife of 16 years and the mother of their two children, drowned in a swimming accident on 8 September 1946. McNulty and Mauchly began to date about a year later.
6. Grace Hopper, interview by Linda Calvert, 3 September to 28 February 1982 (WFGP), 42.
7. “Brief List of Devices and Fields of Application of Devices” (memo, EMCC) (JMP, 3: C: 3–60); Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 2.
8. John Mauchly, interview by Uta Merzbach, 22 June 1970 (COH-SI), 96.
9. Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 90–91.
10. J. Presper Eckert Jr., Kathleen Mauchly, William Cleaver, and Jim McNulty, interview by Nancy Stern, 23 January 1980 (OHC-CB, OH11), 62.
11. A stored-program computer named EDVAC, built by the Moore School of Engineering after Eckert and Mauchly’s departure, was completed after the UNIVAC.
12. Eckert, interview by Nancy Stern, 28 October 1977 (OHC-CB, OH13), 20; Eckert, interview, 23 January 1980 (OHC-CB, OH11), 98; John Mauchly, interview by Henry Tropp, 6 February 1973 (COH-SI), 2. Nancy Stern does not directly address von Neumann’s apparent ability to bypass security restrictions because of his prominent position in government circles, though she does note “that even after the security classification was lifted, Eckert and Mauchly failed to publish any report on the ENIAC” (From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 54).
13. See Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 96–99.
14. Maurice Wilkes’s EDSAC at Cambridge University, inspired by the “First Draft,” was operational before UNIVAC. See Electronic Control Company, Plan for a Statistical EDVAC, 13 May 1947 (MFP, 4–10).
15. Ibid. The laptop computer used to write this book, like the vast majority of computers today, uses the same serial fetch-and-execute architecture.
16. “An Introduction to The UNIVAC System” (GHP, 5–6).
17. Ibid. The system could read or write at 20,000 pulses per second, and each word required roughly fifty pulses.
18. For another interpretation of Eckert and Mauchly’s fund-raising challenges, see Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Basic Books, 1996), 108–110.
19. Ibid., 20–26, 47.
20. Ibid., 107–109; Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 102–106, 115.
21. Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 137.
22. Ibid., 137.
23. Raytheon’s RAYDAC, under development by Hopper’s former colleagues Robert Campbell and Richard Bloch, appeared to be the only competing commercial system. However, it was a one-of-a-kind machine, much like the BINAC (Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969, COH-SI, 5, 10).
24. Her name does not appear in the general works of Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, and Ceruzzi; more surprisingly, Stern references her only once. See Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer; Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2003); Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC.
25. Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 1, 3.
26. Betty Snyder Holberton, interview by James Baker Ross, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 4.
27. Ibid., 3. Margaret Murray’s book Women Becoming Mathematicians also highlights the prejudice faced by the majority of the women who received degrees in mathematics as they attempted to create a professional identity in postwar America. Murray, however, only covers the success stories. Betty Snyder’s experience reminds the reader that for every Winifred Asprey or Susan Hahn, there were other women who were discouraged from becoming mathematicians.
28. Francis E. Holberton and Jean Bartik, interview by Henry Tropp, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 2.
29. Ibid., 11–12.
30. Ibid., 2. Snyder’s perspective differs significantly from that of Jennifer Light, who suggests that the six women selected for the ENIAC project were the best and brightest of the 200 BRL computers (“When Computers Were Women”), Light may have reflexively augmented the status of the ENIAC women in order to defend her thesis that the women and their accomplishments were systematically overlooked by a gender-biased society.
31. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 15.
32. Ibid.
33. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 109–110. Holberton’s remarks shed some light on Mauchly’s behavior during the less-than-cordial break between Eckert, Mauchly, and the Moore School administration. See Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC.
34. Ibid., 114.
35. Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 3.
36. Arthur Katz, “Flow Chart Symbols,” 15 June 1950 (GHP, 5–7).
37. “Outline for Second Lecture: Programming Course for EMCC’s Engineers,” 11 April 1950 (GHP, 5–7).
38. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, 266–268.
39. Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 9; Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, 166–167; Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 3–4.
40. The “10” in the name C-10 stood for the tenth iteration of the UNIVAC operational code (UNIVAC Conference Transcript, 17–18 May 1990, OHC-CB, OH-200, 86; Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983, OHC-CB, OH-50, 23).
41. Frances Elizabeth Snyder, “UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10,” 6 May 1949 (GHP, 5–6).
42. Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 10.
43. Ibid., 10–11.
44. Ibid., 7–8.
45. Ibid., 8.
46. Hopper, interview, 1 October 1982 (WFGP), 32.
47. “EMCC Request for Comments on Traits and Abilities which Coding and Programming Personnel Should Have,” 28 September 1949 (JMP, 3:C:1, 1).
48. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 146.
49. Ibid., 167.
50. Snyder’s sort-merge generator contributed to Hopper’s concept of compilers.
51. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 122.
52. Frances Elizabeth Snyder, “UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10,” 6 May 1949 (GHP 5–6); Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 8.
53. John Mauchly, “President’s Report to the Shareholders,” 15 December 1949 (JMP, 3: C: 1, 1)
54. Ibid.
55. Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 146.
56. Watson, Father and Son Inc., 198.
57. Ibid., 192–193.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., 134–135.
60. Ibid., 199.
61. Ibid., 198–199.
62. Eckert further explained that, besides the emotional attachment to each other, the two held patents jointly, which made it difficult to separate at that point in time (interview by Nancy Stern, 28 October 1977, OHC-CB, OH-13).
63. John Mauchly, interview by Uta Merzbach, 22 June 1970, 75 (OHC-SI); Watson, Father and Son, Inc., 194.
64. Hopper, interview, 1 October 1982 (WFGP), 131–133; Hopper, interview, 4 February 1969 (COH-SI), 12–13.
65. Berkeley to Hopper, 20 November 1949 (PENN, 3: B: 1, 4)
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. John Mauchly, “Recent Events,” 14 May 1953 (JMP, 3: C: 3, 57); Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 46.
73. In the 1890s, as a young bank clerk, Rand invented and patented an index system of dividers and tabs that enabled documents to be placed in vertical file cabinets and located rapidly.
74. UNIVAC Conference Transcript, 17–18 May 1990 (OHC-CB, OH-200), 13.
75. 75. Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 14.
76. UNIVAC Conference Transcript, 17–18 May 1990 (OHC-CB, OH-200), 89–90; Hopper, interview, 1 October 1982 (WFGP), 7–9.
77. Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 149.
78. Ibid.; Ecke
rt, K. Mauchly, Cleaver, and McNulty, interview, 23 January 1980 (OHC-CB, OH11), 122.
79. UNIVAC Conference Transcript, 17–18 May 1990 (OHC-CB, OH-200), 61.
80. Hopper, interview, 1 October 1982 (WFGP), 41; Hopper, interview by Christopher Evans, 1976 (OHC-CB), 22–23. Hopper’s claim concerning tolerance of “color” did not appear to apply to EMCC personnel as of 1949, although Bob Shaw was an albino.
81. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 135; Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 20. A similar organizational atmosphere existed in the early Ford Motor Company, according to Thomas Hughes. See Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Penguin, 1989).
82. Holberton and Bartik, interview, 27 April 1973 (COH-SI), 205–209; Holberton, interview, 14 April 1983 (OHC-CB, OH-50), 11–12.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 8
1. The nature of invention has been considered by Thomas Hughes, W. Bernard Carlson, Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Janet Abbate, Stewart Leslie, and John Law.
2. See Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing; Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer; Grace Hopper, interview by Christopher Evans, 1976 (OHC-CB, OH-81), 14; Hopper, “Keynote Address,” 1–3 June 1978 (HPL, 3–8), 21.
