In this year in which we celebrate both the 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of the first electronic, general purpose computer, ENIAC, and the establishment of the Large Scale Computing Committee within the AIEE, that eventually grew up to become the IEEE Computer Society, events relating to each occur month by month. In April 1943 the proposal to develop the ENIAC written by John Brainerd, Dean of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, together with the machine's builders, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, was submitted to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Sponsored by Herman Goldstine, then an Army Lieutenant responsible for liaison between the two institutions, the proposal was intended to develop a machine that would replace the human (mainly women) "computers" that were calculating the entries in firing tables for the Proving Ground. Three years later that machine changed the world. April is the birthday month of J. Presper Eckert, whom we all had anticipated would be present for the 50th Anniversary celebrations this year. Unfortunately he died in June 1995. Eckert received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980. With John Mauchly, Eckert was not only the inventor of the ENIAC; together they created the EDVAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC computers.
Some of the concepts that were rediscovered in the ENIAC project had been the subject of a patent application in Germany in 1936. In the early stages of building the Z-1 computer in his parent's parlor, Konrad Zuse applied for a patent for the automatic execution of calculations. That application included a storage system which Zuse termed a "combination memory". Zuse explains he had realized that programs could be stored provided they were composed of bit combinations - claiming that programmable memory had already been patented by 1936.
For many "old-timers" in the computer industry, April is remembered as the month in which IBM announced System/360 and thus changed the target against which the competition would be judged for many years. Although data processing managers and computing center directors throughout the world were summoned to hear the announcement on April 7, 1964, the first machines would not be delivered until a year later, and the real "flood" of machines not until 1966. (picture of System/360)
Last month we noted many pioneers who had been employed by the IBM Corporation; among those with a birthday in April is Stephen W. Dunwell. Born 3 April 1913, Dunwell received a direct commission to the Army Security Agency during World War II, whose mission was cryptography and code-breaking, using IBM machines with attached relay calculators. He received the Legion of Merit for this work, and returned to IBM at the end of WW-II with the rank of Lt. Colonel. Later he was responsible for the development of the first supercomputer - STRETCH, IBM 7030, and later the HARVEST machine.
Another IBM employee was Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., (born 19 April 1931), 1980 recipient of the Pioneer Award for his work in the development of OS/360. Brooks was also the discoverer of the bottomless software tar pit and debunker of the concept of the Mythical Man Month in his book of the same title.
Cuthbert C. Hurd (born 5 April 1911) joined IBM in 1949 and formed the Applied Science Department, which was responsible for introducing the 701, the 650, the 704, and FORTRAN. As the first IBM Applied Science leader, he pushed his reluctant management into using the IBM 701 to enter the world of computing. April was the month in 1953 that IBM had dedicated the 701 (Defense Calculator). Hurd also created the environment and served as the manager of the group including John Backus that developed the programming language FORTRAN. Hurd was designated an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer in 1986.
The first FORTRAN program outside of the development group was run on 19 April 1957. Herbert Bright, a manager of the data processing center at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh received an unmarked box of cards from IBM. Expecting the binary deck for the FORTRAN compiler after several years of waiting, he loaded it into the IBM 704 and attempted to compile a simple program -- and got the first error message: "COMMA MISSING IN COMPUTED GO TO STATEMENT". Eleven years later in 1968, Edsger Dijkstra, a leading critic of programming without a mathematical proof of correctness, declared the GO TO statement to be being "harmful", and began the move towards more disciplined programming. In 1980 Dijkstra, who also invented the guarded command and semaphores, was given the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for "multiprogramming control".
Joining Dijkstra in the charter group of IEEE Computer Society Pioneers was Seymour R. Cray; the Control Data Corporation (CDC) designer responsible for the CDC 6600, which was perhaps the first modern supercomputer after STRETCH, Cray was subsequently leading designer of supercomputers in his own corporation. Cray designed machines still dominate the field of supercomputers. (picture of a Cray machine -- xmp or ymp)
April 20 is the anniversary of the 1950 demonstration of the first n-p-n junction transistor by William Shockley, Morgan Sparks, and Goedon Teal of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The first solid state amplifier, the point-contact transistor, had been invented in 1947. In 1949, Shockley proposed a new type of transistor that exploited semiconducting properties in the bulk of the crystal. To make such a transistor, however, required the preparation of a crystal having a "sandwich" structure: two layers of n-type semiconductor (in which conduction occurs by movement of excess electrons) separated by a layer of p-type semiconductor (in which conduction occurs through the movement of vacancies in the electron structure of the crystal). Within a year of the demonstration, Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers had turned it into a practical, reliable, and manufacturable device. [Source: Nebeker, Frederik, "This Month in EE History", The Institute, April 1997, p. 6D.]
Another 1980 Pioneer whose birthday fell in April is George R. Stibitz. Born 30 April 1904, Stibitz was the first user of the term "digital" as applied to the specialized form of circuits used in his relay computers and moreover was the demonstrator of the first remote computation. He set up a terminal at Dartmouth College at the Fall 1940 American Mathematical Society meeting, and allowed attendees, including Norbert Wiener, to use the Complex Number Computer in New York. During World War II he developed several relay computers that were used in the war effort. Stibitz died 31 January 1995, in Hanover, NH.
Alan Perlis was recognized in 1985 for his work in computer language translation, that started with his development of the IT (Interpretive translator) for the IBM 650 in 1956 and his later involvement in the development of ALGOL. Born on 1 April 1922, Perlis was a leader in establishing computer science as a legitimate discipline and the author of many classic one-liners:
