We wind up the year relating the calendar with significant events in the history of computing with recognizing a number of beginnings that have had a profound effect on the world of computing as we know it today. The collection for December is interestingly centered in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though we recognize, from the correspondence resulting from earlier columns that there are many anniversaries that can be added to the list. This month we choose to mention five: The Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren Virginia was the primary site of Naval computing starting in the late 1940s with the installation in 1948 of the Howard Aiken's Mark II computer (the machine in which Grace Hopper found the first bug in 1946) and the Mark III in 1951. The subsequent machine was the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC), constructed at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the overall direction of Wallace Eckert. Initially the NORC had been scheduled for delivery to the White Oak Naval facility, northwest of Washington DC, but the Navy decided that it would be best to assign its operations to an experienced crew, and redirected it to Dahlgren. However even prior to its arrival Edward Teller attempted to have it diverted to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the basis that the work on nuclear calculations was of greater importance than the ballistic calculations intended at Dahlgren. The Navy won out and NORC was delivered to Dahlgren and subsequently dedicated on 2 December 1954. John von Neumann was the keynote speaker at the event having completed his work on the IAS machine shortly before.

In 1965 Richard L. Wexelblat was the first candidate in a Computer Science program to complete his work on a dissertation. While there were many prior doctoral degree candidates whose work was related to computing, the diploma of Wexelblat, presented by the University of Pennsylvania and the home of ENIAC, was the first to carry the designation "Computer Science".

December 8, 1947 is significant as the date of incorporation of the first computer company - the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Following a tiff with the administration at the University of Pennsylvania regarding the patent rights to ENIAC (subsequently invalidated), John Mauchly (1919-1995) and J. Presper Eckert (1907-1980) took the chance to start the company that, after several mergers, eventually produced the UNIVAC. Between the ENIAC and the UNIVAC they 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.

1947 was also the year in which the transistor was developed by a team led by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Though primitive and unreliable initially the transistor was to become the vehicle by which the computer moved to the second generation of machines in approximately 1960 (though there were individual computers using that technology earlier), and the miniaturization of the computer from the ENIAC behemoth to the microprocessor started. Without the transistor the integrated circuit and the computer chip would not have been possible. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley recieved the Nobel Prize for their work in 1956 - an increditably short time later compared to awards to other scientists.

In this year as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the Large Scale Computing Committee within the AIEE, we note that 45th anniversary of the Data Processing Managers Association, chartered on 26 December 1951. For many years DPMA and ACM were colleagues of the IEEE Computer Society in the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, and sponsors of the highly successful series of "joint" conferences. At its zenith in the early 1980s the National Computer Conferences drew as many as 100,000 attendees.

December Birthdays

John Warner Backus was born December 3rd, 1924 in Philadelphia PA. He was the leader of the IBM team that created the programming language FORTRAN, inventor of the metalanguage BNF, known variously as Backus-Normal or Backus-Naur Form (BNF) and until he recent retirement was a proponent of improved methods of programming such as the functional approach. Backus received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer award as a member of the charter group in 1980, and in 1994 was awarded the National Academy of Engineers Draper Award. The FORTRAN programming language was designated by the Academy as one of the "inventions of the century".

Perhaps the most mentioned pioneer in this column is Grace Murray Hopper, was born 9 December 1906 in New York City and died 1 January, 1992 in Arlington VA. Eventually rising to the rank of Rear Admiral, US Navy, Hopper was the third programmer on the Harvard Mark I (ASCC) computer and the developer of the concept of the compiler. She was an early protagonist in the development of automatic programming and high level languages, and subsequently in the encouragement of the Navy and others to use COBOL as a standard language. With John Backus and others she was a charter recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

December is also the birthday month of Kenneth E. Iverson -17 December 1920, Camrose, Alberta, Canada. With Adin Falkoff, Iverson was the inventor and implementor of the programming language APL, for which he received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award, also in 1980.

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

Charles Babbage was also born in December - 26 December 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He died in 1871 in London. Known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine, his Difference Engine was built in his lifetime as a special purpose device intended for the production of tables, a copy arriving in the USA at the Dudley Observatory in 1857. While the Difference Engine has been rebuilt by the Science Museum (London) no working model of the Analytical Engine has yet been constructed.

John Louis von Neumann (Johann Louis Neumann) was born 28 December 1903 in Budapest, Hungary and died 8 February 1957, Washington DC. Building on a career as a brilliant mathematician, von Neumann was able to build a career also as a computer user and scientist initially with calculations relating to the World War II atomic bomb and later as the promoter of the stored program concept. His logical design of the IAS computer became the prototype of most of its successors - the von Neumann Architecture.

This last column of the Anniversary year of the IEEE Computer Society brings to a close our attention to the great events in computing as related to the calendar months. Obviously we could repeat these columns year by year but instead we hope to be able to maintain a WWW presence, possibly adding new items as we learn about them. Your input has been appreciated and will be appreciated.