During World War II a group of scientists led by Max Newman, mathematician from Cambridge University, and including Alan Turing and several thousand others, attacked the German high command coded messages to decrypt their contents and to produce intelligence that became known as "Ultra". Located at Bletchley Park, England, these scientists achieved their goal, even though complicated by an ever more complex encryption devices, through the development of a series of computer-like machines culminating in an electronic marvel known as Colossus. The first prototype began operating in February 1944, and several additional machines were prepared in time for D-day in June 1944, and two years prior to the unveiling of ENIAC. Though not revealed to the world until 1970, the scientists at Bletchley Park were able to use their knowledge to provide portions of the British computer industry. Today a museum at Bletchley Park is reconstructing a Colossus.

Almost two years later, on February 14, 1946 the University of Pennsylvania unveiled the ENIAC, designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, for the purpose of computing firing tables for the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Though arguably not the first "computer", having been preceded by Konrad Zuse's Z-1 and Z-2 machines in Germany from 1935-38, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry's regenerative memory machine in 1939, and Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (aka ASCC) in 1944, and Colossus in Great Britain, ENIAC was the first fully operational electronic, general purpose, machine. Though programming was essentially completed by rewiring and the stored memory was not yet implemented, ENIAC was a parallel processor well ahead of its time.

Among the Computer Society Pioneer Awardees John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert and Herman Goldstine were charter recipients in 1980. Goldstine had been a Army Lieutenant at Abderdeen during the war serving as the liaison between the Army and the University of Pennsylvania, where a band of female "computers" were hand calculating firing tables. It was Goldstine [picture] who managed the establishment of a contract between the Proving Ground and the University to build ENIAC. Later Goldstine teamed with John von Neumann in the construction of the IAS machine, that led to a series of derivatives including the ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, MANIAC, and SILLIAC. In 1982 and 1984 respectively Pioneer Awards were presented to Arthur Burks [picture -- Burks??] for his early work on electronic computer logic design related to the ENIAC and to Nicholas C. Metropolis [picture??] of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who used the ENIAC with what may have been its first program to solve atomic energy problems. In 1945 Eckert and Mauchly applied for a patent for ENIAC, a move that created rift between them and the University. From the ENIAC concept, Eckert and Mauchly established the world's first computer company, that eventually was bought by Remington Rand in February 1950, and after several other transformations became a part of UNISYS Corp. The patent was eventually issued on February 4, 1964, almost twenty years later, only to be overturned in the Honeywell v. Sperry suit in which Judge Earl Larson, Minneapolis US District Court specified that "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff." John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert disputed this finding throughout their lives.

Herman Hollerith was born on 29 February 1860, and in 1890 provided the mechanical means for tabulating the US Census data. His tabulating machines were later used for the analysis of censuses around the world before his machines were replaced by machines built by Powers. The company he founded, Tabulating Machines Company, was one of three that came together in 1914 to form C-T-R (Calculating, Tabulating, Recording) Co. that Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was to take over and rename as the IBM Corporation. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was born on 17 Feburary 1874. Though he is often credited with the statement that "the world only needs three computers", his foresight in the involvement of the company in the construction of Howard Aiken's Mark I calculator and the development of the SSEC, together with his support of early research on electronic digital devices, provided the environment in which his son would build the company into a computer giant.

The IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Awards were presented to several whose birthdays occur in February:

David Wheeler received his award for his early work on assembly language programming and especially for his development of the "Wheeler jump" which was the means of implementing a subroutine call. Richard Hamming, one of the charter recipients of the Pioneer Award, is not known just for his development of error correcting codes which bear his name, but also for his aphorisms that are widely quoted -- "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers", "anything a faculty member can learn, a student can easily". Niklaus Wirth, the developer of the programming language Pascal (and Modula and Oberin subsequently) received his award in 1987 shortly after he had predicted that "I did not know what the [programming] language of the year 2000 will look like, but I am sure it will be called FORTRAN". Another programming language developer, Thomas Kurtz, received his award in 1991. With John Kemeny, also a Pioneer Award recipient, Kurtz developed the programming language BASIC and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, both of which led the way to student-friendly systems.

Last updated 96/01/24