The Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage was never completed in his lifetime, but his son Henry Provost Babbage built the "mill" portion of the machine from his father's drawings, and on January 21, 1888 computed multiples of pi to prove the adequacy of the design. Perhaps this represents the first successful test of a portion of a "modern" computer. Recently a portion of his earlier machine, the Difference Engine, was sold at auction by Christies of London to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

George Stibitz began his own work that was to lead to a series of Bell Telephone Laboratory Relay computers during World War II in 1937 by his construction of a binary adder from parts borrowed from the scrap heap at the Laboratory. By January 1940 he had completed the "Bell Labs Complex Computer" capable of performing complex arithmetic calculations necessary for circuit design and the following September demonstrated the machine at the Fall meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College, coincidently also demonstrating the first remote access to a computer through the use of telephone lines. [Photograph of Stibitz at the dedication of the Dennison display including the K-machine.]

Even before the ENIAC had been unveiled in 1946, developers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, together with their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, were already thinking about their next machine. Rather than abandoning a machine that they knew was not "state-of-the-art", on January 1, 1945 Eckert and Mauchly signed a contract to build the EDVAC, the machine that would the subject of a "Draft Report" authored by John von Neumann and that would, incorrectly, assign the concept of the stored program and the peculiar architecture to him. The EDVAC itself would not be completed until 1952, long after Eckert and Mauchly had left the University. [Photograph of EDVAC -- see paper by Mike Williams in Annals.]

Thomas J. Watson, Sr. had been responsible for assisting Howard Aiken in building the Harvard Mark I calculator in 1944, a machine known within IBM as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), but was rebuffed at the dedication, Aiken and Harvard appearing to claim all the credit for themselves. Though Aiken apologized later, Watson was by no means satisfied, and the emergence and success of ENIAC did not add to his complacency. While not intending to enter the computer business fully in the same as Eckert and Mauchly intended with their own company, he ordered the construction of the updated IBM version of the ASCC, a machine to be known as the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). SSEC was dedicated on January 24, 1948. Watson was dissatisfied with the publicity photographs of the SSEC since the machine room at the Madison Avenue headquarter's contained two large columns that obscured the machine; he had the columns removed in the publicity pictures!

Almost 30 years later, what was to become a strong competitor to IBM, Apple Corporation was incorparated by Stephen Jobs and Stephen Wozniak on January 3, 1977. Seven years later, on January 24, 1984 the company revealed the Macintosh personal computer in a publicity campaign that compared IBM with "Big Brother" and Apple as the savior of the masses.

1960 was perhaps a turning point in the history of computing, many innovations first appeared. In January 1960 alone, the International Federation for Information Processing was founded on the dreams of Isaac Auerbach for a truly international industry and sharing of ideas. International cooperation was also evident in the initial development of the ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) in 1958, but it was the work of the ACM/GAMM committee, formed in January 1960, that truly established the language in the form that Alan Perlis described as the lingua franca of computer science. That same year and month Control Data Corporation delivered its 1604 machine whose success led to the further development of a series of machines that included several that can be included in the classification of "supercomputers".

January 1963 was the month in which Ivan Sutherland introduced the system known as "Sketchpad" for the TX-0 and thus consolidated the field of computer graphics whose originators had earlier included General Motors Research Laboratory. [Photograph of Sketchpad from IEEE Center?]

January Birthdays

[Picture (not in my files)] Nathaniel Rochester, born 14 January 1919, Buffalo NY and a 1984 recipient of the Computer Society Pioneer Award, was the chief architect of IBM's first scientific computer and of the prototype of its first commercial computer, and developer of the concept of symbolic assembly language programming. About the same time as Rochester was developing the IBM machines, [Picture] Heinz Zemanek, 1985 Computer Society Pioneer, an Austrian computer scientist developed the MAILUFTERL (May Breeze) computer (named after the Whirlwind), and later while Director of the IBM Laboratory, Vienna, directed the development of formal programming language descriptors, was born January 1, 1920, Vienna Austria.

[Picture] Erich Bloch, born 9 January 1925, in Sulzburg, Germany, headed the IBM development of the Solid Logic Technology program, which provided IBM with the microelectronics technology for its System/360 computer. He received the 1993 Computer Society Pioneer Award.

[Picture] Today's world of personal computers would be very different if it were not for the work of Doug Engelbart, born 25 January 1925, in inventing the Mouse and for his later strong advocacy of the potential for high-performance human augmentation. Engelbart received the 1992 Pioneer Award.

[Picture] Charles Antony Richard (Tony) Hoare, born 11 January 1934, was a major contributor to the understanding of the logic of programs, and inparticular was the developer of the Axiomatic Approach to program description. He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award and the 1990 Computer Society Pioneer Award.

[Picture] Donald Ervin Knuth, programmer supreme, writer and teacher of the Art of Programming, was born 10 January 1938, in Milwaukee, MN. He continued to become the developer of the text language TEX, and the concept of literate programming. He received the1980 Computer Society Pioneer Award.

95/11/05