The month of July is marked in our history by several inaugurations from the births of significant pioneers through the announcement of new machines and the establishment of computer companies.

July includes the birth of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, born 7 July 1752, in Lyons, France. In the late 18th century Jacquard developed a practical automatic loom which wove patterns controlled by a linked sequence of punched cards. It was from this development that both Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith derived their own use of cards for their respective machines. Jacquard looms are still in use today throughout the world. Jacquard died on 7 August 1834, in Ouillins, France. The company that Hollerith formed eventually, after mergers, became IBM, a company that for thirty years promoted and benefited from mechanical punched card processing. Thus it was appropriate that the first IBM production-line machine, the IBM 650, was designed to be upwardly compatible from the well established line of mechanical card processing machines. The IBM 650, announced on 2 July 1953, became the machine that gave the first computer experience to a generation of university students. With a 60% discount on its monthly lease, universities across the US obtained their first machines. Being a decimal machine, the programming and data representation was simpler than many earlier machines, and like later personal computers, was soon supported by effective application packages. In all over 1000 IBM 650 computers were delivered to organizations throughout the world.

Two years before the announcement of the IBM 650, two other events were significant in the development of the computer. On 9 July 1951, the Ferranti company inaugurated the Mark I machine, a derivative of the machine that had been built by Frederick Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester. The Ferranti Mark I marked the beginning of a line of commercial machines in the United Kingdom that would form the basis of the British computer industry. The next day, Maurice Wilkes, at the University of Cambridge unveiled the concept of microprogramming that would revolutionize the architecture of succeeding generations of machines and provide the means by which machines of different instructional capabilities could be compatible. Kilburn and Wilkes were both designated as an IEEE Computer Society Pioneers in 1980.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore developed the integrated circuit (or microchip), and semiconductor chips, and filed for a patent application on 30 July 1959 on behalf of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. The patent application was challenged by the Texas Instruments application on behalf Jack Kilby. In 1969 the courts ruled in favor of Noyce. It is generally agreed, in hindsight, that Kilby built the first integrated circuit while Noyce provided a practical implementation that could be commercialized. Noyce received an Pioneer Award in 1980, and Jack Kilby in 1993.

July was the month of incorporation of both the Control Data Corporation (8 July 1957) and Intel (18 July 1968).

Birthdays

Fernando Jose Corbató, born July 1, 1926, in Oakland, CA was the creator of the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT in 1961, the first general purpose interactive system. An early version of CTSS was first demonstrated in November, 1961, at the MIT Computation Center. It evolved over the years and in the Fall of 1963 began daily operations at the Laboratory for Computer Science as well as at the MIT Computation Center where it operated until July, 1973. Corbató was one of the charter recipients of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

Jay Wright Forrester, born 14 July 1918 in Climax, NE, developed the basic concept of random-access storage in 1947 based on glow-discharge cells, and later recast the concept in 1949 as toroidal, random-access, coincident-current magnetic storage. Developed as the storage system for the Whirlwind computer, it became the standard internal memory for computers for nearly 30 years. By 1951, the Whirlwind computer was in operation to support the planning and design of the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System. Forrester received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1982.

Jerrier A. Haddad, born 17 July 1922, in New York NY, served in a number of technical capacities within IBM. He was a member of the IBM 604 development team and headed the engineering team which produced the IBM 701 (Defense Calculator), the first IBM machine that was both intended to be more than a one-off machine and fully electronic. Haddad received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1984.

Arthur Lee Samuel, born in 1901, in Emporia KS, died 29 July 1990 in Menlo Park CA. In 1946 Samuel became Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois and was active in their project to design one of the first electronic computers. It was there he conceived the idea of a checkers program capable of beating the world champion to demonstrate the power of electronic computers. He completed the first checkers program later at IBM, apparently the world's first self-learning program, on the IBM 701. When it was about to be demonstrated, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder and president of IBM, remarked that the demonstration would raise the price of IBM stock 15 points. It did. Samuel received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1987 for his work on adaptive non-numeric processing.