The month of June is significant in the history of computing for it was in this month that not only some of the earliest events in computing took place but also some of those that later were to change the course of history. In June 1833, Ada Augusta Byron (later Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time being primarily interested in his mathematical genius rather than in his machines. Babbage had introduced the idea for the Difference Engine just 11 years earlier but had not yet completed. He had not yet disclosed his plans for the Analytical Engine, the true antecedent to the modern computer. This association between the woman we may claim to later have become the world's first programmer, and the "forgotten father of the computer" was to result in her becoming his expository writer - a task that he seemed not be capable of alone. (We have a copyright-free picture of Ada, permission Ada Information Office.)

June was also the month in which we might mark both the beginning and culmination of the ENIAC project. On the 5th June 1943 the contract between the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Aberdeen Proving Ground was signed, signifying the beginning of the development of what has been classed as the world's first general purpose, electronic, programmable computer. Four years later, and more than a year after the unveiling in February 1946, the patent application for the computer was filed by Drs. Mauchly and Eckert. Unknown to them, Konrad Zuse had applied for a German patent for his computer in 1936; John Vincent Atanasoff of the Iowa State College (later University) had failed to file for a patent for his ABC machine, but it was the interchanges between Mauchly and Atanasoff that eventually led the District Court in Minneapolis, Minn., to invalidate the ENIAC patent. Eckert and Mauchly fought to eradicate this effrontery to their innovation. Both Eckert and Atanasoff died in June 1995. (picture of Eckert and Mauchly)

June was a month for dedications also. Starting with 1948, the Manchester Baby computer became operational marking the beginning of the era of stored program machines. Two years later in 1948, SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), the first of a pair of machines specifically designed to meet the needs of the National Bureau of Standards, was dedicated. In 1951 UNIVAC I was dedicated at the Bureau of the Census marking the end of the very difficult period of development of a commercial machine that had started in 1946 when Eckert and Mauchly established the Electronic Control Corporation. The age of one-off machines was almost at an end. (Picture of UNIVAC?)

June also was the month when Drs. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley of the Bell Telephone Laboratories filed their patent application for the transistor. Though not as reliable as the vacuum tube of the same era, the transistor was to quickly supersede the tube, and about 1960 to the key to the computer entering into its second generation. (picture of the original transistor)

Birthdays
Gordon Moore Born 3 January 1929, San Francisco CA; With Robert Noyce, developer of the semiconductor chip; co-founder and chairman, Intel Corporation. Moore was one of the charter recipients of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980.

Robert W. Floyd Born 8 June 1936, New York, NY; Substantial contributor to understanding the meaning of programs, predating the seminal work of Antony Hoare, recipient of the 1978 ACM Turing Award. He received the Pioneer Award for his work on early compilers in 1991.

Friedrich (Fritz) L. Bauer Born 1924, June 10, Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany; Early German computer scientist responsible for the STANISLAUS and for the stack method of expression evaluation, known in German as the "Keller" (Cellar) method. Bauer received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1988.

Nicholas (Nick) Metropolis Born 11 June 1915, Chicago IL; Developer and implementor of the MANIAC system at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

Gerrit A. Blaauw Born July 17, 1924 at The Hague, Netherlands; Computer pioneer who started work with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark III and Mark IV systems, and contributed to the IBM Stretch and System/360.

Blaise Pascal Born 19 June 1623, Rouen, France; Died 1666, France; French mathematician and philosopher who invented an adding machine with automatic carry between digits, and the "Pascal Triangle" of coefficients of the binomial series. Also the inventor of the wheel barrow, the omnibus and the roulette wheel.

Konrad Zuse Born June 22, 1910, Berlin-Wilmersdorf; Died 18 December 1995, Hünfeld, Germany; German inventor of pre-World War II electromechanical binary computer designated Z1 which was destroyed without trace by wartime bombing; developed two more machines before the end of the war but was unable to convince the Nazi government to support his work; he fled with the remains of Z3 to Zurich where he developed the Z4 which was successfully used at ETH. He was the developer of a basic programming system known as "Plankalkül" with which he designed the first chess playing program.

James (Jim) H. Pomerene Born 22 June 1920, Yonkers NY; Design engineer for the IAS computer with John von Neumann, and the IBM HARVEST system.

Alan Mathison Turing Born 23 June 1912, London; Died 7 June 1954, Manchester England; Creator of the concept of the Universal Machine, the concepts of early computational machines, and computer logic.

Robert Rivers Everett Born 26 June 1921, Yonkers, NY; Designer of Whirlwind under Jay Forrester, and later president of the Mitre Corporation. Everett received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1987.

Frederic Calland Williams Born 26 June 1911; Died 1977; Developer of the CRT electrostatic memories which bore his name, devised for the Manchester computers.

Maurice Vincent Wilkes Born 26 June 1913 Dudley, Staffordshire, England; Director of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory throughout the whole development of stored program computers starting with EDSAC; inventor of labels, macros and microprogramming; with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, the inventor of a programming system based on subroutines. Wilkes received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980 as a charter member of that elite group.