John von Neumann introduced the concept of the stored program in the draft of a report on the design of the EDVAC, a concept that has been claimed by several others. However the implementation of the first machines containing the concept, that many feel is the essence of the computer, was achieved elsewhere. The first operating machine was the "Baby" machine built by Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester -- actually a testbed for the CRT memory that they had designed. The first fully operational and productive stored program computer was the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) at the University of Cambridge, built under the direction of Maurice Wilkes and based on the "the principles expounded by J. Presper Eckert, Jr., John W. Mauchly, and others." On 6 May 1949 the EDSAC completed its first program to compute a table of squares written by David Wheeler. EDSAC was the basis for one of the earliest commercial computers, the LEO. The Computer Society presented Computer Pioneer Awards to Wilkes and Wheeler in 1980 and 1985 respectively. (There are pictures of the EDSAC on the WWW, or we can use a picture of Wilkes)
When IBM announced the type-704 machine on 7 May 1954, delivery was contingent upon receiving sufficient orders to create a production line. Cuthbert Hurd, then Vice President for Applied Science, acquired 17 orders and the first large scale scientific computer became available to many universities and government agencies. The 704 was provided with extensive auxiliary storage capabilities and floating point hardware. John Backus had developed an early fixed format, numeric coding language named SPEEDCODING that took advantage of the floating point facilities and relieved the programmers from low level programming concerns for the 701, and for the 704 went the one step further by inventing the programming language FORTRAN. Backus and Hurd were designated Computer Pioneers by the Society in 1980 and 1986 respectively.
Alan M. Turing began his progression towards the complete computer with his publication in 1937 of a paper in which he described the concept of the Universal Machine, the execution of which would determine the computability of processes. During World War II Turing was immersed in the work to break the German codes at Bletchley Park, UK, and was influential in the design of the Colossus, a series of ten machines that were the first electronic, special purpose, symbol manipulation computers. The Colossi were built by the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) under the direction of Tommy Flowers. Although the Colossi were unknown to the public until the mid-1970s, Turing took his ideas to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in 1945 to design the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine, perhaps a tribute to Babbage in the use of the term "engine"). Once again however he was not to build his design, this time because he was in the wrong department -- the task was transferred from the Mathematics division to the Physics division. Disgruntled Turing left the Laboratory to join the staff of the University of Manchester. NPL completed the construction of the ACE, partly through the work of Harry Huskey, and ran its first program on 10 May 1950. Harry Huskey, having done early work with ENIAC returned to the US and afterwards built the SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) and the Bendix G-15. Turing died in 1954. Huskey received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1982.
The Microprocessor Age had started in the mid 1970s, but primarily with machines that were more suited to the enthusiastic hacker (in the sense of the word of that era) than the people with a need to compute. What was needed was something more than a BASIC compiler, or the CP/M operating system to open the broader Personal Computer Era. Daniel Bricklin, and Bob Frankston debuted Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet program, on 11 May 1979, being the first step towards visual programming. For the first time the user had a means of programming without having to write a whole program in a strange language. Daniel Bricklin received the 1995 Computer Entrepreneur Award. (Surely we are going to have a picture of Bricklin before May 1996!!)
The Whirlwind computer designed and built under the direction of Jay Forrester at MIT, was the digital manifestation of an analog concept for a simulator, and was the project that developed a number of innovations that would be integrated into many later computers. Not the least was the matrix core memory, for which Forrester filed a patent application on 11 May 1951. Although the fundamental patent for the ferrite core memory unit had been filed by An Wang, Forrester's design of a wired matrix of cores to form a random access memory was the significant step needed to make core memory a viable, fast internal memory system. The Whirlwind was the basis for the Cape Cod Air Defense System, later the SAGE system that led to the present day Air Traffic Control systems, and the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line. While the original Whirlwind was decommissioned on 27 May 1959, several Whirlwind IIs on the DEW line were still operational in 1980, and may still be operating!
May 13 stands out as the date on which both the organizations which joined to form the IEEE. On 13 May 1884 the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) was founded with Norvin Green, head of the Western Union Telegraph Company, as the first president. The first technical meeting was held six months later in Philadelphia. On 13 May 1912 the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) was formed from the coalescence of the Society of Wireless Telegraph Engineers and the Wireless Institute. Robert Marriott, the president of the Wireless Institute, became the first president of the Institute of Radio Engineers. The AIEE and IRE joined together in 1963 to form the IEEE. [Source: Nebeker, Frederik, "This Month in EE History", The Institute, May 1997, p. 6D.]
The 1950s were a decade in which the means of programming a computer changed from "hand-to-hand combat" with binary or octal machine code to high level programming languages, and the background of a programmer changed from being an applied mathematician to a person who had a problem to solve. Grace Hopper had been a champion of business data processing early in the decade, developing a series of codes culminating in FLOWMATIC for the UNIVAC I. In parallel other systems, such as Commercial Translator, had been developed but there was no common standard across machine lines. On 28 May 1959 a committee, later named CODASYL, was formed to create a common business oriented language, later named COBOL. In 1960 the language was ready and became the language in which the majority of programs were written for the next two decades.
Ivan Sutherland, born 16 May 1938, was the inventor and developer of the interactive computer graphics field 35 years ago. Sketchpad's many innovations included a display file for screen refresh, a recursively traversed hierarchical structure for modeling graphical objects, recursive methods for geometric transformations, and an object-oriented programming style. In 1968 he co-founded the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation where he was Vice President and Chief Scientist. He served as chairman of the Computer Science Department at the California Institute of Technology from 1976 to 1980. In 1980, he left Caltech to establish Sutherland, Sproull, and Associates, a consulting firm, and Advanced Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, both located in Palo Alto, California. Sutherland received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1985. (We have a picture of Sketchpad)
John Cocke, born 25 May 1925, is an IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Computer scientist who specializes in compiler optimizations techniques and was the inventor of the RISC concept. His interest in all parts of the computer business and his ability to "always find something "a little different" to engage his attention have led to some 22 patents. Besides those for RISC technology, his patents cover logic simulation, coding theory, and compiler optimization. Inventing is something Cocke does with great enthusiasm. IBM Chairman Louis V. Gerstner Jr. said when Cocke received the National Medal of Technology: "He has been a towering presence in all aspects of computer science and engineering for almost four decades. He has inspired countless individuals in IBM, academia and throughout the computer industry and has personally created inventions of enduring value." John Cocke received his Computer Pioneer Award in 1989. (picture??)
John G. Kemeny, born 31 May1926, President of Dartmouth College (1971-1980), was a mathematician who was an assistant to Albert Einstein, chairman of the Three Mile Island investigative committee, and with Thomas Kurtz, inventor of the programming language BASIC and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System. Starting in 1959 with a Royal McBee LGP-30, Kemeny and Kurtz searched for a means to bring computing to the undergraduates at Dartmouth College. With the development of Time Sharing by Fernando Corbató in 1961 they saw a means of fulfilling their goals, and conceived a system that would not only serve the educational needs of their students, but also be capable of being implemented by them. Choosing a GE system, they completed their work on DTSS and BASIC in fall 1964; GE reprogrammed the system and created a time sharing service bureau operation that was the most successful portion of their short excursion into the computer business. Kemeny and Kurtz received Computer Pioneer Awards in 1985 and 1991 respectively. (we have pictures of both Kemeny and Kurtz, but a picture of Dartmouth College would be good!)
(NOTE:) We have two other Computer Pioneers about whom I have little information: Samuel N. Alexander (1980) for SEAC, and Jeffrey Chuan Chu (1981) for Early Work in Electronic Computer Logic Design
