The IEEE Computer Society Press recently published a book by Homer R. (Barney) Oldfield entitled "The King of the Dwarfs", his account of the almost fifteen years during which General Electric Company built computers. While the company had built several special purpose machines prior to 1955 (the OMNIBAC and the OARAC), and the president, Ralph Cordiner, had forbidden any entry into the computer business, citing an aversion to compete with IBM. Thus when GE was invited to bid on the contract for building 30 systems to serve the data processing needs of the Bank of America in 1955, they were classed as a process control machines in order to get around the corporate restrictions. Thus when the first ERMA systems (Electronic Recording Method, Accounting) were accepted by the bank on 14 September 1959 in Los Angeles, Cordiner found himself with winning Computer Department that had not only delivered the world's first electronic banking system but also pioneered check handling through the use of Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR). The series of machines that resulted from this pioneering effort allied with other GE expertise in communications also provided the hardware that were chosen by John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz to support the Dartmouth Time-Sharing running that first came on line in September 1964. That first system, using a GE 265 (the combination of a GE 235 and a Datanet 30), provided time-sharing access to 32 simultaneous undergraduate student users, primarily programming in BASIC. The innovation was shared with GE who re-engineered the code and turned it into a successful service bureau operation that outlived the Computer Department.

Dartmouth College had been the location where, on 11 September 1940, George Stibitz first demonstrated remote computing. Using a teletype connected through a telephone line to New York City, Stibitz could control the operations of his Complex Number Calculator at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Among those who used the system was logician Norbert Wiener. Thus it was appropriate that 24 years later, that it was on that same site that introduced a remote processing system that would establish the model for the world of time-sharing thereafter.

September was the chronological site for two other significant events in the history of computing. On 23 September 1884, six years prior to his winning the contract to provide punched card processing services to the US Census Bureau, Herman Hollerith filed a patent application for his tabulating machine. That first commercially viable application of card processing and the subsequent establishment of the Hollerith Tabulating Company led to the establishment of IBM and provided that company with the technological base to become a world power even prior to its entry into the computer business.

On 9 September 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, but working in a World War I temporary building, Grace Murray Hopper was able to get the Harvard Mark II computer operating again after locating and removing a moth from the jaws of a relay. She was used to Howard Aiken, the designer of the Harvard series of machines, walking into the computer room to ask if they were "making any numbers". This time she was able to respond that she was "debugging the computer". Though the term "bug" was probably first used by Thomas Edison, this physical bug gave the computer business the first entry in its dictionary of jargon that is still having terms added today. The original bug, carefully pasted into the logbook of the Mark II computer, and after a sojourn at the Museum at the Dahlgren Naval Surface Weapons Center (now the Naval Surface Warfare Center) in Virginia, is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

On 15 September 1947 the Association for Computing Machinery was chartered, being the amalgamation of regional organizations from the East and West Coasts of the US. The Computer Society looks forward to joining with ACM at the 1996 Supercomputing Conference in Pittsburgh PA in November 1996 to jointly celebrate the overlapping 50th Anniversaries of the two professional organizations.

September Birthdays

John McCarthy, born 4 September 1927, Boston MA; John was one of the Fathers of artificial intelligence through a conference held at Dartmouth College in 1955, and, unhappy with the limitation of the FORTRAN programming language, was the 1958 creator of the programming language LISP -- forever to be known to students as "Lots of Idiotic, Silly Parentheses". McCarthy received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for his work on LISP and artificial intelligence in 1985.

Dennis M. Ritchie, born 9 September 1941, Mount Vernon NY; Ritchie was the Bell Telephone Laboratories developer, with Ken Thompson (Born 4 February 1943, New Orleans LA), of the operating system UNIX, and with Richard Kernighan of the programming language C. Ritchie and Thompson received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1994 for their work on UNIX.

Herman H. Hollerith, born 20 February 1860, Buffalo NY, died 17 November 1929, Washington DC.; as mentioned above, Hollerith was the inventor of the punched card which bears his name and the associated machinery for use in the 1890 US Census; founder of the company (Hollerith Tabulating Company) that eventually became IBM.

David Packard Born September 7, 1912, in Pueblo, CO; Died 26 March 1996, Los Altos, CA; With William Hewlett, Packard was creator of the computer company that bears their names. Financial supporter and designer, Monterey Aquarium. Packard received the IEEE Computer Society Entrepreneur Award in November 1995.

Other Computer Pioneers:

Peter Naur, born 1928, Fredericksburgh, Denmark; Naur was the secretary of the ALGOL 60 committee who modified John Backus' metalanguage to describe ALGOL (which became known as Backus-Naur Form) and who by judicious use of his secretarial powers introduced some of his personal preferences into the ALGOL language. Naur received an IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1986.

Robert N. Noyce, born 1927, Denmark, IA; Died 3 June 1990, Austin TX; With Gordon Moore, Noyce was the developer of the integrated circuit (or microchip), and semiconductor chips. Chairman of the Board of Intel Corp. Noyce received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980 as a charter member of that elite group for his work on "Integrated Circuit Production Technology".