Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer

Description

Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-1973) was a major figure of the early digital era. He is best known for his first machine, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Harvard Mark I, conceived in 1937 and put into operation in 1944. But he also made significant contributions to the development of applications for the new machines and to the creation of a university curriculum for computer science.This biography of Aiken, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard, offers a clear and often entertaining introduction to Aiken and his times. Aiken's Mark I was the most intensely used of the early large-scale, general-purpose automatic digital computers, and it had a significant impact on the machines that followed. Aiken also proselytized for the computer among scientists, scholars, and businesspeople and explored novel applications in data processing, automatic billing, and production control. But his most lasting contribution may have been the students who received degrees under him and then took prominent positions in academia and industry. I. Bernard Cohen argues convincingly for Aiken's significance as a shaper of the computer world in which we now live. Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xv The Names "ASCC" and “Mark I” xix 1 Introduction to a Pioneer 1 2 Early Life and Education 9 3 A Harvard Graduate Student 21 4 First Steps Toward a New Type of Calculating Machine 33 5 An Unsuccessful Attempt to Get the Machine Built 39 6 Seeking Support from IBM 45 7 The Proposal for an Automatic Calculating Machine 53 8 Aiken’s Background in Computing and Knowledge of Babbage’s Machines 61 9 Planning and Beginning the Construction of the Machine 73 10 How to Perform Multiplication and Division by Machine 87 11 Construction of the Machine 95 12 Installing the ASCC/Mark I in Cambridge and Transferring It to the Navy 109 13 Aiken at the Naval Mine Warfare School 115 14 The Dedication 121 15 The Aftermath 131 16 Some Features of Mark I 147 17 Programming and Staffing, Wartime Operation, and the Implosion Computations 159 18 The Mystery of the Number 23 169 19 Tables of Bessel Functions 177 20 Aiken's Harvard Program in Computer Science 185 21 Later Relations between Aiken and IBM 197 22 Aiken at Harvard, 1945-1961 201 23 Life in the Comp Lab 215 24 Retirement from Harvard 227 25 Businessman and Consultant 231 26 A Summing Up 237 Appendixes A The Harvard News Release 249 B Aiken’s Talk at the Dedication 253 C Aiken’s Memorandum Describing the Harvard Computation Laboratory 263 D The Stored Program and the Binary Number System 269 E Aiken’s Three Later Machines 275 F How Many Computers Are Needed? 283 G The NSF Computer Tree 295 H Who Invented the Computer? Was Mark I a Computer? 297 I The Harvard Computation Laboratory during the 1950s 305 Sources 309 Index 325