“I mostly went to Jim Crow schools, on the South Side of Chicago, which meant half-day schools, and to this day I can’t count. My parents were some peculiar kind of democrats. They could afford to send us to private schools, but they didn’t believe in it. I went to three grade schools—Felsenthal, Betsy Ross, and A. O. Sexton, the last of them in a white neighborhood, where Daddy bought a house when I was eight. My mother is a remarkable woman, with great courage. She sat in that house for eight months with us—while Daddy spent most of his time in Washington fighting his case—in what was, to put it mildly, a very hostile neighborhood. I was on the porch one day with my sister, swinging my legs, when a mob gathered. We went inside, and while we were in our living room, a brick came crashing through the window with such force it embedded itself in the opposite wall. I was the one the brick almost hit. I went to Englewood High School and then to the University of Wisconsin for two years. Then I just got tired of going to school and quit and came to New York, in the summer of 1950. The theatre came into my life like k-pow!” Miss Hansberry knocked a fist into the palm of her other hand. “In Chicago, on my early dates, I was taken to see shows like The Tempest, Othello, and Dark of the Moon, which absolutely flipped me, with all that witch-doctor stuff, which I still adore. In college, I saw plays by Strindberg and Ibsen for the first time, and they were important to me. I was intrigued by the theatre. Mine was the same old story—sort of hanging around little acting groups, and developing the feeling that the threatre embraces everything I like all at one time. I’ve always assumed I had something to tell people. Now I think of myself as a playwright.”
John Brooks
MARCH 4, 1950 (“NEVER STUMPED”)
E’VE PAID A call on the International Business Machines Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, which is housed in a room on the ground floor of the I.B.M. Building, at Fifty-seventh Street and Madison, and for the past couple of years has been tackling problems brought to it by scientists and industrialists from all over the world. I.B.M. offers the services of its big brain free to scientists whose questions are hard enough and important enough for the calculator to bother with; businessmen who wish to use it have to pay the operating cost, which comes to three hundred dollars an hour. In both cases, of course, the questions must be capable of expression in the austere mathematical terms the calculator is designed to handle. People who just want to look at the calculator, as we did, are always welcome.
We were introduced to the brain by Robert R. Seeber, Jr., who helped invent it and is, or thinks he is, its boss. Seeber told us that it is the fastest and most complex general computer now in use, cost $750,000 to build, and when in full cogitation requires two operators. The principal cerebral parts of the machine are tubes and wires behind glass panels, covering three walls of the room. Two hoppers, looking rather like oversize mailboxes, stand near the middle of the room. One is the “in” hopper, into which questions are inserted on punched cards or tapes; the other is the “out” hopper, from which, if all goes well, the answer emerges. High on one wall of the room is a large sign reading “think,” but this admonition isn’t addressed to the calculator.
So far, Seeber told us, the calculator has solved five weighty problems in pure science, the most recent of them having to do with the uranium atom. Some time ago, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, advanced the theory that the behavior of the nucleus of an atom of uranium was in many respects similar to that of a drop of liquid, such as water. It was thought, however, that this notion might have to be discarded, because a drop of liquid—we’re talking about a mathematical drop now, not a real one—appeared to split evenly, whereas the uranium nucleus splits unevenly. Two Princeton physicists whipped the problem into shape for the calculator, and the calculator was able to demonstrate that, by George, a mathematical drop of liquid splits unevenly. This opens the way to further presumably fruitful speculation. The calculator took a hundred and three hours to solve the problem. A hypothetical man with an ordinary desk calculator and an iron constitution would have been at the job about a century and a half, Seeber told us. The calculator has tackled any number of commercial problems. When we arrived, it was just warming up for one that involved a means of getting more oil out of oil fields.
Seeber took us on a quick tour of the brain. “This is the number-reading section,” he said, tapping one of the glass panels. “You feed two things into the calculator, factors and instructions, both in numerical form. The factors are ‘read’ and put into the memory section, where they’re later dealt with by the various computing sections, according to what the instructions say.” As we moved along, relays began to rattle in a carefree manner and patterns of light danced across the panels. “The oil problem,” Seeber said. At the memory section, he flipped on a switch, and a pattern of lights appeared behind one of the panels. “That’s a number it has to remember,” Seeber said. “Happens to be plus 12,788,400.” Peering behind the panel, we noticed several loose wires. We pointed them out to Seeber, and he nodded and said, “Yes, it’s a funny thing about those wires—nobody knows what they’re doing there.”
We asked Seeber to tell us some of the calculator’s limitations. He said that it can’t reason and hence can’t have any new ideas, and that though its memory is more reliable than human memory, it is less persistent. It exercises a certain amount of discretion, but only if a human being first establishes what choices are open to it. “You have to tell it every simple little fact,” Seeber said, in what seemed to us a slightly petulant tone. “You even have to tell it whether to add or subtract.” We inquired about a story we’d heard, to the effect that an electronic calculator had once been asked, as a lark, to prove that one equals zero; according to the story, it had made several gallant attempts to do the job and had then suffered a breakdown, from which it was months recovering. “Our machine has never been stumped,” Seeber said. “But then it has never been baited. We’ve been too busy to try mathematical posers on it. It is subject to normal wear and tear and to breakdowns from constant overwork. The first things to go are the tubes, then the relays and resistors. If the calculator makes a minor mistake because of a defective part, it goes on automatically trying to do the same part of the computation over and over again. In case of a really serious mistake, it shuts itself off. During the severe strain of solving that nucleus-of-uranium problem, it blew a part every four hours or so. We’d fix the part and then give the whole brain a rest—sometimes ten minutes, sometimes a couple of hours.”
Rex Lardner
AUGUST 2, 1952 (“IT”)
HE PEOPLE OVER at the W. L. Maxson Corporation, which is primarily in the business of developing and manufacturing secret electric, electronic, and electromechanical equipment for the government but also puts out, for commercial users, such things as Unimax switches, Langevin transformers, and Maxson precision phasemeters, were kind enough a few days back to invite us to come over and have a go at their Nim machine. “A California guided-missiles man built a ticktacktoe machine,” the Maxson gentleman who proffered the invitation said, “so we built a Nim machine. Our machine is a very strong player, so watch out.” In spite of our poor record against machines of any sort, we marched over to the building housing the firm’s electronic laboratory, at 475 Tenth Avenue, the next day, rode up to the fourteenth floor, and, wondering all the while what Nim might be, stated our business, signed in, had a huge badge pinned on our lapel, and were conducted by three solemn, bespectacled young men into a cubicle with light-green walls. There we were confronted with a walnut box, thirty inches high and eighteen inches deep, whose front was studded with light bulbs and push buttons. The box was sitting inscrutably on a table. In the upper right-hand corner of the front panel was printed the word “Nim.” Below this inscription were two legends that could be illuminated. One was “You Win,” the other “You Lose.” Below them was a button marked “New Game.” The greater part of the panel was taken up by four rows of seven bulbs each. There was a button at the end of each row, and
below them were, at one side, a button labelled “Machine Play” and, at the other, a bulb labelled “You Play,” which was also lighted. In the upper left-hand corner of the contrivance was a bulb with the word “Tilt” over it. The three young men were labelled Eugene Grant, Herbert Koppel, and Howard Baller. Grant started off by explaining to us that Nim is an old game for two people, usually played with several rows of counters; the number of rows and the number of counters is immaterial. Each player takes a turn at removing one or more counters from a single row. The player who removes the last counter of the whole bunch wins. “Other forms of Nim are played with a single row of, say, matchsticks,” Baller told us. “Then you’re limited to taking one, two, or three matches at a time, and the idea is to make your opponent pick up the last one.” “The origins of the game are shrouded in the mists of antiquity,” Koppel said, “but it seems to come from the Orient. The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘to take’ or ‘to filch’ is ‘niman.’ In The Beggar’s Opera, one of the characters says, ‘I expect the Gentleman about this snuff-box that Filch nimm’d two nights ago in the park.’ Charles L. Bouton, the mathematician, called it a game with a complete mathematical theory. On our machine, we use lights instead of counters.”
Grant told us the machine was all set to play and briefed us on procedure: Every time we pressed the button to the right of a row of lights, one of the bulbs in that row would go dark; if we pressed buttons in two rows without allowing the machine a turn, the “Tilt” button would light up and we would lose on a foul. With some trepidation, we pressed the button governing the second row twice. Two lights went off. At Koppel’s nod, we pressed the “Machine Play” button, and with haughty efficiency the machine put out several more lights in the same row. “It’s now impossible for you to win,” Baller announced witheringly. Nevertheless, we doggedly kept pressing buttons, and soon there were only two lights left—one in the first row and one in the third. “It’s your turn,” Koppel said. “Press a button.” We did. The light in the first row went out. We pressed the “Machine Play” button, the last light went out, and “You Lose” triumphantly flashed on.
“The way the machine’s arranged now,” said Koppel, “a player can win by pure luck five percent of the time.” “It ought to be explained,” said Baller, “that, mathematically, each play you make produces either a safe or an unsafe condition—that is, relative to your position in regard to the rest of the bulbs. If the condition is safe, and you keep it that way for the rest of the game, you can’t lose. If it’s unsafe just once, you can’t win, no matter what, because the machine never makes a mistake.” “The machine is so keen on winning that sometimes it cheats a little bit,” said Koppel. “It makes the ‘You Play’ bulb light up without taking its turn. Or it puts out lights in two rows at once without flashing the ‘Tilt’ bulb. It also plays a nerve-racking game of attrition when it’s up against an expert, putting out only one bulb at a time. Wears you down.” “The way to maintain the safe condition,” said Grant, “is to see to it that each power of two appears an even number of times in the aggregate of all rows. That is, you are safe when the sums of all individual binary digits are even numbers. The formula is—” We urged him to let it go. “When William Maxson, the son of the founder of the firm, played it,” Baller said, “Koppel, who made the machine from plans by Grant and me, gave him special instructions, and he beat the pants off it. At the end of about the fourth game, the machine started clicking and clacking something terrible.” “Oh, it has a temper,” Koppel said.
The machine weighs fifty pounds, cost two thousand dollars to build, and is loaded with small electronic tubes, germanium crystals, and wires. It was completed, after three months’ work, in time to go on display at the recent National Conference of Airborne Electronics Engineers, in Dayton. “Most of our stuff is so hush-hush we can’t exhibit it,” Grant told us. “So we built this to show people interested in engineering what we could produce in the way of a simple digital computer. Turned out to be the biggest draw in Dayton. It—we call it It—played about fifteen hundred games and only lost a hundred and fifty. That was against some of the best engineering minds in the country. You want a return match?” We said no, thanks, walked out, and handed in our badge.
John Brooks
AUGUST 6, 1955 (“MENTAL”)
T WAS OVER five years ago that we paid a call on the International Business Machines Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator in I.B.M. World Headquarters, at Fifty-seventh and Madison, so when I.B.M. announced a couple of weeks ago that it now has a whole integrated team of big and small electronic brains up there, standing ready to tackle the big and small problems of businessmen and scientists, we decided to repeat our visit. We have now done so, and have found that things had really moved along up on Fifty-seventh Street during our absence. In the first place, the term “electronic calculator” has given way to a more exact one—“electronic data-processing machine.” Secondly, the data processors are now being rented to business organizations at profitable rates, just like other I.B.M. machines, instead of being offered for use either free or at cost, the way our old, superseded acquaintance the S.S.E.C. was. Thirdly, the new devices lack one of the most endearing components of the S.S.E.C.; namely, some loose ends of wire, inexplicable even to I.B.M. men, sticking out of its memory section. The integrated team, which we found on the ground floor of the I.B.M. Building after passing an amiable receptionist and an implacable “think” sign, consists chiefly of a lot of shoulder-high closed cabinets purring smoothly in a couple of blandly pleasing rooms with aluminum ceilings and red walls. There is scarcely a wire in sight, let alone one not connected to anything.
In the larger of these rooms, where a dozen men were clustered expectantly around the “out” end of a machine, we had the good fortune to fall in with Dr. Cuthbert C. Hurd, I.B.M.’s director of electronic data-processing, and thus coach of the integrated team. Dr. Hurd, a youngish-looking, sparse-haired man, told us that the star players are the 701, which rents for three hundred dollars an hour, and the 702, which rents for four hundred and forty-five dollars. The 701 has been available for rental for a couple of years, but the 702 is brand-new. “They resemble twins having different mental characteristics,” Dr. Hurd told us. “They both use megacycle circuitry, of course, and they both use the same kind of printers, punches, card readers, and magnetic tapes. On the other hand, they look different, except for their memories, which look exactly alike.”
Dr. Hurd showed us the 702’s memory, a big, handsome gray box, and then, leading us into the other room, showed us the 701’s memory. Sure enough, they looked exactly alike. “Now, as to their mental characteristics,” Dr. Hurd went on, like a doting father, “the 701 has much more arithmetical facility, and can, for example, add many columns of figures simultaneously. The 702, on the other hand, adds the same way you and I do, but it can accept information from the outside world much more readily than the 701, and it can understand the language that an accountant uses. In a word, the 701 has a scientific turn of mind—it’s particularly good on theoretical problems—and the 702 has a practical business orientation. Those men you see around the console of the 702 are businessmen waiting for it to finish solving their problem, but to preserve business security I’d better not tell you who they are or what their problem is. In fact, I don’t know what their problem is.” Dr. Hurd explained that I.B.M. encourages users of its data-processing machines to operate them for themselves, after first taking a three-week course the company offers in how they work. When I.B.M. has to do the operating for clients, it charges extra. We asked Dr. Hurd if he could give us a general notion of some business problems submitted to the 702 that he did know about, and he said he could. “For example, one of the airlines wants to optimize the assignment of its maintenance help,” he said. “The 702 is being asked to simulate the random arrival of planes at airports. Can do! Then, there’s a large chemical concern looking for names for new products. It is feeding the 702 a set of rules—names must be chemicall
y logical, must not have too many consonants, and so on. The 702 will absorb the information and rattle off a list of all possible names, from which the company executives can make their selections.”
Dr. Hurd rattled off some statistics to prove how much more advanced the 701 and 702 are than the S.S.E.C. was, but, thank God, we have forgotten them. As we were preparing to leave, we noticed that the men around the 702 console were examining with satisfied expressions some punch cards coming out of it. Dr. Hurd plucked at our sleeve and said modestly, “I ought to mention that the 701 and 702 have their limitations. There is no evidence yet that they or any machine can be taught to do program analysis, otherwise known as programming, otherwise known as creative thinking.”
Philip Hamburger
NOVEMBER 17, 1956 (“BRAIN”)
UR MAN STANLEY, wearing a mechanical, nonpartisan smile, came into the office the day after election and left the following message:
“Spent Election Night in company of Univac, giant Remington-Rand electronic brain, at Remington-Rand Building, on lower Fourth Avenue. Univac that people saw on C.B.S. television not actual Univac—just blinking, flashing facsimile of control board of brain itself. Real brain sweating like Einstein downtown, giving results that were subsequently phoned to C.B.S. correspondents at studio uptown, then read over air. Went downtown after supper, entered control room for big brain through closely guarded door. Room a madhouse. Close to a hundred human brains, attached to bodies, occupied room, some bending over teletype machines, others poring over stacks of papers at desks, others standing before restaurant-refrigerator-type machines with glass fronts and whirring discs inside. Control boards everywhere—red, green, amber. Terrifying. Was mercifully taken in hand by Dr. Max Woodbury, of New York University’s College of Engineering Mathematics Department. Dr. Woodbury a tall, tense brain, with minute reddish-brown mustache—one of several scientists in charge of Univac operation. ‘Univac has a great mind,’ he said. His voice was filled with awe. ‘All these people are servicing Univac, helping her to reach her conclusions,’ he said. ‘We began stuffing statistics into Univac in 1952 and 1954. Originally, we went back to Bryan and free silver for statistics, but they didn’t seem to have any appreciable pertinence, so we confined ourselves ultimately to data from 1928 onward. Mostly Presidential-election figures—data from states and districts, paying special attention to unique counties, such as Wayne County, Michigan; Polk County, Iowa; San Francisco County; and the five boroughs of New York. Univac knows a unique county when she sees one,’ he said cryptically.
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