Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

by Kurt W Beyer

  44. Miller, interview, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 38.

  45. Scott McCartney, ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer (Walker, 1999), 23–25.

  46. Eckert discovered that reducing the voltage below the amount for which the tube was designed significantly prolonged its life. In the end he ended up running tubes at less than 10% of the standard voltage.

  47. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 30.

  48. Hopper claimed that Bloch could write code in ink and it would run the first time.

  49. Campbell, interview, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 59. Both Campbell and Bloch would go on to make significant contributions to the practice of automated checking at Raytheon in the late 1940s. Bloch’s major contribution was the original concept of the parity check.

  50. Robert Burns, interview by Henry Tropp, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 21.

  51. Ibid., 15.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

  1. Aiken to Weaver, 5 September 1940 (HAP). For a more complete depiction of Aiken’s journey, see Cohen, Howard Aiken. This book, however, contains new material about Aiken that is not covered in Cohen’s book.

  2. Aiken to Weaver, 5 September 1940 (HAP).

  3. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 17.

  4. Aiken to Weaver, 5 September 1940 (HAP); Cohen, Howard Aiken, 18–19; Robert Burns, interview by Henry Tropp and I. Bernard Cohen, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 6–8.

  5. Saunders to Conant, 8 December 1939 (JCPP 165).

  6. Calculating Machine Committee, 18 December 1939 (JCPP 165), 2.

  7. Van Vleck to Chase, 19 March 1940 (JCPP 165).

  8. Saunders to Chase, memorandum, 5 March 1940 (JCPP 165).

  9. Chase to Conant, memorandum, 20 April 1940 (JCPP 165).

  10. Ibid.

  11. Conant to Aiken, 26 April 1940 (JCPP 165).

  12. Aiken to Conant, 2 May 1940 (JCPP 165); Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 7.

  13. Aiken to Weaver, 5 September 1940 (JCPP 165); Cohen, Howard Aiken, 14.

  14. “Problem of Dr. Aiken’s Future,” 12 March 1940 (JCPP 165).

  15. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 119.

  16. Robert Campbell, interview by Henry Tropp, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 32.

  17. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 119–120.

  18. Grace Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 16.

  19. Burns, interview, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 22.

  20. Ibid., 18–19.

  21. Frederick Miller, interview by Henry Tropp, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 62; Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 55.

  22. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 18–19.

  23. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 238–239.

  24. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 18.

  25. Miller, interview, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 23–24.

  26. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 8–9.

  27. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 129.

  28. Miller, interview, 14 April 1972 (COH-SI), 46–47.

  29. Burns, interview, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 56.

  30. Ibid., 20–21.

  31. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 26.

  32. Burns, interview, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 42.

  33. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 162–163.

  34. Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (Bantam, 1990), 190.

  35. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 24.

  36. Ibid., 23–24.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, July 1968 (COH-SI), 33–34.

  39. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 25.

  40. Hopper, interview, July 1968 (COH-SI), 34.

  41. Burns, interview, 2 August 1972 (COH-SI), 42.

  42. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 47.

  43. Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 44.

  44. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 27–28.

  45. Ibid., 26.

  46. Ibid., 9.

  47. Ibid., 15.

  48. Report, Berkeley to U.S. Naval Proving Ground, 27 May 1946 (EBP, 76–2).

  49. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 20.

  50. Ibid., 10.

  51. Aiken to Wood, 24 August 1944 (HAP).

  52. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 29.

  53. Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 62.

  54. Aiken also signed many of his patent rights away when contracting with IBM on the Mark I. Such was not the case with the Mark II.

  55. USN Ordnance Contract NORD-8555 (HAP); Williams, Hopper, 58.

  56. Ibid.; Cohen, Howard Aiken, 201.

  57. Harry Goheen, interview by Henry Tropp, 1972 (COH-SI), 1–2.

  58. Ibid., 3–4.

  59. Ibid., 7–8.

  60. Confidential Memorandum U.S. Naval Proving Ground from Lt. Cdr. Edmund Berkeley, 27 May 1946 (EBP, 76–2).

  61. Ibid.

  62. Goheen, interview, 1972 (COH-SI), 18–19.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Grace Hopper, “Keynote Address” (at the History of Programming Languages Conference, Seattle, 1–3 June 1978) (HPL, 3/8), 14.

  65. Maurice V. Wilkes, David J. Wheeler, and Stanley Gill, The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, with Special Reference to the EDSAC and the Use of a Library of Subroutines (Addison-Wesley, 1951).

  66. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, Contract No. W-670-ORD-4926, 23 June 1945,” in The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, ed. B. Randell, third edition (Springer-Verlag, 1982).

  67. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 108–109, 116–126.

  68. Ibid., 127–142.

  69. Ibid., 143–153; Hopper, “Keynote Address” (HPL 3/8), 15.

  70. Ibid. Hopper acknowledges in an internal UNIVAC report dated November 1958 that Wilkes and the EDSAC crew should be given credit for consolidating and formally systematizing subroutine concepts. See Grace Hopper, “Automatic Programming: Present Status and Future Trends” (NBS, 32/717/1).

  71. Grace Hopper, interview by Christopher Evans, 1976 (OHC-CB), 13.

  72. Ibid.

  73. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, November 1968 (COH-SI), 1.

  74. Richard Bloch, interview by Henry Tropp, 12 April 1972 (COH-SI), 20–21.

  75. Richard Bloch, interview by William Aspray, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 9.

  76. Human computers at Los Alamos also solved the implosion problem during the fall of 1944, but they computed values to six decimal places, while the Mark I produced results out to 18 decimal places and a smaller interval size (Cohen, Howard Aiken, 164–166).

  77. Bloch, interview, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 10.

  78. Hopper, interview, 1976 (OHC-CB), 14.

  79. John A. N. Lee, “Howard Aiken’s Third Machine: The Harvard Mark III Calculator or Aiken-Dahlgren Electronic Calculator,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 1 (January 2000): 62–81.

  80. The Mark III was the first of a series of early machines to use magnetic drums as primary storage. Among the others were SWAC, MADDIDA, Manchester Mark I, and ERA. Those members of the computing community with RADAR experience during the war turned to mercury acoustic delay lines as their primary storage technology (BINAC, UNIVAC, EDSAC, EDVAC, ACE). Eventually magnetic core memory developed by Jay Forrester while working on the Whirlwind project at MIT would become the standard memory technology.

  81. Hopper, interview, November 1968, 3–4.

  82. The Mark III’s “stored-program” concept was different from that associated with the von Neumann computer architecture. First, the Mark III had one drum for instructions and a separate drum for data, whereas von Neumann architecture stores instructions along with data and treats the two in a like manner. Even though separate instructions and data made debugging less problematical, the Mark III lacked the flexibility to take an instruction from memory, manipulate it, and execute the
changed instruction. With the success of EDSAC, UNIVAC, and the IAS computer (at Princeton), the von Neumann architecture became the standard within the industry.

  83. Lee, “Howard Aiken’s Third Machine,” 68.

  84. Ibid.

  85. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (Walker, 1998); Hughes, Networks of Power; Edward W. Constant, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

  86. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker explore the concept of “technological closure” with their noteworthy discussion of how the modern form of the bicycle came to being. See Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch (MIT Press, 1987).

  87. Bijker et al., eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 12–13.

  88. The invitation was arranged by Aiken’s colleague and friend Douglas Hartree. Hartree, a British professor of physics, trained a generation of British mathematicians and scientists, including Maurice Wilkes, on the use of differential analyzers. Hartree maintained active lines of communication between Harvard and Cambridge during the 1940s.

  89. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 124–125.

  90. Hopper, interview, November 1968 (COH-SI), 4.

  91. James W. Cortada, Historical Dictionary of Data Processing: Biographies (Greenwood, 1987), 62.

  92. Ibid.

  93. Leslie J. Comrie, “Babbage’s Dream Comes True,” Nature 158 (October 1946): 567–568.

  94. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer, 167.

  95. In the preface, Aiken thanks Hopper for being the author, even though authorship is attributed to “Staff of the Computation Laboratory.”

  96. Ibid., 1.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

  1. For a general discussion of technical communities of practice, see John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

  2. Robert Campbell, interview by Henry Tropp, 11 April 1972 (COH-SI), 49.

  3. Grace Hopper, interview by Beth Luebbert and Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 11, 31; President of MIT to President of Harvard, confidential memorandum, 7 February 1940 (JCPP, 165).

  4. Ibid.

  5. For more on the tensions between Thomas Watson Sr. and Howard Aiken, see Cohen, Howard Aiken.

  6. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 39–40.

  7. Von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.”

  8. For more on the von Neumann/Eckert-Mauchly controversy, see Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC; McCartney, ENIAC; Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton University Press, 1972), 191.

  9. Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC; McCartney, ENIAC, 196. The paper was not distributed widely, for it was deemed “Confidential” by the US Army. The historical controversy over the “First Draft” had real-world ramifications during the summer of 1971, for the document was successfully held up as evidence against Eckert’s and Mauchly’s bid for a computer patent.

  10. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 164.

  11. Howard Aiken, interview by Henry Tropp and I. B. Cohen, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 33, 183.

  12. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 13.

  13. Richard Bloch, interview by William Aspray, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 12.

  14. Grace Hopper, interview by Uta Merzbach, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 9–10.

  15. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 165; Bloch, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 18.

  16. Ibid.,16.

  17. Hopper, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 10.

  18. Bloch, 22 February 1984 (OHC-CB), 12.

  19. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, 182.

  20. Ibid., 138.

  21. Ibid., 141–149; McCartney, ENIAC, 61.

  22. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, 182.

  23. Ibid., 111.

  24. Ibid., 192.

  25. Ibid., 198–200.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Mark I’s sequential mode of operation,, as with all “von Neumann architecture” computers, inspects one instruction at a time before execution. The ENIAC performed many activities in parallel.

  29. Von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDSAC.”

  30. Ibid.

  31. Aiken, interview, 26–27 February 1973 (COH-SI), 34.

  32. Grace Hopper, interview with Linda Calvert, 1 October 1982 (WFGP), 138; Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 1.

  33. Harvard University Press, Fall Releases 1946 (GHP).

  34. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972 (COH-SI), 1.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 6. It appears that Hopper relied heavily on the following works: J. A. V. Turck, Origin of Modern Calculating Machines (Arno, [1921] 1972); Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne, Le calcul simplifié par les procédés mécaniques et graphiques, second edition (Gauthier-Villars, 1905), Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne, Vue d’ensemble sur les machines á calculer (Gauthier-Villars, 1922); Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864).

  37. [Grace Hopper], A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, volume 1 (Harvard University Press, 1946; reprint, MIT Press, 1985); Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken, “The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator,” Electrical Engineering 65 (1946), 384–391, 449–554.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid. Aiken would use a similar system of separating data from operational commands in all of his machines, a technique that was discarded in the von Neumann stored-program architecture.

  40. [Hopper], A Manual of Operation; Cohen, Howard Aiken, 64.

  41. On the relationship between Aiken and Babbage, see Cohen, Howard Aiken.

  42. One copy of this book was inscribed “From one admirer of Babbage to another.” L. J. Comrie to Howard H. Aiken. 8 March 1946. Comrie reinforced the Babbage-Aiken connection with his 1946 review of the Manual of Operation entitled “Babbage’s Dream, Comes True.”

  43. Hopper, interview, 1 October 1982, 139–140.

  44. IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (GHP, 1–3).

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid. T. H. Brown had been a consulting member of the IBM Department of Education since 1928.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid.

  50. At the dedication, IBM freely donated a machine which cost the company $259,000 to build and four years to construct. Moreover, Watson personally dedicated another $100,000 to Harvard to help defray the costs of the machine’s operation.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. See Cohen, Howard Aiken; Cohen, “Howard H. Aiken, Harvard University, and IBM: Cooperation and Conflict,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, ed. C. Elliot and M. Rossiter (Lehigh University Press, 1992).

  54. Watson, Father, Son & Co. On the shift from independent inventor/engineer approach to a more corporate approach to technological innovation, see Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977).

  55. IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (GHP, 1–3).

  56. Ibid.

  57. For more on this version of technological advancement, see the writings of Joseph Schumpeter.

  58. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972, 2.

  59. See I. B. Cohen, “Babbage and Aiken,” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 171–193.

  60. The steps Aiken took to turn his ideas into a functioning computing machine are well documented and will not be reviewed here. See Cohen, Howard Aiken.

  61. Headlines from this period, from HCL: “Automatic Brain for Harvard: Navy Man Inventor ofWorld’s Greatest Calculator”; “Harvard Told Robot Brain Just a Starter”; “Robot Works Problems Never Before Solved”; “
Highbrow Harvard Bows to a Robot Brain”; “Mechanical Einstein Calculator Has Mathematical World in Palm.”

  62. In President Conant’s foreword, the machine is referred to as the “I.B.M. Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.” See [Hopper], A Manual of Operation; L. J. Comrie, “Babbage’s Dream Comes True,” Nature 158 (26 October 1946), 567.

  63. Comrie, “Babbage’s Dream Comes True,” 567. Comrie’s comments suggest that he may not have been aware of the top secret British computer work at Bletchley Park during WWII that produced the Colossus.

  64. Hopper’s name appeared with Aiken’s as co-author.

  65. Hopper, interview, 5 July 1972, 35–36.

  66. Howard Aiken to Hubert Livingston, 18 July 1946 (HAP).

  67. Howard Aiken to Mr. W. H. Claflin, 1 October 1945 (HAP).

  68. Hopper, interview, 7 January 1969 (COH-SI), 11.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

  1. James Conant to Howard Aiken, 26 April 1940 (JCPP, 165).

  2. According to I. B. Cohen, this grander vision never materialized. See Cohen, Howard Aiken, 201–202. For more on the modernization of Harvard, see Morton Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University (Oxford University Press, 2001).