Grace Murray Hopper
Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was a remarkable woman who grandly rose to the challenges of programming the first computers. During her lifetime as a leader in the field of software development concepts, she contributed to the transition from primitive programming techniques to the use of sophisticated compilers. She believed that "we've always done it that way" was not necessarily a good reason to continue to do so.
Grace Brewster Murray was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City. In 1928 she graduated from Vassar College with a BA in mathematics and physics and joined the Vassar faculty. While an instructor at Vassar, she continued her studies in mathematics at Yale University, where she earned an MA in 1930 and a PhD in 1934. She was one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students, and her doctorate in mathematics was a rare accomplishment in its day.
In 1930 Grace Murray married Vincent Foster Hopper. (He died in 1945 during World War II, and they had no children.) She remained at Vassar as an associate professor until 1943, when she joined the United States Naval Reserve to assist her country in its wartime challenges. After USNR Midshipman's School-W, she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked at Harvard's Cruft Laboratories on the Mark series of computers. In 1946 Admiral Hopper resigned her leave of absence from Vassar to become a research fellow in engineering and applied physics at Harvard's Computation Laboratory. In 1949 she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician. This group was purchased by Remington Rand in 1950, which in turn merged into the Sperry Corporation in 1955. Admiral Hopper took military leave from the Sperry Corporation from 1967 until her retirement in 1971.
Throughout her years in academia and industry, Admiral Hopper was a consultant and lecturer for the United States Naval Reserve. After a seven-month retirement, she returned to active duty in the Navy in 1967 as a leader in the Naval Data Automation Command. Upon her retirement from the Navy in 1986 with the rank of Rear Admiral, she immediately became a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, and remained there several years, working well into her eighties. She died in her sleep in Arlington, Virginia on January 1, 1992.
During her academic, industry, and military tenure, Admiral Hopper's numerous talents were apparent. She had outstanding technical skills, was a whiz at marketing, repeatedly demonstrated her business and political acumen, and never gave up on her good ideas.
Grace Hopper was a programmer on the Harvard Mark I and Mark II projects, and was hired by the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company in 1949 to program the commercial version of the ENIAC. She experimented with the concept of software reusability, and published a paper in 1952 which laid out the general concepts of language translation and compilers. General computer languages were thus enabled, which created an environment that encouraged a significantly larger universe of computer users and applications. Hopper became a Commodore in the U.S. Navy in 1983 (which was converted to an Admiral in 1985), and died in 1992.
The Bug
In 1947, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator (a primitive computer).
On the 9th of September, 1947, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F.The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. (See the picture above.) The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found."
The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born. Although Grace Hopper was always careful to admit that she was not there when it actually happened, it was one of her favorite stories.
Howard H. Aiken
Howard Aiken studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and later obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1939. During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. He envisioned an electro-mechanical computing device that could do much of the tedious work for him. This computer was originally called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) and later renamed Harvard Mark I. With help from Grace Hopper and funding from IBM, the machine was completed in 1944. In 1947, Aiken completed his work on the Harvard Mark II computer. He continued his work on the Mark III and the Harvard Mark IV. The Mark III used some electronic components and the Mark IV was all-electronic. The Mark III and Mark IV used magnetic drum memory and the Mark IV also had magnetic core memory.
Aiken was inspired by Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. In 1947, he is purported to have said, "Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States." This remark is also attributed to Thomas J. Watson, but was probably said by neither.
In 1958, he received the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering Engineers Day Award, in 1964 he received the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, and in 1970, Aiken received IEEE's Edison Medal 'For a meritorious career of pioneering contributions to the development and application of large-scale digital computers and important contributions to education in the digital computer field.'
Howard Aiken was also an Officer in the United States Navy Reserve.
He retired to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and died on March 14, 1973 during a trip to St. Louis, Missouri.
J. Presper Eckert
John Adam Presper "Pres" Eckert Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory.
Jay W. Forrester
Graduating with an M.S. degree from MIT in 1945, Jay Forrester worked on a number of analog computer projects for the U.S. Navy. In 1948, when the demands of an aircraft stability analyzer appeard to outstrip the analog computing techniques of the day, Forrester began work on a digital machine, the Whirlwind I. It would advance the state of the computer art in many fundamental ways, including the development of high-speed circuits.
The Whirlwind was the first "real-time" computer, made possible by Forrester's development of "coincident-current" magnetic core memory, which remained the dominant memory technology until the 1970's. He is currently involved with the System Dynamics approach to education.
John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist. The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer, a special-purpose machine that has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.
The son of a Bulgarian immigrant who became an electrical engineer, Atanasoff held positions as a teaching professor, a governmental wartime research director, and a corporate research executive before being recognized in the 1970s and 1980s for digital electronic computer research he conducted at Iowa State College in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
In 1996, Torvalds accepted an invitation to visit the California headquarters of Transmeta, a start-up company in the first stages of designing an energy saving central processing unit (CPU). Torvalds then accepted a position at Transmeta and moved to California with his family. Along with his work for Transmeta, Torvalds continued to oversee kernel development for Linux.
In 2003, Torvalds left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel, backed by the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium formed by high-tech companies, which included IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, RedHat, Novell and many others. The purpose of the consortium was to promote Linux development. OSDL merged with The Free Standards Group in January 2007 to become The Linux Foundation. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
John William Mauchly
John William Mauchly (August 30 1907 – January 8 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946) influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world.
Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse June 22, 1910 Berlin - December 18, 1995 Hünfeld) was a German civil engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, in 1941 (the program was stored on a punched tape). He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3.
Zuse also designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül, first published in 1948, although this was a theoretical contribution, since the language was not implemented in his lifetime and did not directly influence early languages. One of the inventors of ALGOL (Rutishauser) wrote: "The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language was undertaken in 1948 by K. Zuse. His notation was quite general, but the proposal never attained the consideration it deserved."
In addition to his technical work, Zuse founded the first computer startup company in 1946. This company built the Z4, which became the second commercial computer leased to ETH Zürich in 1950. Due to World War II, however, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the UK and the USA; possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946. In the late 1960s, Zuse suggested the concept of a Calculating Space (a computation-based universe).
There is a replica of the Z3, as well as the Z4, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1, some original documents, including the specifications of Plankalkül, and several of Zuse's paintings.
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray was a U.S. electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded the company Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of super computing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry through his efforts.
In 1950, Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ERA had formed out of a former United States Navy lab that had built code breaking machines, a tradition ERA carried on when such work was available. ERA was introduced to computer technology during one such effort, but in other times had worked on a wide variety of basic engineering as well.
Cray quickly came to be regarded as an expert on digital computer technology, especially following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer. He remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s. At the newly formed Sperry-Rand, ERA became the "scientific computing" arm of their UNIVAC division.
But when the scientific computing division was phased out in 1957, a number of employees left to form Control Data Corporation (CDC). Cray wanted to follow immediately, but CDC's CEO, William Norris, refused as Cray was in the midst of completing a project for the Navy, with whom Norris was interested in maintaining a good relationship. The project, the Naval Tactical Data System, was completed early the next year, at which point Cray left for CDC as well. By 1960 he had completed the design of the CDC 1604, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price range.
Even as the CDC 1604 was starting to ship to customers in 1960, Cray had already moved on to designing its "replacement", the CDC 6600. Although in terms of hardware the 6600 was not on the leading edge, Cray invested considerable effort into the design of the machine in an attempt to enable it to run as fast as possible. Unlike most high-end projects, Cray realized that there was considerably more to performance than simple processor speed, that I/O bandwidth had to be maximized as well in order to avoid "starving" the processor of data to crunch. As he later noted, Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.
The 6600 was the first commercial supercomputer, outperforming everything then available by a wide margin. While expensive, for those that needed the absolutely fastest computer available there was nothing else on the market that could compete. When other companies (namely IBM) attempted to create machines with similar performance, he increased the challenge by releasing the 5-fold faster CDC 7600.