When Computers Were Human (42 page)

34. Computing machine of John Atanasoff with operator

Atanasoff's calculator was never a finished production machine like the complex calculator at Bell Telephone Laboratories, but by the most generous accounts, it did what it was intended to do. “It was good enough so that we were able to solve small systems of equations,” wrote Atanasoff, though he acknowledged that the high-voltage card punch was troublesome. “We made substantial efforts to solve this flaw, including changes in the card material and careful changes in the voltage use for
each material.”
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After working on the machine for two years, he left Iowa State College in order to take a job at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He apparently left no one at the college who was interested in preserving his machine or in keeping it operational. When the school's physics department decided to reclaim Atanasoff's office space, they disassembled the device, salvaged what they could for scrap, and disposed of the rest.
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Some thirty years later, Atanasoff's machine would acquire notoriety as a central exhibit in a court case that contested the patent on the electronic digital computer. In the trial, it would be named the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, and its builder would be identified as the inventor of the modern computer. The controversy that followed the verdict would last for two decades more and would create partisans who claimed “that the first electronic digital computer was constructed at Iowa State by J. V. Atanasoff and [his assistant] Cliff Berry”
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and opponents who believed with equal fervor that the machine was not a computer, as it was “premature in its engineering conception and limited in its logical one.”
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This debate, with its implications for the reputations and fortunes of the participants, cannot be easily dismissed. Yet, in commanding both scholarly and public attention, it has obscured the position of the human computer in the late 1930s. Both Atanasoff's computing machine, be it a computer or no, and George Stibitz's complex calculator would have fit nicely into existing computing laboratories, just as the adding machines of the 1890s moved easily into the Coast Survey Office, the Nautical Almanac Office, and the Harvard Observatory.

The last computing machine of 1937 moves one step further from the offices of human computers, though it remained tied to the kinds of calculations that were being done by human computers. It was conceived at Harvard University by a graduate student in the school's electrical engineering program. The student, Howard Aiken (1900–1973), was studying the actions of electrons in vacuum tubes. The mathematical expressions that described the electrical forces inside a vacuum tube were a messy set of differential equations. Like all other problems driving the development of computation, they could not be solved in a simple, symbolic fashion. In common with the equations of Richardson's weather model, they described a phenomenon in three dimensions and would have required a substantial computing staff to calculate the solution. Harvard had access to funds from the National Youth Administration to pay the salaries of human computers, but such assistance was not sufficient for Aiken. “At the present time,” he wrote, “there exist problems beyond our ability to solve, not because of theoretical difficulties but because of insufficient means of mechanical computation.”
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Like Atanasoff, Aiken turned from the problems of physics to the problems of calculation. He designed a machine that used gears and wheels but had a special control mechanism that provided “automatic sequencing.”
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This mechanism would read a series of instructions from a paper tape and would direct the machine to perform those instructions. These instructions were almost a program, as we now use the term. By changing instruction tapes, the operator could make the machine perform complex arithmetic, solve simultaneous equations, compute orbits and trajectories, and reduce data.
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In many ways, Aiken's idea was similar to Charles Babbage's second computing machine, the one he had called the Analytical Engine. Aiken discovered the work of Babbage while he was preparing the basic outline of his machine. He was even able to inspect a partial adding mechanism that had been built according to Babbage's specifications by his son. This connection between the nineteenth-century mathematician and the emerging computing machines is superficial, according to Aiken's biographer, I. Bernard Cohen. “At that time [Aiken] did not have a detailed and accurate knowledge of the purposes and principles of operation of Babbage's two proposed machines.”
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Aiken accomplished what Babbage could not: he built a working relationship between a commercial business and a scientific computing laboratory. In 1937, Aiken was older than most graduate students. Cohen has characterized him as “tall, intelligent, somewhat arrogant [and] assertive.” Aiken had supported his family since the age of fourteen, when he and his mother were abandoned by his father. As a high school student, he had taken night jobs while attending classes during the day. When he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he had worked from four to midnight at the local electric and gas utility.
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His position at Harvard freed him from the need to seek outside employment and allowed him to search for someone who might be able to sponsor his computing research.

He first presented his ideas to an engineer at the Monroe Calculator Company, “a very, very scholarly gentleman,” Aiken recalled. The engineer quickly recognized what Aiken was attempting to do and “foresaw what I did not … the application to accounting.” The engineer gave a favorable review of the machine, but the management of Monroe decided that they were not interested in the project.
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Following this rejection, Aiken then turned to the computing staff of the Harvard Observatory. The observatory computing room operated much as it had in 1880 under Edward Pickering. A staff of computers and assistant astronomers, many of them women, measured photographs, interpreted data, and reduced the values recorded by the telescopes and sensors. The office had at least a few touches of modernity, such as mechanical adding machines, but it was more concerned with astronomy than with general methods of computation.
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35. Mark I mechanical computer at Harvard

The observatory director, through an indirect path, helped Aiken gain the attention of the senior managers at IBM. On a trip to New York, Aiken presented the IBM managers with a plan for a machine that would “be fully automatic in its operation once a process [was] established.”
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He visited the Columbia University Astronomical Computing Bureau, met Wallace Eckert, and studied the Orange Book. By the time his visit with IBM ended, Aiken had gained the attention of company president Thomas J. Watson. Watson was impressed with the proposal and offered to finance the project and build the machine in an IBM factory. Aiken would provide the general design and work with IBM engineers to develop the appropriate technology. Harvard would provide the computer center and operate the device.
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In a move that suggested that the two groups would not long cooperate on the project, IBM decided to call the machine the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, while Harvard would name it the Mark I. By the time the project was finished, IBM had invested $100,000 in the construction of the machine and donated another $100,000 to cover operational costs, a combined sum that approached the annual budget for the Mathematical Tables Project.

Viewing the new computing machines, George Stibitz prophesied that “Human agents will [soon] be referred to as ‘operators' to distinguish them from ‘computers' (Machines).”
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Neither his machine nor that of John Atanasoff would take the title “computer” from human beings. The
computers at Bell Telephone Laboratories may have operated the complex calculator, but they were more concerned with mathematics than with machinery. Atanasoff's machine handled only one modestly complex step of a large process. Both inventions were intermediate devices that did not quite reach the era of stored programs and still looked back at the age of oil cans and orangewood sticks. Even Howard Aiken's Mark I, the most sophisticated of the three machines, looked over its shoulder toward older technologies. One of Aiken's assistants captured the traditional nature of the Harvard computing laboratory when he described the Mark I as emitting “a distinct sound, not unlike the clatter of steel-shod horse's hooves clanging along a paved street.”
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Aiken generally employed his computing machine in work that could have been handled by the computing floor of the Mathematical Tables Project or the First World War computers of Aberdeen or even the
Nautical Almanac
computers of Charles Henry Davis. Shortly after the machine began operations, Aiken produced a set of mathematical tables. His volumes covered a different set of expressions from those being prepared by the computers of the Mathematical Tables Project, but the real difference between the two sets of computations was the difference between Harvard and the WPA, not the difference between machine calculation and handwork. The WPA reproduced its tables from mimeographed stencils. The Mark I tables were typeset and printed on fine paper. The WPA books were bound in a rough tan cloth and avoided references to work relief. Aiken used a fine blue cover and printed the university seal on the title page.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Professional Ambition

L
IKE THE ADDING MACHINES
of the 1880s, the calculators of Stibitz, Atanasoff, and Aiken coincided with a world's fair. This fair, which opened in the spring of 1939, was hosted by New York City. “It is arranged,” wrote the author H. G. Wells, “to assemble before us what can be done with human life today and what we shall almost certainly do with it … in the near future.” After pausing for a digression, he added, “It is a promotion show.”
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Like the World's Columbian Exposition, now almost half a century in the past, the Long Island fair displayed the technologies that would be embraced by American culture. Visitors could examine television receivers, FM radios, prototypes of divided highways, and primitive fax machines. They could inspect the products of both Bell Telephone Laboratories and International Business Machines. IBM president Thomas Watson hosted a company conference at the fair and delivered a rousing speech on the future of punched card technology.
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In the midst of all the symbols of material progress stood the WPA hall with its proud and slightly self-contradictory inscription, “This building shows the wealth created by the skill and artistry of America's unemployed.” The presence of the WPA had been controversial and a little embarrassing to government leaders. The opening of the exhibit had been delayed by labor troubles, an ironic touch that delighted opponents of the New Deal.
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When the WPA finally allowed visitors into the building, more than three weeks had passed since the start of the fair. A signature book by the front door recorded the opinions of those who came into the exhibit during those first days. “The WPA must go,” signed former presidential candidate Alf Landon, but his comment was altered by a WPA supporter so that it read, “The WPA must go on.”
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“The exhibits cover every aspect of WPA activity,” wrote one reporter, “from art, music, and drama to the manufacture of clothing for the poor.” Above the displays, WPA employees had written slogans that portrayed
the agency in a heroic light. “Work is the Right of every American,” read one panel, and “Work Builds Better Communities,” claimed another.
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Over the science projects was written, “Work Increases Knowledge,” a phrase that Gertrude Blanch and Arnold Lowan would have liked to claim for the Mathematical Tables Project. As far as we know, there were no calculations from the project on display.
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Only the powers of integers had been officially published. The second book, the volume on the exponential function, was still being printed.