The Burroughs 205
Part of California Computing
Although the earliest electronic computing devices were developed east of the Rocky Mountains, the itch to build a machine quickly spread to California. Two papers available on the Internet catch the flavor of the California computing community in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Gruenberger gave a talk in January, 1958 at the Digital Computer
Association in which he documented the history of high-speed computing
in southern California from 1942 to 1957. It is particularly interesting in that it
documents the "demand" side of the industry as centered on the
area's booming aircraft industry.
- A Meeting Summary of the 45th anniversary meeting of the Los Angeles ACM held in July, 1999. John Alrich was at the meeting and offered a few thoughts on the contributions of CEC's Sibyl Rock and Cliff Berry.
A third paper, published by Richard Sprague in the July, 1972, Communications of the ACM, documents many of the early efforts but is limited to machines that developed out of Northrop's efforts.
East coast computing work was encouraged, communicated and documented by the Eastern Association for Computing Machines formed in 1947 largely at the instigation of Prudential's Edmund C. Berkeley. The group quickly dropped the word "Eastern" from its name as membership swelled, but meetings remained on the East Coast. This was a real hardship for Californians interested in participating. Even by air, the trip from Los Angeles to Boston was a grueling 24-hour experience, frequently involving three or four refueling stops.
Three key events brought electronic digital computer development to California. All happened in 1948.
- Paul Morton, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, had spent the first
part of 1948 surveying the eastern computer work. He managed to
get Navy funding to construct a digital computer at Berkeley. Work
got underway on June 14, 1948.
- On July 29-31, 1948, the first major west coast conference on high speed
computing was held at UCLA. There were over five hundred
attendees. At this conference, the Institute for
Numerical Analysis (INA) at UCLA was dedicated. It was quite a collection of both
pioneers and beginners including Aikin, Mauchly, Goldstine and VonNeumann
from the eastern projects and Sprague, Steele and Toben of Northrup.
Cliff Berry saw to it that Consolidated Engineering Corp. was well represented. He brought along Sibyl Rock, of course, but also James Bradburn and R. F. Sink from CEC.
- Harry Huskey had worked for Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC and the beginnings of the EDVAC in Philadelphia. He spent the year of 1947 in England working with Alan Turing before returning to the U.S. to work at the Bureau of Standards. In early December of 1948 he and his family moved to Los Angeles to begin building the Standards Western Automatic Computer. In 18 months, SWAC would emerge at INA on the UCLA campus in June of 1950 as the world's fastest computer.
While the east coast computing projects shared information through the somewhat academic and mathematically oriented ACM, a very different group formed in southern California to interchange ideas. The Los Angeles chapter of the IRE's Professional Group on Electronic Computers provided a forum for exchange of information between the groups starting to build electronic computers. And there were many.
The PGEC group met monthly. At the January, 1951, meeting, the organizations currently working on new computers were asked to report on development and progress to date. These fourteen organizations gave reports:
- Benson - Lehner Corp.
- California Institute of Technology
- Computer Research Corporation
- Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc.
- Electro - Circuits Company
- Electronics Engineering Company.
- Hughes Aircraft Company
- Institute for Numerical Analysis
- North American Aviation, Inc.
- Northrop Aircraft Corporation
- Rand Corporation
- U. S. Naval Air Missile Test Center
- University of California College of Engineering
- William Miller Company
The PGEC group met regularly at the INA building on the UCLA campus. There were fifty members of the group present at the September, 1951, meeting when Henry Kenosian from the Burroughs research center in Philadelphia addressed the group to describe the "building blocks" used in the Burroughs Lab Computer.
Notably absent from that January, 1951, list of active projects was Consolidated Engineering Corp. In spite of Cliff Berry's advocacy, the company was not yet willing to commit to developing their own machine. On September 25, however, Burroughs' Henry Kensosian determined that CEC was "...getting ready to explore the digital computer field preparatory to getting in it. One week later, IBM's Los Angeles based scientific computing representative, Donald Pendery noted, "...a policy decision to enter the digital computer field had been made" (by CEC). A week after that, C. C. Hurd had relayed that news to Messrs. Learson and Birkenstock at IBM's NYC headquarters.
It's worth taking a closer look at several of these early California computer projects.