a handful of electronic engineers showed up at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and requested a place in the basement to plug in their tools. They were out of luck. “The only really useable space in our basement is that adjoining the men’s lavatory, to which you are most heartily welcome,” Electronic Computer Project director John von Neumann was told. Despite this inauspicious welcome, the engineers moved in, and in April, the project’s accountants recorded the first $4 for “electrical work.”
The Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930 as a refuge for scholars in mathematics, physics, history, and art. There were no laboratory facilities of any kind. “What could be wiser than to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it?” the founding director Abraham Flexner had been advised in 1939. Not a word about workbenches or tools.
John von Neumann was a pure mathematician who, along with many of his colleagues, had been drawn over to the applications side of things during World War II. He liked it there, and refused to leave. Having been exposed to the powers of digital computing through his involvement with the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos, he was impatient to build the next generation of computers, and was well aware of the implications of Alan Turing’s 1936 results on Universal Machines. “We are building one,” he told his arriving engineers, and the copy of Turing’s paper in the IAS library has been so heavily consulted that its binding has come unglued.
Other groups were engaged in similar projects, but none quickly and boldly enough for von Neumann. “If he really wanted a computer,” explained Arthur Burks, “the thing to do was to build it.”
Burks and Herman H. Goldstine, an Army colonel transplanted from the ENIAC project at the Moore School in Philadelphia, were installed on the second floor of Fuld Hall in a small office belonging to logician Kurt Gödel, where they set to work, under the guidance of von Neumann, outlining the logical architecture of the machine.
ing an enormous load,” say the minutes of the first meeting of the Electronic Computer Project. The circuitry would be modular, because “this sort of design is favorable for mass production,” added the engineers. “Words coding the orders are handled in the memory just like numbers,” explained von Neumann, breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, ensuring that all hell would break loose.
Instead of importing a few mathematical logicians into a lab full of engineers, von Neumann imported a handful of engineers into a place run by mathematicians. Although they had to start out by building their own workbenches at the Institute, and scrounge for war-surplus components as best they could, there was no one around to say, “Well, Dr. von Neumann, this looks interesting, but we build computers like this ...”
The lead engineer was Julian Bigelow, former colleague of Norbert Wiener and co-author of the 1943 paper “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” around
Every single bit of the digital universe we now inhabit can be traced back directly to those first binary digits that flickered to life in the summer of 1951.
which the beginnings of the cybernetics movement coalesced. His job was to take the logical design as laid out in the abstract by Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann, and coax it to life as a machine. “
Julian would have the ideas, and Ralph Slutz would kind of detail the ideas, and then James Pomerene and I would go try and make the electrons do their thing,” explains Willis Ware, one of the original engineers. “Julian was the architect of that machine.” Bigelow’s gang soon outgrew their room in the basement of Fuld Hall, and were pushed outside to a hastily constructed building at the edge of the Institute’s 600-acre woods.
At the Institute for Advanced Study, it was easier to find an expert in quantum mechanics than someone who worked on their own car. Bigelow was the exception — the only permanent member of the
References:
Archives