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A Hidden Treasure on Computer Science Pre-History in Pisa: the CSCE Collection

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A Hidden Treasure on Computer Science Pre-History in Pisa: the CSCE Collection A Hidden Treasure on Computer Science Pre-History in Pisa: the CSCE Collection Stefania Biagioni and Silvia Giannini Institute for the Science and Technologies of Information Italian National Research Council Via Giuseppe Moruzzi, 1 – 56124 Pisa, Italy [email protected] , [email protected] Abstract The collection of the Center for the Study of Electronic Computers (CSCE) contains the scientific documentation produced by the staff and associate members of the Center. The CSCE was established by the University of Pisa with the specific purpose of designing and building the first electronic computer entirely built in Italy: the CEP, standing for “Pisan Electronic Computer”. In recent times we have carried out the analysis, the description and the digitization of these historical documents, stored in paper copy at our library, and turned them into an Open Access digital archive freely available at http://csce.isti.cnr.it/ . The most important historical events The history of the CSCE started at the beginning of the ‘50s, when the municipal and provincial administrations of Pisa, Lucca and Livorno granted the University of Pisa a significant amount of money (150 million liras) to be used for the realization of an important scientific device. The original idea was to build an electrosynchrotron. The studies about the construction of this electrosynchrotron began in February 1953 at the Institute of Physics of the University of Pisa, and were about to finish when a bid by the University of Rome, one of the project partners, to have the project transferred to Frascati, near Rome, was accepted; this transfer meant that the amount originally granted to the University of Pisa became available for a new project. In 1954, Marcello Conversi, director of the Institute of Physics, along with other researchers from the same institute, approached the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi at the Varenna Summer International School of Physics “A. Volta” to seek advice on how best to use the unused grant. Enrico Fermi suggested to the Rector of the University of Pisa that the amount should be used to realize an electronic computer, the first entirely built in Italy. At that time, in Italy there were only two electronic computers, both purchased from abroad: the CRC102A, made in the US and installed in Milan at the Institute of General Electrotechnics in 1954, and the MARK I STAR, made in the UK and installed in Rome at IAC (standing for Institute for Calculus Applications) in 1955. In the opinion of Fermi, the hypothesis " to build an electronic computer in Pisa - seemed by far the best among all the others. It would be a research tool that would benefit all the sciences and all research in an almost inestimable way .1" 1 translated from G. De Marco. La calcolatrice elettronica pisana: le origini dell’informatica in Italia. Pisa, IEI-CNR, giugno 1996, All. 1: Letter typewritten of Enrico Fermi The recommendation of Fermi raised some doubts because the academic community claimed that the building of electronic computers was an exclusive job of the industry, and that the money would thus best be employed by buying a computer rather than by building it. At the end, the choice fell on the route that was longer and more difficult, albeit more captivating and rich of satisfactions: building a computer. The CSCE was established in 1955 and the project started. The enterprise was financed also by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, by the National Committee for Nuclear Research, by the National Research Council and by the society Olivetti, which participated with its own staff. Before starting the real construction of the CEP, standing for “Pisan Electronic Computer”, the executive group of CSCE RM decided to build a reduced-functionality prototype (“Reduced Machine” – RM). The RM was completed in 1957. Its main features were: word length of 18 bits magnetic core memory of 1024 words (1K) fixed-point arithmetic 32 machine instructions 70,000 additions or 500 multiplications per second photoelectric tape reader as the input device and teletype as the output Despite the simple and limited characteristics of the RM, this was used in scientific calculi of considerable complexity. So, from a purely historical point of view, the RM and not the CEP was the first electronic computer entirely built in Italy . With the RM in operation, the construction of the full-blown machine started. It was completed at the end of 1960, and it inherited from the RM about half of its component parts. However, the CEP had decidedly better performance: word length of 36 bits CEP arithmetic in fixed point and floating point single and double precision 128 instructions and 220 pseudo-instructions instructions of fixed length, with length equal to a word 8192 words (8K) of magnetic core memory 70,000 additions or 7,000 multiplications per second data entry via photoelectric reader and exit drills with tape, teleprinter and parallel printer. The CEP was inaugurated on November 13, 1961 by the President of the Italian Republic, Giovanni Gronchi. Six years had passed from the birth of the CSCE; in these years, the number of computers installed in Italy had grown from 2 to 22. The CEP remained in operation for seven years, offering its computing services for a minimum of 2000 hours per year up to over 4000. The main users were researchers from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Pisa. It is quite likely that, had the CEP been built before, it would have had a greater scientific value. However, the studies and the experiences connected to the building of the CEP had produced a more important and durable result: the creation of a group of experts in the emergent field of Computer Science. In 1962, the University of Pisa and the CNR signed a convention, on the basis of which the CSCE became a “national center of interest” of the CNR. In 1964 the institute CNUCE, standing for National University Center of 1961 Electronic Calculus, was born with the aim to supply scientific calculus service. In 1968 the CSCE became the Institute for Information Processing of the National Research Council (IEI-CNR), with the aim to promote and carry out computer science research. The close interactions and the common activities of both institutes led to their merging, in 2000, in to the present Institute for the Science and Technologies of Information “Alessandro Faedo” (ISTI- CNR). Prof. Alessandro Faedo, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Analysis of the University of Pisa, member of the Managing Committee of CSCE since 1954 to 1958, and Rector of the University of Pisa since 1959 to 1976, created the first Curriculum in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in 1969. Indeed, this research activity, at CSCE before and at IEI later, had contributed to establishing, in the academic community, a new scientific field such as Computer Science that, at that time, was not yet considered a discipline in its own. Currently, ISTI-CNR is devoted to basic and applied research in Computer Science. The analysis of the collection On the occasion of the Congress organized in order to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the CEP, held in Pisa on last June, we have carried out the analysis, the description and the digitization of the scientific documentation produced by the staff and associate members of the CSCE, which were stored in paper copy at our library. The cataloguing work started with the supervision of all the materials. The analysis of the CSCE documents has shown that the set of documents grew spontaneously and sedimented over the years, with the only aim to record the progress of CSCE studies and activities. Only later these characteristics, typical of archive materials, appear to have been lost because of the increasing prevalence of a different purpose: giving to the documents the nature of a collection. Indeed, the identification codes associated to the print copies of the internal memos show that these codes were attributed a posteriori , and not in the year in which the notes were actually written. The two key features (naturalness and originality) that characterize the “archival bound” were thus lost. Because of the impossibility to trace or to follow the original and natural order of the papers, and because of the numerous rearrangements that the material has undergone over time, we have reorganized all the documents using a bibliography edited by CSCE and printed in 1969, called “Documentation 2”. This choice was also supported by the almost exact correspondence between the numbering in Documentation 2 and the identification codes associated to the print copies. Right from the first recognition that we carried out, we realized that the material had been previously divided into two series, first and second, and that a further division had been made between published material, internal memos, and miscellaneous documents. Series I consists of 42 works published between 1957 and 1965, and 147 internal memos written between 1955 and 1963 including individual descriptions of the sub-programs and the machine pseudo-instructions (61 papers). Series II consists of 128 published works for the period 1962-1968 and 72 internal memos for the period 1963-1968. The analytical description of the contents of the two series is presented in the bibliographic sections of the http://csce.isti.cnr.it/ site. The archiving procedures We have produced the bibliographic descriptions of all the documents by using the PUMA publication management system. We have assigned each record to the specific type provided by the system and according to its contents. The identification code for each document is assigned automatically by the system, and is composed of the name of the collection, the code corresponding to the document type, the year, and the progressive sequence number within the year (e.g., /cnr.csce/1958-A2-001).
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