Key Events in the History of Computing II Post World War II

1945 Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers.

14 February 1946 ENIAC was unveiled in Philadelphia. ENIAC represented still a stepping stone towards the true computer, for differently than Babbage, Eckert and Mauchly, although they knew that the machine was not the ultimate in the state-of-the-art technology, completed the construction. ENIAC was programmed through the rewiring the interconnections between the various components and included the capability of parallel computation. ENIAC was later to be modified into a stored program machine, but not before other machines had claimed the claim to be the first true computer. 1946 was the year in which the first computer meeting took place, with the University of Pennsylvania organizing the first of a series of "summer meetings" where scientists from around the world learned about ENIAC and their plans for EDVAC. Among the attendees was Maurice Wilkes from the University of Cambridge who would return to England to build the EDSAC. 1946 Later that year Eckert and Mauchly, in a patent dispute with the University of Pennsylvania, left the University to establish the first computer company -- Electronic Control Corp. with a plan to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). After many crises they built the BINAC for Northrop Aviation, and were taken over by Remington-Rand before the UNIVAC was completed. At the same time the Electronic Research Associates (ERA) was incorporated in Minneapolis and took their knowledge of computing devices to create a line of computers; later ERA was also assimilated into Remington-Rand.

1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain invent the "transfer resistance" device, later to be known as the transistor that will revolutionize the computer and give it the reliability that could not achieved with vacuum tubes.

Transistor

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 1

1948 The work on a stored program computer was ongoing in at least four locations -- at the University of Pennsylvania on the construction of EDSAC, with John von Neumann at Princeton University on the Institute for Advanced Study Machine (IAS), with Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge University, and at the University of Manchester. Douglas Hartree had visited various locations in the US and had returned to England to convince his colleagues, Freddy Williams and Tom Kilburn, to build a computer. Max Newman, one of the leaders of the Bletchley Park activity, had created the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at Manchester, and was looking for a means to build a computer. On June 21, 1948 their prototype machine, the "Baby" was operated for the first time; the world truly moved from the domain of calculators to the domain of computers. Williams, Kilburn, and Newman continued to build a full scale machine they designated the Manchester Mark I. The Ferranti Corporation took the design and began a line of computers that were one of the major components of the British Computer Industry. Mark I occupied only one large laboratory and had a massive (!!!) random access memory of 1024 bits.

Mark I – The “Baby”

1948 T.J. Watson Sr., miffed (bad-tempered mood) at Howard Aiken at the lack of recognition at the dedication of the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator [ASCC] (Harvard Mark I) and unnerved by the success of ENIAC, ordered the building of the Selective Sequence Control Computer (SSEC) for IBM. Though not a stored program computer, the SSEC was the first step of IBM from total dedication to punched card tabulators to the world of computers. The publicity pictures of SSEC were modified to exclude the columns in the machine room at the Madison Avenue offices of IBM, after Watson expressed regret that they existed!

1949 Just a year after the Manchester Baby machine became the first operating stored program machine in the world, then first large scale, fully functional, stored-program electronic digital computer was developed by Maurice Wilkes and the staff of the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University. It was named EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer); the primary storage system was a set of mercury baths through which generated and regenerated acoustic pulses represented the bits of data. Wilkes had been an attendee at the 1946 Summer School at the University of Pennsylvania and come home with the basic plans for a machine in his mind.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 2 1949 Back in the US the National Bureau of Standards began work on two machines. The Bureau had been made responsible for managing the contract for the delivery of the UNIVAC to the Census Bureau, but recognized that it needed computational facilities for its own work. Not having an overwhelming budget, the Bureau decided to emulate the National Physical Laboratory (its UK equivalent) and build its own machines. These were to be placed in the east and west coast centers. Sam Alexander took charge of the development of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), while Harry Huskey (builder of the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory [NPL], the British equivalent of NBS) led the development of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC).

Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC)

1950s

In the fifties, the PGEC became an organization with many elements of present Computer Society, excepting the technical and education committees. Conferences were the most significant activity, but publications grew rapidly with some 1,800 editorial pages generated during the decade.

1950 After World War II and his work at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing joined the staff of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, England, with plans to build his own computer. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was completed in 1947 but the director of the Laboratory gave the task of construction to the Physics rather than the Mathematics department, where Turing resided, and consequently Turing left NPL to take up a position with his war-time boss, Max Newman, at the University of Manchester. The work on a prototype machine based on Turing's plans, named Pilot Ace, was designed by Harry Huskey in 1948 and completed in 1951. The full scale version was completed several years later by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 1951 Jay Forrester, Bob Everett and others at MIT began work on a simulator for the Air Force in late 1946, but changed their minds about the use of analog techniques, deciding instead to use digital processing to produce the first real-time processing computer -- the Whirlwind. This work is also well known for the development of core memory. The basic concept for core memory had been patented by An Wang, Harvard University, in 1949, but his technique involved using the cores on single wires to form delay lines. The Whirlwind Project conceived the technique of stringing the cores (a memory, consisting of a series of tiny doughnut-shaped masses of magnetic material) onto a matrix of wires and thus producing a random access memory.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 3 Below: Alan Turing Left: Pilot Ace, was designed by Harry Huskey in 1948 and completed in 1951.

1951 After five years of work of the first computer company established by Eckert and Mauchly, the UNIVAC computer was delivered to the Census Bureau, just in time to begin work on the decennial census. Somewhat over budget, the hope for the Remington-Rand Corporation was that they could produce a sufficient number of copies to recover their losses on a 1946 fixed-price contract with the government. Eventually several copies would be built and delivered to a wide variety of both government and commercial users. 1951 Maurice Wilkes had realized quickly after the completion of the work on EDSAC at Cambridge University that "a good part of the remainder of [his] life was going to be spent in finding errors in programs." With Stanley Gill and David Wheeler he developed the concept of subroutines in programs to create re-usable modules; together they produced the first textbook on "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer", (Addison- Wesley Publ. Co., New York, 1951). The formalized concept of software development (not to be named for a decade) had its beginning. 1951 The third of Howard Aiken's machines, the Mark III was delivered to the Naval Surface Weapons Center, Dahlgren, Virginia in March 1951. The Mark III was notable for being the first full scale machine to include drum memory, even though Aiken still insisted on keeping the data and the instructions on separate (and slightly different sized) drums. The Time magazine, in a painting by Artzybasheff, featured the Mark III on the cover; the first time a computer appeared. The painting is now at Harvard University.

Painting by Artzybasheff depicting Mark III

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 4 1952 Grace Hopper, by now an employee of Remington-Rand and working on the UNIVAC, took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled "The Education of a Computer", (Proc. ACM Conference, reprinted Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 9, No.3-4, pp. 271-281) in which she described the techniques by which a computer could be used to select (or compile) pre-written code segments to be assembled into programs in correspondence with codes written in a high level language -- thus describing the concept of a compiler, and the general concept of language translation. For the next forty years Hopper was to champion the development of easier ways of solving problems and taking no notice of the doubters who said that "it can't be done". The idea of "automatic programming" had been born. 1952 By the end of 1952 UNIVAC had become the common name for a computer, just as Hoover and Xerox became synonyms for vacuum cleaners and paper copiers, fuelled in part by the use of UNIVAC in the CBS presidential election night television news program. Using a dummy console in the studio, the returns were processed on a machine in the Philadelphia plant of Remington-Rand. With only 5% of the returns counted the UNIVAC predicted a landslide victory for Eisenhower, but in spite of Charles Colinwood's repeated requests to "UNIVAC, tell us what you think", it was not until after midnight on the East Coast of the US that CBS admitted that they had not believed the predictions and had withheld the results of the programs run on UNIVAC. Election nights on television would never be the same again, and UNIVAC was established as the premier computer. 1952 John von Neumann completed his version of the successor to the ENIAC at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. 1953 In the midst of the first "police action" on the part of the United Nations in Korea, IBM took the opportunity to contribute to the war effort by providing a "Defense Calculator" that was in fact their first true entry into the computer business. The IBM "Type 701 EDPM" was built as a result of the conviction of T.J. Watson, Jr. that IBM had to take a step into this field and his convincing his father that computers would not immediately destroy the card processing business. The 700 series of machines, including the 704, 709, and eventually the 7090 and 7094, dominated the large mainframe market for the next decade, and brought IBM from computer obscurity to first place in that same time period.

1953 While many universities in the US and other countries were building their own computers, the Cambridge University EDSAC was the first to be commercialized. With the foresight of company probably least likely to have been expected to have a strong interest in computers, J. Lyons & Company, Ltd., a purveyors (one that furnishes provisions, especially food) of confectionery and operators of "corner teahouses" throughout Great Britain, took the EDSAC design and converted it for their own business applications. Called LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), it came to the attention of many other companies with the same kind of business processing needs, turning an in-house development project into a new computer company. LEO Computers, Ltd. eventually was purchased by English Electric Company, and together they became part of International Computers Ltd. (ICL), the major builder of British computers through the 1970s. 1954 Since the 1930s IBM had built a series of calculators in the 600 series that contributed to the versatility of the card processing equipment that was their major product. The early IBM computers (701 and 702) were incompatible with the punched card processing equipment,

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 5 but the IBM Type 650 EDPM, a natural extension of the 600 series, used the same card processing peripherals thus making it upwardly compatible for many existing IBM customers. A decimal, drum memory machine, the 650 was the first to be mass produced though IBM never expected to lease 1000 in the first after its announcement. For many universities it was to be their first computer, its attractiveness was considerably enhanced by the availability of a 60% educational discount conditional on the institution teaching certain computer-related courses. 1954 Following the example set by Grace Hopper, and a successful implementation of a digital code interpreter for the IBM 701 named Speedcoding, John Backus proposed the development of a programming language that would allow uses to express their problems in commonly understood mathematical formulae -- later to be named FORTRAN. Assembling a team of researchers from IBM and other customer sites, Backus always believed that it would take them 6 months to complete the task; whenever anyone asked when the system would be ready he responded "in six months"! 1954 While John von Neumann was working on the IAS Machine, several other parallel projects were underway at other institutions to build copies. To assure conformity the Princeton group took extensive photographs of the construction stages of the IAS machine and shipped them, with notes to the other builders. At Los Alamos National Laboratory Nick Metropolis built the MANIAC, the University of Illinois built the ILLIAC, and at Rand Corporation Willis Ware built the JOHNNIAC. In March 1954 the JOHNNIAC was unveiled and operated by Keith Uncapher, later to be the first chair of the newly formed IEEE Computer Group, later named the Computer Society. In 1994 Willis Ware was presented with the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for his work on JOHNNIAC. The newly formed National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded John von Neumann a grant to continue his work on computing, the first of a long line of university support for computing by the Foundation.

1955 Less than ten years after the unveiling of ENIAC, the idea of large scale computing epitomized by ENIAC, had changed to the concept of "supercomputing". IBM began work on their contribution to the national effort by producing a machine that was promised to be 100 times faster than the fastest machine of the day. This machine was to expand the state-of- the-art and thus was named STRETCH. When STRETCH was eventually delivered in 1960 (??) the quoted price had to be reduced since the speed target was not reached. That same year IBM introduced the 704, whose principal architect was Gene Amdahl, who was go on to establish his own company building supercomputers in the 1990's. The 704 had the distinction of being the first commercial machine with floating-point hardware, and was capable of operating at approximately 5 kFLOPS. 1955 The number of computer customers had grown to the point where it was appropriate to form the first users groups to exchange experiences and programs, and at the same time to present a uniform face to the manufacturers. SHARE (not an acronym but often given the interpretation of "Society to Help Allieve Redundant Effort") was created for the users of (large) IBM machines, and USE for UNIVAC users. Computing was no longer to be shaped only by the computer companies.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 6 1956 Sperry-Rand, the successor to Remington-Rand, but still maintaining the UNIVAC Division, took up the challenge to create a supercomputer on behalf of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that was to be named LARC (Livermore Automatic Research Computer). Work also began in the United Kingdom on a supercomputer project. The Atlas project was a joint venture between University of Manchester and Ferranti Ltd. with Tom Kilburn as the principal architect. 1956 Not forgetting that the purpose of the computer was to solve problems, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky organized a conference at Dartmouth College, with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, on the concept of Artificial Intelligence. From this meeting the promises of AI grew, but were not to be achieved for several years. 1957 The early computers had small internal memories and slow external memories primarily relying on magnetic tape. While internal memories had been upgraded to magnetic drums and then core memory. The next logical step was the disk memory, with movable read/write heads to provide a semi-random access capability and a storage capacity akin to that of magnetic tape. The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first disk memory system. 1957 After three years of work Backus and his colleagues delivered the first FORTRAN program compiler for the IBM 704, and almost immediately the first error message was encountered -- a missing comma in a computed GO TO statement. The unmarked 2000 card deck was received at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh by Herbert Bright who deduced that it was the long expected compiler, and created the first user program -- complete with an error. The world of programming languages had taken a large step upward, from a domain in which only specially trained programmers could complete a project, to a domain in which those with problems could express their own solutions. 1958 The invention of the transistor in the latter half of the 1940's opened the modern electronics age of employing "electrons in solids," leaving obsolete the vacuum tube electronics utilizing "electrons in vacuum" then in its heyday. In 1958, Jack St. Clair Kilby conceived and proved his idea of integrating a transistor with resistors and capacitors on a single semiconductor chip, which is a monolithic IC. His idea of a monolithic IC, together with the planar technology of Dr. Jean Hoerni and Robert Noyce's idea of "junction isolation" for planar interconnections, underpins the great progress of today's semiconductor IC and the microelectronics based upon it. The technology has allowed the innovation of numerous applications in computers and communications, which have changed our life styles dramatically. 1958 The original development that started with the Whirlwind project became a reality in 1958 with the installation of the SAGE system for Air Defense at McGuire AFB in NJ. The first effective air traffic control system was operational for the north-eastern US. 1958 The recently founded Control Data Corporation under the leadership of William Norris, created their contribution to the supercomputer market with the fully transistorized -- CDC 1604 -- Seymour Cray was the chief architect. 1958 Meanwhile, continuing his work towards the development of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy developed concepts of the programming language LISP for manipulating strings of symbols, a non-numeric processing language. Later students, changed the meaning of LISP, standing for LISt Processing, into "Lots of Idiotic, Silly Parentheses". 1959 While there was a movement towards supercomputers in many companies, IBM announced the availability of two desk-size machines for the small user -- the IBM 1401 for the business user and the IBM 1620 for the scientist. The 1401 became the most popular business data processing machine, and for small universities and colleges, the 1620 became the first computer experience for a many students. Both machines introduced a character

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 7 oriented core memory of 20-40 kbytes in which "word" boundaries could be defined by the programmer to provide "unlimited precision". Both machines were supported by an arithmetic unit that used decimal table-look-up instead of binary adders. Initially IBM had intended to name the 1620 as the CADET, but when this was translated into "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try" the name was dropped. 1959 After several years of work General Electric Corporation delivered 32 ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine -- Accounting) computing systems to the Bank of America in California to rescue the banking industry from being overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing numbers of checks being used by an ever increasing clientele. Based on a basic design by SRI, the ERMA system employed Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) as the means to capture data from the checks and introduced a check handling system that was not daunted (discouraged) by documents that were not in pristine condition. The banking industry had become automated, opening the way for new ways of banking including the ATM and electronic personal banking. On the other hand it was a high water mark in the history of computer manufacture at GE that, with the exception of developing a profitable line of machines for NCR (the NCR 304), never really achieved the status that might be expected of such a financial giant.

Left: ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine -- Accounting) computing system Right: ERMA system employed Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) as the means to capture data from the checks

1960s

PGEC services in the early sixties were much the same as in the late fifties, although the number of conferences and transactions pages continued to increase. However, in 1961, the PGEC leadership began to consider creating technical committees. These committees would provide more forums for special interests and, at the same time, reduce the chance of these interests forming separate IRE groups and segmenting the field. In May 1962, the first of these committees, a logic and switching theory committee, was approved to operate jointly with the AIEE committee already in operation. Concurrently, merger plans were proceeding between the IRE and AIEE. The IRE-AIEE merger into the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers began at the headquarters level in 1963. The PGEC then became the Professional Technical Group on Electronic Computers, and very shortly thereafter, the Computer Group. In early 1963, the group began operating with an Administrative Committee that included a mix of PGEC and AIEE CDC people. The final merger was completed in April 1964.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 8 A major step was taken in July 1966 with the first issue of the bimonthly Computer Group News, which included group and industry news, applied and tutorial articles, a guide to computer literature, and a repository of computer articles. Repository materials were available to the profession for a nominal charge. Computer Group News opened the door for many magazines in the society, as well as in IEEE. But it was also significant in another way. With the publication of its own magazine, the Computer Group employed and managed its own small full-time staff in the Los Angeles area for publications support and other administrative activities. The Computer Group was the first IEEE group to employ its own staff, and it was a major factor in the growth of the society. In 1968, IEEE Transactions on Computers became a monthly publication. The number of published periodical pages grew to almost 9,700 pages in the transactions and about 640 in the Computer Group News. Membership grew to 16,862, including 4,200 students and 158 affiliates. The decade closed with 41 chapters.

1960 Since 1952 Grace Murray Hopper had been developing a series of programming languages that increasingly used natural language-like phrases to express the operations of business data processing. FLOWMATIC was the last of these. Others had also taken on the challenge, including IBM that had produced a language named COMMERCIAL TRANSLATOR. From these bases an industry-wide team -- Conference on Data System Languages (CODASYL) -- led by Joe Wegstein of NBS (now NIST) developed a new language in a very short time and created the first standardized business computer programming language, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). For the next 20 years there were more programs written in COBOL than any other single language. That same year the second of the mathematical languages, ALGOL 60 was developed, also by a committee. Although not widely implemented ALGOL became the conceptual basis of many programming languages thereafter. 1960 marked the end of first generation of computers (vacuum tube driven) gave way to the second generation using transistors. 1961 The work on integrated circuits by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce came to fruition in 1961 when the first commercially available integrated circuits became available from the Fairchild Corporation. The patent for the silicon based IC had been granted to Robert Noyce, starting a long contention (struggle) on patent rights for IC's between the germanium version of Kilby and that of Noyce. From this date forward, computers would incorporate ICs instead of individual transistors or other components. 1961 While operating systems (originally called monitors or supervisors) had been developed as a means of improving the throughput of computers in the late 1950s, the users were frustrated by their lack of intimacy with the computer. To solve this problem and return the control of the computer back in the hands of the user, Fernando Corbató, MIT, produced CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System) for the IBM 7090/94, the first effective time-sharing system and coincidentally the first means of remote access to a computer since Stibitz' demonstration in 1940. 1962 In Great Britain the Atlas computer at the University of Manchester became operational; it is the first machine to use virtual memory and paging; its instruction execution was pipelined, and it contained separate fixed- and floating-point arithmetic units, capable of approximately 200 kFLOPS. 1963 By 1963 the process of standardization of the elements of the industry was becoming prevalent and among the first was a standard for a code for information interchange (ASCII).

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 9 For the first time there was a means for computers to interchange information, but it would take almost 15 years before this would become commonplace. 1963 was the year in which the IRE and AIEE merged to form the IEEE, the process of examining the various components to consolidate activities began, and the opportunities for new projects were considered. From the AIEE Large Scale Computing Committee and the IRE Professional Group on Electronic Computers would come a new group. 1964 Starting in 1959 Douglas Engelbart launched the SRI Augmentation Research Center to pioneer the modern interactive working environment. NLS (On Line System) was built during the mid-1960's to develop and experiment with software and hardware tools that would make people more productive using computers. NLS was an exploratory vehicle for research into the "knowledge worker/organization." Among the original ideas developed and implemented in NLS were the first hypertext system, outline processor, and video conferencing. In 1964 he had developed the "mouse," to be followed by the development of two-dimensional editing, the concept of windows, cross-file editing, uniform command syntax, remote procedure-call protocol, mixed text-graphic files, structured document files, idea processing, and many more developments. Like the work of almost any pioneer Engelbart's work was not recognized immediately, the mouse waiting until the development of the personal computer, fifteen years later, to find its niche. Engelbart received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1992. By the mid-1960's the jet airliner (and Boeing) had revolutionized the airline travel business but the reservation process, even though there were elemental reservation systems, was inadequate. In a period when remote access had been proven by the CTSS system, IBM produced the first large scale, on-line, real-time reservation tracking system, named SABRE for American Airlines, and soon to be copied by others. 1964 To many the world of computing changed radically on April 7, 1964 when IBM announced System/360, the first IBM family of compatible machines. While there was a least one other compatible family in GE, the commitment to an upwards compatible family and the merging of the scientific and business lines of machines by IBM had a profound effect on the way many businesses thought about computers.

IBM’s System/360, the first IBM family of compatible machines

1964 In the Fall of 1964, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System became operational with BASIC as principle language for student program development. Developed by John Kemeny (later president of Dartmouth and chairman of the commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident) and Tom Kurtz, together with lots of help from undergraduates, BASIC was to become the "lingua playpen" of the young computer community. Both Kemeny and Kurtz were honored by the IEEE Computer Society as Pioneers. 1964 was also the year in which the IRE Professional Group on Electronic Computers and AIEE Committee on Large-Scale Computing Devices merged to form Computer Group, later to be renamed the Computer Society, and Keith Uncapher served as the first chair (1964-65). 1965 While some companies were developing bigger and faster machines, Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the PDP-8 in 1965, the first TRUE minicomputer. The PDP-8 had a minuscule instruction set and a primitive micro-language, and excellent interface capability.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 10 Thus the PDP-8 became used extensively as a process control system, including interfacing to telephone lines for time-sharing systems. 1965 The success of CTSS at MIT was noted by J.C.R. Licklider, director of information processing research at ARPA, who believed that the technology had useful applications in the agency. He arranged to sponsor Project MAC (variously interpreted as "Machine Aided Cognition", "Minsky Against Corbató" and other names) that would take the next logical stage in the development of time-sharing to produce a system known as "Multics". Choosing a GE 600 series machine as the basis for the development, MIT was joined by GE and AT&T Bell Laboratories to produce a general-purpose, shared-memory multiprocessing timesharing system. 1966 A joint project between IBM and the SHARE user's group developed a new programming language with the intention of combining both scientific and business data processing as had the System/360 machines. The language was also intended to be a high level system development language. 1966 The need for computers in Colleges and Universities in support of science and engineering was noted in the "Rosser report" sponsored by NSF. This report effectively terminated any grant support for universities to build their own machines, and improved the support for universities to lease commercial machines. 1966 By December 1996 the Computer Group membership had reached 11,000, a growth of 10% during the year. 1967 Seven years after Fairchild Corp. had delivered the first commercial integrated circuit, the third generation of computers began in 1967 with the delivery of the first machines using that technology. 1967 John Hamblen, faculty member at the University of Missouri, Rolla, produced the first annual survey on the use of computer in higher education, that became the guideline for university administrations against which to gauge their computing resources and activities. The NSF "Pierce report", a follow-on to the Rosser report looked closely at the curriculum of computer science programs throughout the US, and provided the impetus for the development of curricula for the field. 1968 In 1955, during the development of the programming language FORTRAN, Harlan Herrick had introduced the high level language equivalent of a "jump" instruction in the form of a "GO TO" statement. In 1968 Edsger Dijkstra laid the foundation stone in the march towards creating structure in the domain of programming by writing, not a scholarly paper on the subject, but instead a letter to the editor entitled "GO TO Statement Considered Harmful". The movement to develop reliable software was underway. 1968 For the future, Arthur C. Clark introduced HAL, the computer of the future in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", basing the design on the artificial intelligence proposals of I.J. Good (a member of Bletchley Park) and Marvin Minsky. Supposedly HAL was a monosyllabic cypher of IBM!

1969 Work on ARPAnet begins. The concept of networking was by no means new in 1969; even as early as the Romans had there been a network of roads that facilitated not only the rapid movement of troops but also the rapid interchange of information by messengers. During the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars there were various schemes developed to distribute messages over a network of communication lines, primarily along lines of sight between prominent locations.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 11 1969 Disillusioned by the work on Multics and continuing problems with the GE 600 series machines, Bell Telephone Laboratories withdrew from Project MAC. Messrs. Ritchie and Thompson began work on their own operating system, that instead of being targeted to multiple users, would concentrate on the single user and thus in a play on the name Multics, it was named UNIX. In 1994 Ritchie and Thompson each received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award.

Sabancı University - FASS - Introduction to Multimedia / Instructor: Murat Germen 12