An Interview with BERNARD A. GALLER OH 236 Conducted by Enid H. Galler on 8, 10-11, and 16 August 1991 Sutton's Bay, MI Ann Arbor, MI Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Processing University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Copyright, Charles Babbage Institute 1 Bernard A. Galler Interview 8, 10-11, and 16 August 1991 Abstract In this wide-ranging interview, Galler describes the development of computer science at the University of Michigan from the 1950s through the 1980s and discusses his own work in computer science. Prominent subjects in Galler's description of his work at Michigan include: his arrival and classes with John Carr, research use of International Business Machines (IBM) and later Amdahl mainframe computers, the establishment of the Statistical Laboratory in the Mathematics Dept., the origin of the computer science curriculum and the Computer Science Dept. in the 1950s, interactions with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM about timesharing in the 1960s, the development of the Michigan Algorithm Decoder, and the founding of the MERIT network. Galler also discusses Michigan's relationship with ARPANET, CSNET, and BITNET. He describes the atmosphere on campus in the 1960s and early 1970s and his various administrative roles at the university. Galler discusses his involvement with the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, the founding of the Charles Babbage Institute, and his work with the Annals of the History of Computing. He describes his consultative work with Israel and his consulting practice in general, his work as an expert witness, and his interaction with the Patent Office on issues surrounding the patenting of software and his role in the establishment of the Software Patent Institute. 2 BERNARD A. GALLER INTERVIEW DATE: 8 August 1991 INTERVIEWER: Enid H. Galler LOCATION: Sutton's Bay, MI ENID GALLER: Professor Bernard A. Galler is talking about his long career at The University of Michigan. We are at Sutton's Bay, Michigan. It is August 8, 1991. My name is Enid Galler. At what point in your life did you decide to become a mathematician? BERNARD GALLER: I believe it started when I was 10 years old, and with watching my father help my sister with her algebra in high school, and I got interested in mathematics and was pretty good at it. The teachers in high school encouraged me, and it just went on from there. I think I thought from the beginning that I would be a teacher. And they encouraged that, also. E. GALLER: Why did you think that you would be a teacher - from observing how your father tutored your sister? B. GALLER: Yes, and I think that any time I mentioned it, he strongly encouraged it, so that it simply built on itself, and it was what I wanted to do. The teachers in high school would let me tutor others, occasionally take over the class and teach it, and I was good at it, so it was a natural thing to do. When I got to the University of Chicago, I had already had a fair amount of college math, or at least advanced high school math, so I went into the divisional courses, even though I was in the College, and I remember that my first teacher was Charles Brumfiel, who I learned later had just become a teaching assistant - it was his first teaching experience - and later, we were colleagues at The University of Michigan. He died a short time ago. But we were always friends, and I really appreciated his encouragement back then in mathematics. In fact, he wrote a letter to my parents once, saying, "Bernard could be a very good mathematician if he were just a little more careful and didn't make all those mistakes." And that made a big impression on me. 3 In any case, I got a bachelor's degree in mathematics, Bachelor of Science, in 1947 at the University of Chicago and went on to UCLA for a master's degree. While there, I wrote a master's thesis with Arens on the Theorem of Pontrjagen Without the Second Axiom of Countability; that was in topological algebra, and it was very interesting. I actually thought I had something new there. Then I went back to the University of Chicago. Fortunately, they didn't ask me to take their qualifying exam, because I already had a master's degree, and so I went on and got a Ph.D. in mathematics there. And that really began my professional career. After getting a job at The University of Michigan, based on a 10-minute talk at the spring meeting of the Math Society - in those days it wasn't expected that you would go to the university that was recruiting you to give a lecture and meet everybody. I was made an offer by The University of Michigan based on a 10-minute talk at the big meeting at Chicago in the spring. So when we got to Ann Arbor, we really didn't know anything about The University of Michigan, but I came into the Mathematics Department. I was expected to teach Logic because of my thesis work, and I taught Advanced Calculus that first year. That's when I got into computing, because I also audited the course that John Carr was giving that fall, and we got to be friends. But that's another story. E. GALLER: Why don't you right now tell about that course that you audited from John Carr, and what that led to. B. GALLER: All right. Actually, it starts back a little bit earlier, because in the course of my work with Marshall Stone and Paul Halmos on my thesis, I had gotten interested in mathematical logic, and the trail that I followed led me to a book on computing, the book called High Speed Computing Devices, because I had come across an article in Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation by a group at Michigan that I didn't know, but of course, later did get to know well - Arthur Burks and others - which described a machine they had built with Burroughs to evaluate well-formed formulas in logic. A footnote in that article pointed me to the High Speed Computing Devices book and got me interested in computers. When I got to Michigan, I happened to notice in the time schedule a course by John Carr, and I sat in on it. And that's when we became friends. He introduced me to the people at General Motors, but after he introduced me to Paul Dwyer. John recommended that the best way to learn about computers was to actually write some programs and do some computing, and he suggested that I work with Paul 4 Dwyer on some linear programming stuff. We did that, first on the MIDAC, which was my first computer, out at Willow Run Labs, then when the IBM 650 came in 1956, Dwyer and I used that, but we outgrew it. Our programs and the size of the arrays we wanted to process were just too large for the 650, so John took me to General Motors and introduced me to the people there, and they let me use their [IBM] 701 computer, and then the 704 when it arrived. That led to a whole series of developments in computing at the University, which I suppose we should get to somewhat later. But halfway through the first semester of that course, I got a call from the chairman of the department, Hildebrandt, who said, "John says you ought to teach that course next term." And I said, "Fine, that's a good way to learn it." And so I did, and that was the course which was largely numerical analysis, but also talked about programming languages. It was everything that was known about computing at the time, really. Because John had been at the MIT summer courses and had brought back a lot of notes and was teaching from that, and I was teaching from my notes from John's notes, and so I learned some numerical analysis, actually published a paper with a student in the course that year. And that course evolved eventually into Computer Science 473, which has been renumbered a number of times and actually broken up into a number of different courses as each part of them expanded. But I think its direct descendant is probably the 280, 380, 381 sequence now. E. GALLER: Tell more about Professor Dwyer. B. GALLER: Well, Paul Dwyer was a very eminent mathematician and statistician. He and Cecil Craig had set up the Statistical Laboratory which was, in fact, where the IBM 650 computer came and was the beginning of computing on the campus itself. Paul Dwyer had worked with the Air Force on linear programming techniques. The Air Force was interested in optimal ways of assigning different people to Air Force crews. They wanted to look at the various psychological attributes that the candidates had and match them according to certain objectives so that they made a coherent crew, and they were trying to use linear programming for that. So one particular kind of linear programming problem was called the assignment problem, and was directly applicable to that kind of problem. Paul Dwyer was interested in doing that, but he needed someone to help him with his computing, and so that's where I came in. I wrote the programs; Dwyer worked out the methods and we published several articles together. Somehow, it was a sort of a special-purpose technique and wasn't anywhere near as general as Danzig's linear programming iteration 5 method; Danzig's method really caught on and ours never quite did.