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Columbia University Computing History
A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University
Frank da Cruz |
Books, manuals, journals, magazines, notes, andartifacts. 65 years of computing at Columbia University.
Last update:Sun Aug 4 14:30:40 2019 Adapted for mobile devices 4 April 2015. Converted to HTML5 7 February 2019.
[ Credits ][ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ FAQ ]
The world's most powerful computerat Columbia University's Watson Lab,612 West 115th Street NYC, 5th floor rear, 1954.
[ Early ][ 1920 ][ 1930 ][ 1940 ][ 1950 ][ 1960 ][ 1970 ][ 1980 ][ 1990 ][ 2000 ][ 2010 ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
- Recent Developments
- Eleanor Krawitz Kolchinpassed away 25 January 2019.
- Many pages converted to HTML5 and fluid design (for cell phones), 2018-2019.
- New pages or popular ones with new content include:The original card punch,Old card punches,IBM Radiotype (and World War II),IBM 405,IBM 610 (the first 'personal computer'),IBM 360/91,Films with old computers.
- Beginning in 2017, some pages at this site have been translated intoother languages. The most prominent examples are the pages on Watson Labalumni John Backus andHerb Grosch, Watson Lab founderWallace Eckert, and the father of modern automaticcomputation, Herman Hollerith. And also a1949 Columbia Engineering Quarterly article,The Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory:A Center for Scientific Research Using Calculating Machines byWatson Lab Tabulating Supervisor Eleanor Krawitz.Click here toread more about translations.
- Supplement: Hollerith
- An Electric TabulatingSystemby Herman Hollerith, The Quarterly,Columbia University School of Mines, Vol.X No.16 (Apr 1889),pp.238-255.
- Supplement: Grosch
- Computer: Bit Slices from aLife by Dr. Herb Grosch(2003), 500+ pages, including several chapters on IBM's Watson ScientificComputing Laboratory at Columbia University in the 1940s and 50s.[ Also available in PDF ]Herb Grosch passed away January 25, 2010.
- Supplement: Brennan
- The IBM Watson Laboratory atColumbia University - A History by Jean Ford Brennan(1971). 76 pages, 25 photos. The history of IBM-sponsoredcomputing research and laboratories at Columbia University, 1928 though1970.
- Supplement: Hankam
- Homeward Bound, thememoir of computing education pioneer Eric Hankam,including his escape from Nazi Europe, his time at IBM Watson Laboratory atColumbia University, and his continuing adventures.
- Supplement: Krawitz
- The Watson Scientific ComputingLaboratory by Eleanor Krawitz, Columbia EngineeringQuarterly, November 1949.
- Personalities:
- [ Herman Hollerith ][ Wallace Eckert ][ L.H. Thomas ][ Herb Grosch ][ John Backus ][ John Lentz ][ Ben Wood ][ L.J. Comrie ][ John McPherson ]
- IBM Punched-Card Machines:
- [ Tabulators ][ Sorters ][ Key Punches ][ Calculators ][ Interpreters ][ Reproducers ][ Collators ]
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If you came here looking for the history of the Kermit protocol, Kermitsoftware, or the Kermit Project, you can findsome of it below in the 1980-82 timeframe, and a bit moreHERE. Plus some 2012 oral historytranscripts at the Computer History Museum HEREand HERE
Who am I and why did I write this? Starting around 2000, peoplepopped into my office all the time to ask 'when did such-and-such happen?'— the first e-mail, the first typesetting, the first networking, thefirst PC lab, the first hacker breakins, etc -- since I was there for mostof it. So I took some time and wrote it down, and in so doing becamefascinated with the earlier history. I was a user of the Columbia ComputerCenter from 1967 until 1977 in my various jobs and as a Columbia student,and I was on staff from 1974 until 2011. Brief bio: After some earlyprogramming experience in the Army (mid-1960s), the Engineering School andPhysics Dept (late 1960s, early 70s), and Mount Sinai Hospital (early 70s),I came to work at the Computer Center Systems Group in 1974, hired by itsmanager Howard Eskin out of his graduate Computer Science classes. After ayear of OS/360 programming, I was manager of the PDP-11/50 and the DEC-20s(first e-mail, early networking, the first campuswide academic timesharing),then manager of 'Systems Integration' (first microcomputers, PCs, Kermit),principal investigator of the 'Hermit' distributed computing researchproject, then manager of Network Planning for the University and chair ofthe University-wide Network Planning Group, before 'retiring' tothe Kermit Project, which hadless (well, zero) meetings and way more fun. I was laid off from Columbiain 2011 but still have access to this website. (Note: the Columbia KermitProject website was cancelled and its website frozen July 1, 2011; the newOpen Source Kermit Project websiteis HERE.)
Capsule Summary
Automatic computing at Columbia University got off to a serious start in the1920s in the with the installation of large IBM accounting and calculatingmachines in the Statistics and Astronomy departments and a closerelationship that developed with IBM that would last 50 years. Columbiasoon developed a world-class reputation for innovationin scientific computing. As World War II approached,Columbia astronomy professor Wallace Eckert wasrecruited by the US Naval Observatory toapply the techniques he had developed at Columbia to the production of thealmanacs that guided air and sea navigationthroughout the war. At the end of the war Eckert rejoined Columbia as thefounder and director of IBM Watson ScientificComputing Laboratory on 116th Street, IBM's first pure researchfacility, which also served as Columbia's 'computer center,' and created theworld's first Computer Science curriculum. Severalgroundbreaking early computers were designed and/or built and Watson Lab.In 1963Columbia opened its own Computer Center on campusunderneath the Business School. From 1963 to 1975 all computing at was doneon large central IBM mainframes, with a handful ofsmaller computers in the departments. Jobs were coded on punched cards andrun by operators in the Computer Center machine room. In 1973 apublic Self-Service Input/Output area (SSIO)was opened with key punches, card readers, and printers where users couldsubmit jobs and retrieve the results themselves. Beginning in 1975interactive timesharing was introduced based oncentral Digital Equipment Corporation computerswith public hardcopy and video terminals installed inthe SSIO area and in the Engineeringbuilding. Other terminal rooms were added over time, mainly inthe dormitories. During 1977-80 a lively onlinecommunity developed, with email, bulletin boards, and file sharing, whilecourses increasingly required the use of the central computers, or tookadvantage of them in other ways. In the 1980s public terminals weregradually replaced by microcomputers, PCs, and workstations connected to thecentral computers through their serial ports, like terminals. Columbiajoined the ARPANET (later to become the Internet) in 1984. The terminalnetwork was replaced in stages by Ethernet, which was also extended todormitory rooms, offices, and even apartments. About 1995 the combinationof Windows 95 and the World Wide Web led to widespread migration fromcentralized timesharing to distributed desktop computing, wired and thenincreasingly wireless. Students began to arrive with their own computers,laptops, tablets, and mobile devices; the need for public PC labs dwindled.By 2005 or so, the Computer Center merely provided the infrastructure,mainly the network, e-classrooms, and email.Now even email has beenoutsourced.Disclaimers
- Obviously this is written from my perspective; others might havedifferent recollections or views. In particular, at least after 1963, thisturns out to be more a history of centralized academic computing, ratherthan all computing, at Columbia, giving short shrift to the departments,administrative computing, the libraries, and the outlying campuses; a morecomplete history needs these perspectives too. I've made every attempt tocheck the facts; any remaining errors are mine -- please feel free to point them out.
- Computers are value-neutral tools that can be used for goodor evil, and it is clear that from the very beginning they have been usedfor both. This document does not aim to extol the virtues of computers ingeneral, nor of any particular company that makes them, but only tochronicle their use at Columbia University.
Acknowledgements
- Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University(with Watson Lab dates)
- Herb Grosch (1945-51),Eric Hankam (1945-59),Ellie (Krawitz) Kolchin (1947-58),John H. (Jack) Palmer (1949-57)[4],James U. (Jim) Lemke (1948-50),Daniel (Dan) Robbins (1949-53),John Backus (1950-52),Ken Schreiner (1951-60),Seymour Koenig (1952-70; Director 1967-70),Harry F. Smith (1956-1967),Joe Traub(Watson Fellow 1956-59),Ken King(Watson Fellow 1955-56, technical staff 1957-62),Jessica (Hellwig) Gordon (1957-58),Mike Radow (High School Science Honors Program, late 1950s),Peter Capek (High School Science Honors Program, early 1960s),Steve Bellovin (Columbia studentand Watson Lab employee, 1968-69).
- Former Columbia Computer Center Directors
- Ken King (1963-71),Jessica Gordon (1971-73),Bruce Gilchrist (1973-85),Howard Eskin (1985-86),Vaçe Kundakcı (1989-2005).
- Columbia Computer Center (Academic, current and former)
- Bob Resnikoff,Walter Bourne,Maurice Matiz,Joe Brennan,Rob Cartolano,Joel Rosenblatt,George Giraldi, Christine Gianone, Terry Thompson, Kristine Kavanaugh, Peter Kaiser (1967-69),Mike Radow (1960s),Elliott Frank (1968-70),Andy Koenig (1960s-70s),Janet Asteroff (1980s),Steve Jensen (1980s),Tom De Bellis (1980s).
- Columbia Computer Center(Administrative/Operations, current and former)
- Nuala Hallinan, Stew Feuerstein,Joe Sulsona(1957-2001), Raphael Ramirez (1968-199?),Alan Rice (1960s), Peter Humanik, Ben García.
- Columbia Faculty
- Joe Traub (Computer Science Department founder and previously Chair),Steve Bellovin (Computer Science Department, formerly of Bell Labs), AndrewDolkart (School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation), Bob McCaughey(Barnard College History Department). Many of the Watson Lab technicalstaff and Computer Center directors were also on the Columbia faculty.PERSONAL THANKS to Professor Emeritus LeonJ. Lidofsky (Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering) for getting mehooked on programming and giving me the run of his 1960s-era computer lab;without this push I'd probably still be an overeducated taxi driver!
- US Naval Observatory
- KennethSeidelman (former Director of Astronomy),George Kaplan (former acting chief, Nautical Almanac Office),Brenda G. Corbin (Librarian).
- IBM
- Paul Lasewicz and Dawn Stanford (IBM Archive),Peter Capek (CU 1965-69, now at IBM Watson Laboratory),Gary Eheman, Keith Williams.
- The Parnassus Club
- Nuala Hallinan plus former residents Barbara L. Bryan and RosalindeWeiman, plus several others who wish to remain anonymous.
- And.
- Simon Rackham for the 1968 computer movie,Ruth Dayhoff (Director of Medical Digital Imaging, US Dept of VeteransAffairs),Ed Reinhart (Formerly of RAND Corp, JPL, and Comsat),Mary Louise McKee (NORC programmer, US Naval Proving Ground Dahlgren VA),George Trimble (Aberdeen Proving Ground, IBM),John C Alrich (Burroughs/ElectroData),Loren Wilton (Burroughs/Unisys),Ellen Alers (Smithsonian Institution),Garry Tee (Dept of Math, University of Auckland NZ),Allan Olley (University of Toronto),Charlotte Moseley (formerly of the County of San Diego Data ProcessingCenter),Pnina Stern (formerly Pnina Grinberg of BASR),Annette Lopes (CU Associate Registrar, then Associate Director of StudentServices, now [2011] Executive Director, Human Resources, Finance andAdministration);Jocelyn Wilk, Steve Urgola, and Mae Pan (Columbia University Archives andColumbiana);Bill Santini (CU Student Services).
I was inspired by Bruce Gilchrist'sForty Years of Computing article from 1981[3](so that makes it sixtyseventy78 years!)
Special thanks to Bruce Gilchrist and Nuala Hallinan, each ofwhom contributed valuable archive material and considerable time, effort,and miles to this project; to Herb Grosch for his awesome book aswell as tons of new information, corrections, insights, anecdotes, andartifacts; to Eric Hankam for the loan of his personal archive of photos andmaterials, his autobiography, and a wealth of Watson Lab recollections; toCharlotte Moseley for preserving and contributing a large number of old IBMmanuals; and to Bob Resnikoff who unearthed his long-lost cache of 1980machine-room and MSS photos. Herb, in particular, was involved in thisproject on a daily basis since he first happened upon it in May 2003 untilshortly before his death at 91 in January 2010. Herb rememberedeverything.
And thanks to the editors ofIEEE Annals of the History ofComputing for an announcement and abstract of this site in theirApril-June 2002 issue, and for announcing the online version of Herb Grosch'sbook in the July-September 2003 issue.
Please report any broken links directly to the author.
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Introduction
At the dawn of the new Millenium, computers and the network are ubiquitous; wecan't live without them. It wasn't always so. How did we get here? A seriesof technological innovations including Pascal's adder (the Pascaline, 1600s),Leibnitz's multiplier (the Stepped Reckoner, about 1700), the Jacquard loom (1804), the Babbage Analytical andDifference Engines (1820s-30s), electricity and electromagnetism, thetelegraph, the Hollerith tabulating machine(1890), the relay, the vacuum tube, core memory, the transistor, the laser,the integrated circuit, and on and on, each resulted in products thatstimulated applications, which in turn stimulated the demand for more andbetter products, and before long computers entered the economy and the popularculture.A case can be made that the computer industry got its start at ColumbiaUniversity in the late 1920s and early 1930s when Professors Wood andEckert, to advance their respective sciences, began to send designs andspecifications for computing machines to IBM Corporation, which until then hadbeen a maker of punched-card tabulating machines for thebusiness market. From those days through the 1980s, the relationship ofColumbia with companies like IBM was symbiotic and fruitful(and continues on a smaller scale to this day, mainly in the Physicsdepartment with the construction of massively parallel supercomputers -- whoelse would know how to connect 512 processors in a6-dimension mesh withthe topology of a torus?) IBM Corporation itself was the childof Columbian Herman Hollerith.
The early days of invention and innovation are past. Computers and networksare now well established in the daily lives of vast numbers of people in manynations, and certainly at Columbia University. Today's computersare off-the-shelf mass-market consumer appliances, which was perhapsinevitable and is no doubt a good thing in some ways. How this came aboutis a story told elsewhere but as you'll see below, some important partsof it happened right here.
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Timeline
[ Early ][ 1920 ][ 1930 ][ 1940 ][ 1950 ][ 1960 ][ 1970 ][ 1980 ][ 1990 ][ 2000 ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
The story of computing at Columbia is presented chronologically. Most linksare to local documents, and therefore will work as long as allthe files accompanying this document are kept together. There are also afew relatively unimportant external links, which are bound to go bad sooneror later -- such is the Web.
- 1754-1897:
- Columbia University was established byKing George IIof England in 1754 (HUMOR)in downtown Manhattan near what is now City Hall. Thecampus moved to 49th Street and Madison Avenue in 1857, and from there to itspresent site at 116th Street and Broadway in 1897.
- 1879-1924:
- In 1879, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) received his Engineer ofMines (EM) degree from the Columbia UniversitySchool of Mines[48]. After graduation he stayed on as an assistant toone of his professors, W.P. Trowbridge, who later went on to what was tobecome the US Census Bureau and took Hollerith with him. This led toHollerith's development of the modern standard punch card and thetabulating machine and sorter that were used toprocess the 1890 Census [40]. Hollerith wrote up hisinvention and submitted it to the Columbia School of Mines, which granted hima PhD in 1890 [48]. Hollerith's name is synonymouswith the advent of automatic computing; until about 1940, punched-cardcalculators, tabulators, and so on were commonly called 'Hollerithmachines', even when they were made by other companies.
- 1896:
- Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company, which wasto become (through various mergers and renamings) the International BusinessMachines company, IBM.
- 1900-1920:
- Prof. Harold Jacoby, Chair of the Astronomy Department, in a memo dated4 December 1909, refers to 'Miss Harpham (our chief computer)' [28]. 'Computer' was an actual job title in those days,referring to someone whose job was to compute -- usually tables fromformulas -- by hand or using a mechanical calculator (more about this inHerb Grosch's Computer, Bit Slices of aLife, e.g. on page 4). The1917-18 Columbia University Bulletin, Division of Mathematical and PhysicalSciences, in the Equipment section, lists 'five computing machines' withoutfurther detail (you can find a list of possible candidates at the Universityof Amsterdam Computing Museum). Apropos of nothing, professor Jacobywas a graduate of the Columbia class of 1885, and organized a gift from thatclass to the University: the Vermont granite ballthat was mounted on the Sundial on 116th Street (now College Walk) from 1914to 1946, and now sits in the middle of a field in Michigan [54]. Jacoby died in 1932; Wallace Eckert (about whommuch more below) wrote his obituary in PopularAstronomy.
- 1906:
- Hollerith brings his Type I Tabulator tomarket, the first with automatic card feedand the first such device that is 'programmable' via a plugboard.
- 16 June 1911:
- The Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, CTR, is founded by themerger of Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company with several others. Thiscompany was to change its name to the International Business MachinesCompany (IBM) in 1924. IBM celebrated its 100th anniversary on 16 June 2011.
[ Early ][ 1920 ][ 1930 ][ 1940 ][ 1950 ][ 1960 ][ 1970 ][ 1980 ][ 1990 ][ 2000 ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
- 1924-26:
- The Columbia University Statistical Laboratory (location unknown)includes Hollerith tabulating,punching, andsorting machines, Burroughs adding machines, Brunsviga andMillionairecalculators (the latter was the first device to perform direct multiplication),plus reference works such as math and statistical tables. Prof.Robert E. Chaddock (Statistics Dept) was in charge. The Astronomy department(Prof. H. Jacoby) still has the 'five computingmachines' [5].CLICK HERE for a gallery of late-1920s computingmachines.CLICK HERE for a 1926 aerial view of ColumbiaUniversity. CLICK HERE for a 1925 ColumbiaUniversity map.
- 1926:
- Wallace Eckert (1902-1971) joinsColumbia's Astronomy faculty, specializing in celestial mechanics and mostespecially the moon. In pursuit of these interests, Eckert is to become atrue computer pioneer.
- 1928:
- Benjamin Wood (1894-1986), head ofthe University Bureau of Collegiate Educational Research[5], proposes to Thomas J. Watson Sr., president of IBM,a method forautomated scoring of examination papers in large-scale testing programs (whichpreviously involved 'acres of girls trying to tabulate . test results' [45]). After some discussion, Watson sent three truckloadsof tabulating, card-punching, sorting, and accessory equipment to the basementof Hamilton Hall [9,40].
- 1928:
- Meanwhile in England, L.J. Comrie (1893-1950),Superintendant of H.M. Nautical Almanac Office, begins a project to calculatefuture positions of the moon using punched cards, a sorter, a tabulator, and aduplicating punch, in what is probably the first use of these machines forscientific calculation [72]. This work wouldshortly inspire Columbia's Wallace Eckert to take thenext historic step: automating these calculations.
As we will see, much of the impetus towards automated scientific computation(and therefore modern computers) came from astronomers, and its primaryapplication was in navigation. The same impetus brought us accurate,portable timepieces in the previous century.
- 1928:
- Columbia's medical school, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, movesfrom 10th Avenue and 55th-60th Streets to Washington Heights betweenBroadway and Fort Washington Avenue, 165th-168th Streets, the former siteof Hilltop Park(1903-1912), the baseball stadium of the New York Yankees (known as theNew York Highlanders until 1912).
- Jun 1929:
- Prof. Wood's operation became the Columbia University StatisticalBureau (PHOTOS). In addition to tabulatingtest results, it served as a 'computer center' for other academic departments,particularly the Dept of Astronomy, which used the equipment for 'interpolatingastronomical tables' [9,40].
[ Early ][ 1920 ][ 1930 ][ 1940 ][ 1950 ][ 1960 ][ 1970 ][ 1980 ][ 1990 ][ 2000 ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
For his work, Eckert designed a control system basedon plugboards and rotating drums to interconnect the new equipment,eventually incorporating methods to solve differential equations by numericalintegration [9].The Astronomical Laboratory was the first to perform general scientificcalculations automatically [30]. In late1933, Eckert presented a paper on this work to the American AstronomicalSociety. Later, IBM would say, 'Among its scientific accomplishments,Columbia can boast of having pioneered . the use of automatic computingmachines for research work' [37]. A seemingly mundanebut significant aspect of this work was the new ability to feed the result ofone computation into the next and print the results of these calculationsdirectly, thus eliminating the transcription errors that were common inastronomical and lunar tables [17].
To illustrate with a 1946 quote from Kay Antonelli,University of Pennsylvania, referring to her wartime work [34], 'We did have desk calculators at that time,mechanical and driven with electric motors, that could do simple arithmetic.You'd do a multiplication and when the answer appeared, you had to write itdown to reenter it into the machine to do the next calculation. We werepreparing a firing table for each gun, with maybe 1,800 simpletrajectories. To hand-compute just one of these trajectories took 30 or 40hours of sitting at a desk with paper and a calculator.' Imagine the effectof a transcription error early in the 30-40 hour procedure.
Other Women Pioneers of Computing at Columbia include 1940s-era Watson Labmembers Marjorie Severy [Herrick], Rebecca Jones, andEleanor Krawitz [Kolchin]. Grace Hopper,though by no means a Columbian, was present at the inaugural meeting of theAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM), held at Columbia in 1947.
The roster of Watson Lab technical staff (1945-70) is listed inBrennan [88]. Out of 207 professional staffmembers, 35 are definitely women. Many more are listed with only initials;some others by Romanized Chinese name (which generally does notindicate gender). But at least 17% of the technical staff were women, whichisn't bad for the postwar years, in which women were discouraged fromworking (or worse, laid off from their wartime jobs). Serial box mac osx.
'The initial equipment of the Bureau consists of that which has been used bythe Department of Astronomy at Columbia University during the past few years. modified to make them more efficient for scientific work .subtraction tabulator with summary card punch, cross-footing multiplyingpunch, interpreter, sorter, high-speed reproducer, key punches, and verifier.
'Some possibiliies of the machines can begained from the program now in progress. This consists primarily of (1)numerical integration of the equations of planetary motion; (2) completechecking of the lunar theory; (3) computation of precession and rectangularco-ordinates for the Yale University Zone Catalogues; (4) thephotometric program of the Rutherford Observatory; and (5) problems of stellarstatistics.' [86].
Users of the Bureau were charged only for labor and materials (a tremendousbargain, since the equipment was donated).The Astronomical Computing Bureau would serve as a model for many of thewartime computing centers, such as those at Los Alamos, the Naval Observatory,and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds [30,90].
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Numerov, Boris Vasilyevich:Thewebsiteof the Tosno Museum of Local History and Tradition (Leningrad Region) says(as of 12 Sep 2003)'An exhibit section is devoted to Boris Numerov (1891-1941) - a prominentastronomer, land-surveyor and geophysicist, a creator of various astronomicinstruments and means of minerals exploring. His family has lived in the townof Lyuban' not far from Tosno since 1922. In the times of Stalinistrepressions Boris Numerov was arrested and executed in 1941. In 1957 he wasrehabilitated.' Numerov is known today for the various algorithms and methodsthat bear his name.
In June 1940, a letter arrives for Eckert from V.N. Riazankin on behalf ofthe Astronomical Institute of the USSR Academy of the Sciences, asking tovisit Eckert's Lab. Jan Schilt, now in charge ofthe Lab, forwards it to Eckert in Washington. In August 1940, I.S. Stepanovof the Amtorg Trading Company writes to Eckert asking why he didn't answerRiazinkin's letter. Here's the final paragraph of Eckert's reply (cc'd toSchilt):
May I take the opportunity to state that one of your eminent scientists, thelate Dr. Numerov, corresponded with me several years ago concerning this veryproblem [machine construction of astronomical tables for navigation].It was his intention to secure a similar installation, and had one inoperation. I sincerely hope that his interest in my machines was notconstrued by his government as treason, and that Mr. Riazankin will not meetthe same fate as Dr. Numerov. [88].
Schilt writes to Eckert from Columbia on August 9th:
Concerning the letter of Mr. Stepanov I am shivering a little bit. Your replyto him is extremely strong and clear, so much so that I would not be surprisedif I wouldn't hear from them at all, and frankly I just soon would not . ifthere is any danger that [the machine] room may prove a death trap to Russianscientists I think I am in favor of not talking to these people. [88].
(Note: the correspondence places Numerov's death prior to 1941.) According toDavid Alan Grier [46], the Amtorg Trading Company was aspy agency; the proposed visit from Riazinkin, which never actually tookplace, is thought to have been an attemptedfirst case of computer espionage [45]. Infact, Amtorg was not just a front; it handled the bulk of Soviet-Americantrade for many years, but it was also an ideal spot for the placement ofspies. Was Riazankin a spy? We'll never know. In any case he was neverheard from again.
Herb Grosch reports that Sovietastronomers continued to pay occasional visits to Watson Lab after the War,e.g. in connection with taking over production of the annualKleinePlaneten listing of asteroid positions from Watson Lab, which did the work in 1946 after the GermanAstronomischesRechen-Institut was destroyed in the War.
'The new IBM punched-card machines were devoted to calculations to simulateimplosion, and Metropolis and Feynman organized a race between them and thehand-computing group. 'We set up a room with girls in it. Each one had aMarchant. Butone was the multiplier, and another was the adder, and this one cubed, and allshe did was cube this number and send it to the next one,' said Feynmann. Forone day, the hand computers kept up: 'The only difference was that the IBMmachines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tiredafter a while.'
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IBM played a large partin the Allied war effort, supplying all of its products to the US governmentat 1% over cost, and taking on new jobs as well, including manufacture ofnearly six percent of all M1 rifles [seepictures and story] [another one here][orsearch Google](other non-weapons companies made M1s too, including National Postal MeterCompany, General Motors, Underwood [typewriters], and Rock-Ola, a maker ofjuke boxes). IBM also evacuated the families of employees in England toToronto [85] and assisted the families of USemployees who had gone off to war and held jobs open for all its returningveterans [57].According to allegations in 2001 [48] (havingnothing to do with Columbia), IBM might also have played a part inGermany's war effort, in which widespread use was made of punched-cardtechnology manufactured by IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag[120], which had beentaken over by the Nazi government in 1940. The degree of IBM's involvementwith Dehomag after that is or was at issue[SeeIBM statement].
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| * | The Army work referred to was for the Army Air Force: test data reductionfor a GE aerial fire control system that later went into production for theB-29bomber [57]. |
Atomic bombs are primarily a means for the ruthlessannihilation of cities. Once they were introduced as an instrument of war itwould be difficult to resist for long the temptation of putting them to suchuse. The last few years show a marked tendency toward increasingruthlessness. At present our Air Forces, striking at the Japanese cities, areusing the same methods of warfare which were condemned by American publicopinion only a few years ago when applied by the Germans to the cities ofEngland. Our use of atomic bombs in this war would carry the world a long wayfurther on this path of ruthlessness.
Subsequent drafts were toned down a bit but made the same recommendations.The Oak Ridgepetition urged that 'before this weapon be used without restriction in thepresent conflict, its powers should be adequately described and demonstrated,and the Japanese nation should be given the opportunity to consider theconsequences of further refusal to surrender'. Watson Lab staff who wereperforming calculations for Los Alamos were unaware of the petitions or,indeed (with only two exceptions, Eckert and Grosch, the only ones withsecurity clearances), that the calculations were for abomb [59]. In any event, the petitions neverreached the President.
Former President, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, andSupreme Commander of NATO Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir,Mandatefor Change, (Doubleday 1963), “The incident took place in 1945when Secretary of War Stimson visiting my headquarters in Germany, informedme that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I wasone of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to questionthe wisdom of such an act . . . But the Secretary, upon giving me the newsof the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it,asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During hisrecitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling ofdepression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis ofmy belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb wascompletely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our countryshould avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employmentwas, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. Itwas my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way tosurrender with a minimum loss of 'face'.”
FDR's and Truman's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and of the CombinedUS and British Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy wrote in hisbook I WasThere (Whittlesey House, 1950),“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshimaand Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. TheJapanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of theeffective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventionalweapons.”
_____________________________| * | Note: The link to the Stimson diaries seems to go stale from time totime, and the selection of entries seems to change; as of mid-August 2005,some independent copies can be foundHEREandHERE. For further detail and analysis see:'Hiroshima: HistoriansReassess' by Gar Alperovitz, Foreign Policy (Summer 1995)No. 99: 15-34, esp. Part 4,'The Preferred Option.' |
Chock Full O' Nuts sightings go back as far as1944. When did it close? Mid-1980s I think. A few other establishments that werehere in 1945 are still open in 2004: The West End (1915),Tom's Restaurant (1936), Columbia Hardware (1939), andMondel's Chocolates (1943).
Later he describes some experimental machines: 'Among the digital machineswhich have been developed over the years, there are several based on the relaynetwork; we now have two of these at the Laboratory [note: he is notreferring to the Aberdeens, which had not yet beendelivered] . The first one was developed with the idea of seeing howfew relays it is possible to use to produce a calculating machine. Thismachine is built on the standard IBM key punch. . The control is veryconvenient. a combination of control panel and master card or program card.Thus, instead of having twenty control panels for a complicated job, you canset it up to use one control panel and twenty master cards.'
This might very well be the birth of software. The controlpanel, which stays in place for the duration of the job, defines the'instructions' of the machine, in a sense its 'microprogram'. The sequenceof operations (invoking instructions from the control panel) is on a deckof cards. It is a PROGRAM. A few years later, IBM would build aCard Programmed Calculator, and from there it isa short step to the first general-purpose stored-program computer, which,arguably, was IBM's SSEC, built under Eckert'sdirection (in fact the SSEC was completed before the CPC).The significance of card programming can't be overstated. A deck ofcontrol cards (along with the specifications for the correspondingcontrol-panel wiring, at least in these early days) documents the program. Itcan be printed, read, modified, duplicated, mailed, kept for future use, andrun again on different data sets. Much of this might be said of plugboardstoo, provided you don't have to recycle them, thus destroying the program.But most important, a program deck can be any length at all, thus allowingextremely complex problems to be run -- problems that might have required athousand plugboards. (Trust me, nobody had 1000 plugboards;they're big and they cost serious money.)
Graduate-level hard-science courses used the Watson Lab machines too,including some taught by regular Columbia faculty such asGeorgeKimball (Chemistry), among whose students wereMargaret Oakley Dayhoff(Columbia Ph.D. 1948, the founder of computational biochemistry),Isaac Asimov(Columbia B.Sc 1939, M.A. 1941, Ph.D. 1948), andMauriceEwing (Oceanography), the founder ofLamont-Doherty EarthObservatory, whose students includedFrank Press (ColumbiaM.A. 1946, Ph.D. 1949), who went on to become President ofthe US National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the National ResearchCouncil. More about these courses in the 1951 entry.
Popular descriptions of computers as 'brains' and analogies with the humannervous system were so rampant in the late 1940s and early 50s, that George Stibitz,developer of the wartimeBell RelayCalculators, was prompted to write an article cautioning against such wildtales as the one in the Feb 18, 1950, Saturday Evening Post, whichsaid that computers were subject to psychopathic states which engineers cureby 'shock treatments' consisting of the application of excessively largevoltages [79].
The SSEC was programmed from Watson Lab on standard IBM cards converted toinput tapes on a special punch called the Prancing Stallion [57]. Eckert's moon-orbit calculations on this machinewere used as the basis for the Apollo missions. It was dismantled in 1952.One of the SSEC's programmers wasJohn Backus (PHOTO AND DETAILS), who had twoColumbia degrees and was at Watson Lab in1950-52 [9], and who went on to design FORTRAN,the first high-level machine-independent programming language, andAlgol,the first block-structured language, and is also known forBackus Normal Form (BNF), a meta-language for describing computerlanguages. Faulty driver on kernel stack. Before FORTRAN, almost every computer program was written inmachine or assembly language, and therefore was not portable to any other kindof machine.
The idea of a high-level programming language was the second step on the roadto user friendliness. The first step was the assembler. Such notionswere not without controversy. John von Neumann, when he first heard aboutFORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked 'why would you want more thanmachine language?' One of von Neumann's students at Princeton recalled thatgraduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary fortheir early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, butwhen von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was awaste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clericalwork. (These anecdotes from a biographical sketch of von Neumann by John A.N. Lee, Dept of ComputerScience, Virginia Polytechnical Institute.)
Another SSEC programmer wasEdgarF. Codd, originator of the relational database model[40] (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13,No. 6, June 1970, pp.377-387), who was at Watson Lab from 1949 to 1952[9] and diedApril18, 2003.
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- It is the smallest complete mechanical brain in existence.
- It knows not more than four numbers; it can express onlythe number 0, 1, 2 and 3.
- It is 'guaranteed to make every member of an audience feelsuperior to it.'
- It is a mechanical brain that has cost less than $1,000.
- It can be carried around in one hand (and the power supplyin the other hand).
- It can be completely understood by one man.
- It is an excellent device for teaching, lecturing and explaining.
Some space was retained in the 116th Street building: offices for PhD students, classroom space,and a machine room [4,9,17,66].
The former women's residence on 115th Street was in fact theParnassus Club,a boarding house for young women -- students at theJulliard School of Music, which was thenonly a couple blocks away on the currentManhattan School of Music site(MAP)or at Barnard College, a block north(MAP),for semi-professional performers. It operated from 1921 to 1955.CLICK HERE for stories and photos.
The North-facing building was gutted by IBM in 1953 to create WatsonLaboratory. According to a resident, 'we all had to move out because someofficial body at Columbia had decided the neighborhood had become toodangerous for us; at least that was the reason given in a letter we allreceived that spring' (this refers to the second Parnassus Clubbuilding, which remained in operation until 1955). (Miss Macmillan's 1965obituary states, however, that the Club was closed due to her poor health.)The exterior of 612 West 115th Street retains itsoriginal look but the inside contains no trace of the Parnassus Club. InJuly 2003, a resident from 1950 appeared on the doorstep with her daughterand grandson; she was showing them where she used live. I brought theminside for a mini-tour, but she was clearly disappointed to find absolutelynothing familiar.
The original Watson Lab at 612 West 116th Street was designed by Thomas Nashand built in 1906 as the Delta Phi fraternity house. The current Watsonbuilding at 612 West 115th Street was originally an apartment buildingcalled Duncan Hall, designed in 1905 by the prolific firm of Neville &Bagge, originally built and owned by a Frank Woytisek. The building acrossthe street, No. 605, was also an apartment building by Neville & Bagge,called the Bellemore, built in 1903 and originally owned by Moses Crystal[12]. It was home to the Bureau of Applied SocialResearch (BASR) from 1955(?) until it was demolishedabout 1970.
200th anniversary of Columbia University.
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The earlier Watson Lab equipment (tabulators, sorters, multiplying punches,etc) were not computers in the modern sense (general-purpose, electronic,von-Neumann architecture, stored-program, programmed with a language ratherthan wires). NORC had been the first such computer at Columbia but, althoughit was used in one Columbia PhD dissertation [65],it was not open to the Columbia community for general use [61]. Thus the IBM 650 was the first computer availableto Columbia researchers and we have a 50th anniversary onAugust 30, 2005.Eric Hankam points out [66] that this was not asdramatic a turning point as it might seem, since the same types of problemshad been solved on non-stored-program calculators at Columbia over thepreceding two or three decades; at the time, the 650 was seen as just anotherincremental step in calculator design. However, the 650's power, flexibility,and ease of use relative to the wire- and card-programmed machines (601,Aberdeen,602,604,CPC,607)attracted a flood of Columbia research projects. By 1961, 650s were alsoinstalled at Nevis Lab, Hudson Lab, and ERL. As demand oustripped capacity,it became increasingly clear that Columbia would need a computing facility ofits own, big enough to serve the entire university.
Computerized registration was seen by some as a step towardsdehumanization of students and turning universities into factories, a majorfactor in the rise of the Free SpeechMovement at the University of California at Berkeley, which set thestage for campus activism, protest, and rebellion throughout the 1960s,including Columbia in 1968:'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makesyou so sick at heart, that you can't take part; and you've got to put yourbodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all theapparatus and you've got to make it stop.' According to StevenLubar of the Smithsonian Institution, this sentiment, although directedprimarily at the economy and war machinery, extended to the punched-cardequipment in the registrar's office: 'Berkeley protestors used punch cards asmetaphor, both as a symbol of the 'system'--first the registration system andthen bureaucratic systems more generally--and as a symbol of alienation. 'Iam a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me.'
- Standard punched card equipment
- A comprehensive selection of basic punched card machines, with manyspecial devices. The equipment includes keypunch, sorter, reproducer, andprinter.
- Wired-program calculators
- The group of electro-mechanical and electronic calculators include theType 602-ACalculating Punch,the Type 607 Electronic Calculating Punch,and the Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator.The 607 is an automatic electronic calculator with pluggable program controland 146-digit storage capacity, capable of performing most programs at therate of 100 cards per minute.
- Stored-program calculator
- The type 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machineis a stored-program calculator [i.e. computer] which can store 2000 ten-digitwords, read 200 cards a minute, punch 100 cards a minute, and performapproximately 100 multiplications a second. The memory capacity can be usedinterchangeably for numerical data and operating instructions, which permitscomplete flexibility in the elaboration of instructions by the machine itself.
Plus special-purpose devices such as a card-driven lithography printer,a card-controlled astronomical photograph analyzer, as well as a machineshop and physics and chemistry laboratories, a highly specialized library,and access to the big IBM 700 series computers downtown.
Although FORTRAN -- the first high-level, machine-independent programminglanguage -- marked a great leap forward in user friendliness, and was probablyavailable for the 650 by this time, it's worth remembering how one ran aFORTRAN job in the early days. First you punched your FORTRAN program on akey punch machine, along with any data and controlcards. But since the 650 had no disk, the FORTRAN compiler was not resident.So to compile your program, you fed the FORTRAN compiler deck into the cardreader, followed by your FORTRAN source program as data. After some time, themachine would punch the resulting object deck. Then you fed the FORTRANrun-time library object deck and your program's object deck into the cardreader, followed by any data cards for your program. Your program would runand results would be punched onto yet another deck of cards. To see theresults, you would feed the result deck into another machine, such as an IBM 407, to have it printed on paper. The computer itselfhad no printer.By the early 60s a certain division of labor had become the rule, in which'system analysts' would make a flow chart, programmers would translate it tocode, which was written by hand on'coding forms' that were givento key punch operators to be punched on cards. The coding forms and carddecks were passed on to 'verifiers' who repunched the source code to catch andcorrect any mistakes, signed off on the job, sent the deck to the operator toawait its turn at the computer. Hours later the results would be delivered tothe programmer in the form of a printout and the cycle would continue.
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- GSEE 287, Digital Computers I: Programming and Operating.
- Astronomy 111-112: The use of High-Speed Digital Computers for ScientificCalculation.
- Engineering 281:Numerical Analysis for Research Students in Science andEngineering.
- Physics 288: Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial DifferentialEquations.
- Management Games (Industrial Engineering): Market simulations.
Plus short courses in IBM 650 and Fortran programming and the ShareOperating System (SOS) [29,31].
Besides the Watson Lab courses, the Electrical Engineering Department offers:
- EE 104: Electric Circuits IV: Digital Circuits and Computing Systems.
- GSEE 267: Digital Systems and Automata.
- GSEE 269: Information Theory.
- GSEE 274: Electrical Analogue Computers.
- GSEE 275-276: Logical Design of Digital Circuits.
- GSEE 288-289: Digital Computers II and III: System Analysis and Synthesis.
- EE 277-278-279: Pulse and Digital Circuits.
- An IBM 1620at Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory.
- An IBM 650 at the Nevis Cyclotron Laboratory.
- An IBM 650 at Hudson Lab.
- An IBM 650 at the Electronics Research Lab of the Engineering School.
The primary needs were in high-energy physics (then accounting about 200 hoursof IBM 650 time per month), sociology (50 hours/month), geophysics (100 hoursof IBM 709 time per month), biochemistry, andchemistry. 'A school of computer science will evolve gradually at theComputing Center, with an independent line of administration as an educationalorgan of the University'. The IBM Watson Lab courses would be taken over bythe Computing Center. Textwrangler mac manual. The initial staff was to be 15 persons covering twoshifts, including a branch librarian [29]. TheComputing Center was to serve 'those whose research is sponsored and thosewhose research is not. It has been created with the aim of serving all of theneeds of both groups without preference toward either one, with theexpectation that its cost would have to be met in substantial part by theUniversity' [36].
- Two data channels.
- Two IBM 1301 Model 2 disks,total capacity: 9320000 36-bit words.
- Six IBM 729VI 7-track tape drives.
- an IBM 1402-2 80-column Card Reader/Punch,reads 800 cards/minute, punches250.
- Two IBM 1403 chain printers, 132 cols/line, 1100lines/minute = 3 secs/page.
- 7040 Console Typewriter.
- 1014 Remote Inquiry Unit.
- Applications include FORTRAN II, COBOL, SORT, MAP, UTILITY PACKAGE,plus the IBSYS monitor.
- 4000 characters of memory.
- Two 729V tape drives.
- One 600 LPM printer.
- Advanced Programming Package
- 5 IBM 026 key punches,one of which is an express punch (on stilts so the operator has to stand up).
- 1 IBM 407 accounting machine.
- 1 IBM 519 Model 1 Reproducing Punch.
- 1 IBM 085 Collator.
- 1 IBM 082 Sorter.
- 1 IBM 557 Alphabetic interpreter
Access to computing was batch only. Users brought decks or boxes of punch cards tothe operators and came back the next day to retrieve their cards and theresulting listings from the output bins. Jobs were paid for out of grants orfunny money. There were no user terminals and there was no user access to themachine room, which was staffed around the clock byoperators and a shift supervisor.
'During the first six months of the Center's operation, [the 7090] logged907.55 hours on 158 projects for 101 members of our academic staff. Downtimeran to thirty hours or so monthly during the first two months, as expected ina new installation, but fell to acceptable levels for the remainder of theperiod. About forty-five percent of the time used was furnished to projectssponsored by government contracts.' [36]
(The story of administrative computing prior to 1965 is still largelya mystery. Dorothy Marshall, VP for ADP, upon her retirement in 1988, wrote areminiscence in the ADP Newsletter [11],where she recalls that 'ADP actually originated in the Controller's Office,the first [administrative] department to use a punch-card system. The firstlarge system ADP acquired is still with us -- the Alumni Records and GiftInformation System (ARGIS) -- and I recallvery clearly the accusations that we were using all the tape drives and allthe system resources at the expense of the University researchers.' (This wasto be a recurring theme.) Unfortunately Dorothy did not mention dates orplaces.)
(Coincidentally, some clue was provided on the front page of the ColumbiaUniversity website, 18 Jan 2001, and subsequent University Recordarticle[18] announcing theretirementof Joe Sulsona, shift supervisor of the Computer Center machine room,after 42 years: 'Sulsona, a New York City native, went from high schooldirectly to the military. When he returned from Korea in 1957 at the age of23, he studied the latest in computing, gaining experience as a boardprogrammer, which involved the manipulation of wires and plugs on a computerboard, much like the original telephone operating systems. He was hired atColumbia's alumni faculty records office as a machine operator and spent histime punching out data cards using a small keypunch machine.')
- Model 75 CPU 2075 with 2.5 million bytes of memory.
- Two processor storage units 2365 (512K total)
- Selector Channel 2860-II
- Drum storage control 2820
- Drum storage unit 2301(fixed-head cylindrical disk for swapping)
- Direct-access storage facility 2314 with 2844 2-channel control unit
- Two storage control units 2841
- Eight disk storage drives 2311
- Multiplexor channel 2780
- Two card reader/printer controls 2821
- Four printers 1403 with 1416 print train
- Two card reader/punches 2540
- Two typewriter terminals 2740
- Forty typewriter terminals 2741
- Two communications adapters 2701
- Display control 2848-I
- Ten display stations 2260-2
- Two tape control units 2803
- Two magnetic tape units 2402-2 (4 drives)
- Magnetic tape unit 2402-5 (2 drives)
- Two magnetic tape tape units 2402-6 (4 drives)
- On-Line CRT display Stromberg-Datagraphics 4060
With the exception of the last item, all model numbers are IBM.
- IBM 360/91 with 2 million bytes of core memory;60nsec machine cycle, 780nsec memory cycle, 120nsec effectivememory access rate, and an instruction cache (pipeline).
- An additional drum.
- All of the peripherals and equipment listed above for the 360/75.
- Two full-time IBM technicians on site (Hansund Fritz?)
The 360/75 became the Attached Support Processor (ASP) for the 91, essentiallya job scheduler and input/output controller, freeing the 91 for intensivecomputation. I don't have a photo of our own Model 75, butHERE is one from IBM.
Rather than rent the coupled 360/75/91 system as IBM proposed, the Universitypurchased it outright for seven million dollars [19],to be amortized over seven or eight years (whether seven or eight was a pointof much contention, as it affected the chargeback rates levied upon researchgrants; in fact it was in operation for more than eleven years; thus thedecision to purchase saved about fifteen million dollars). Of the total cost,three million dollars was for the 360/91 CPU, memory, and second drum; thiswas only half the list price due to the educational allowance that wasnegotiated. The rest was for the 360/75 and its peripherals.
My own (perhapsinflated) recollection is that the 360/91 covered about an acre of floorspace, most of which was devoted to full-sizecabinets each containing 16K of core memory, for a total of 2MB at about8 square feet of floorspace (and about 48 cubic feet) per 16K, plussurrounding floorspace for access, times 300. Each memory cabinet had aglass door so you could look in and see each bit. All the disks, tapes, printers, Teletypes and everything else were in there too,plus a vast tape library and specialized test equipment such as the BOM(Byte Oriented Memory) tester.
All this was powered through a gigantic cast-iron motor generator weighingwho-knows-how-many tons (just the flywheel probably weighed a ton) putting out400-some Volts 3-phase power, and cooled by distilled water trucked in by DeerPark in big glass bottles in wooden crates. There was a control room in thebasement full of pipes, valves, gauges, pumps, and water jugs and a mammothcooling tower upstairs, venting half a million BTUs per hour into theatmosphere (Alan Rice, a physics PhD student who was also a night-shiftoperator, recalls an incident in which a heat alarm summoned the firedepartment, who were ready to chop the machine up with axes until he talkedthem out of it).
But the most impressive feature of the 360/91 was its control panel(PHOTO). The operators used to turn off the roomlights and stare it at all night, waiting for the yellow 'loop mode' lightcame on (executing a loop in the pipeline without accessing core memory);this was the sign of a well-crafted program.(For more about loop mode,READ THIS).
There was an ongoing bubble chamber experimentin the machine room, which began in the 7094 days. Stereo photographs ofbubble chamber events were digitized using the High-Energy Particle Detector(HPD) Flying Spot Scanner (HPD might also stand for Hough-Powell Device),channel-attached to the 360/91, as was a very largeIBM 2250 video display with light pen (this terminalalone was said to have cost $100,000), to allow scientists to interactivelyselect interesting events for analysis. This kind of work required physiciststo take the computer standalone for hours at a time, which became problematicin later years when it was in demand by the general academic andadministrative computing population around the clock, and eventually theexperiment was discontinued: the science for which the computer was originallyacquired, and which provided much of the funding for it, was squeezed out bythe mundane requirements of instruction and administration.
The Stromberg-Carlson 'on-line CRT display' (NEED PHOTO) was in fact a kind ofgraphics plotter, about the size of a panel truck, originally in the machineroom but later parked outside in the hallway where it couldn't hurt the othermachines. Users created graphics images on the mainframe using a packagecalled IGS, wrote them to 7-track magtape, and had the operators feed themagtape to the plotter. The images were projected on a screen inside the box;a 35mm camera -- no kidding -- would take a picture of the screen, and thensomehow disgorge its film, which would be developed in chemical baths, washed,and mounted as a slide that would eventually pop out of the little output slotif all went well, which rarely was the case -- more often the machine leakedacid and/or caught fire. Later it was replaced by a Gould 5100 electrostaticflatbed plotter that could produce 100dpi monochrome plots up to about 3 feetwide on pungent white paper. Various plotting packages (including onethat Howard Eskin and I wrote that fitted lines, curves, and splines to datapoints) were available for it on the mainframe only.
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The Columbia Computer Center offices and the Columbia Purchasing Departmentmove to the Watson Lab building on 612 West 115th Street. The IBM-Columbiarelationship continues for some time afterward mainly in the form of facultyappointments (in 1976 I took a graduate-level numerical analysis course inthe Engineering School from one such professor, Pat Sterbenz, author of thebook Floating-Point Computation). IBM left behind a machineroom with raised floor (back of 7th floor, where they had their 1620), a fully equipped classroom (back of 1), and lotsof furniture including my 1940s-vintage Steelcase desk with metal PhysicsDept ID plate attached (dating from World War II when IBM moved into Pupin).During its residence at Columbia University, IBM Watson Laboratory staff hadbeen granted 67 patents and published 359 articles in recognized scientificjournals [9].
Dorothy Marshall [11] writes, 'The third floor [of 612 West 115th Street]was entirely without inner walls and contained large milling machines andother noisy tooling machines, as well as pipes, hoses, and exhaust ducts[but] the staff at Casa Hispanica felt they were extraordinarily crowded'[so were glad for the additional space]. Nola Johnson writes in the sameissue, 'I remember when we were packed like sardines in Casa Hispanica.There would be three or four of us in one tiny room, complete with keypunchand fireplace.'
Until about the mid-1970s, CUCC staff submitted jobs from Watson (as they haddone from Casa Hispanica), and messengers went back and forth deliveringdecks of cards and rolled-up printouts. In fact,rolled-up printouts still arrived each day from a daily batch job that wassubmitted decades ago and ran faithfully until 2004 when the Academic IBMmainframe was retired; nobody knew exactly what the batch job didor how to cancel it.
(Newsletters of the early 70s were devoted mainly to JCL hints and tips,announcements of meetings and conferences, announcements of OS/360 upgrades,explanations of cost accounting, and lists of unclaimed tapes in the tapelibrary -- up to 6 pages of numeric tape IDs on one occasion (in the EarthWeek issue no less: V6#5, 15 Apr 1971) -- plus the annual April Fools Issue,usually featuring parodies of cost accounting.Prior to 1971, they also contained abstracts or reports of researchprojects, e.g. 'Motivating Learning in Interracial Situations' (V5#2); 'FrenchBusiness Elite Study', Jonathan Cole et al; 'Transport and Fluid Mechanics inArtificial Organs', Ed Leonard et al (V5#13); as well as Computer ScienceColloquia.)
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The back of the 7th floor was an IBM machine room dating from the 1950s,complete with raised floor, 'space phone' floor-tile pullers, andcommunication cables radiating out to all the offices. The famous 1957 bookabout IBM, Think [8], speaks of teakpaneling and cozy fireplaces, but those were in thefirst Watson Lab, not this one.
In those days, the Computer Center had a certain academic standing not onlythrough faculty appointments, but also for its R&D activities and library.The non-circulating research library (not to be confused with theThomas J Watson Library of the Business School) in room 209 of the Computer Center Building was a full-fledged branch ofthe Columbia Library, complete with card catalog and librarian (the originallibrarians were Julia Jann and Hugh Seidman; Nuala Hallinan [20] was librarian from 1966 to 1973, succeeded by EvelynGorham). The holdings, cataloged in Butler Library, included computer sciencebooks and journals as well as computer manuals and Computer Centerhandouts [25]. New acquisitions continued untilat least 1973. Eventually (about 1980) the collection was transferred to theEngineering Library.
Several technical staff members performed pure R&D, for exampleRichard Siegler who worked half-time on an AI medical diagnosis assistantin SPITBOL with Dr. Rifkin at the Medical Center. An annual catalog, theColumbia University Bulletin, Computing Activities [7] was published, as well as a Technical Abstract ofeach year's research projects. CUCCA was co-sponsor (with EE/CS) of theUniversity Colloquium in Computer Science. There was an alliancewith NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on 112th Street (Tom's Restaurantbuilding), which had one of the four existing IBM 360/95s.
The academic user community was quite small. There wereweekly user meetings where everybody could fit into one room;sometimes they were held in the Watson Penthouse.
When developing software on the mainframe, writing in assembler, Fortran,PL/I, etc (compiled, not interpreted, languages), programs would often 'dumpcore' because of faulty instructions (bugs, mistakes). In those days, a coredump meant a literal dump of literal core memory to the printer, in hex,sometimes several feet thick. To find the fault, programmers would have todecode the core dump from the listing by hand, separating instructions,addresses, and data -- a lost art (and good riddance!) When the DEC-20s arrived on the scene, it became possible to analyzeand debug core images (and even running programs) interactively andsymbolically with a tool called (what else) DDT, and debugging tasks that oncetook days or weeks became quick and even fun. DDT-like tools live on today inUnix as 'adb' and 'gdb'.
(From 'Bandit', 6 July 2010) CALL/360 was written for Buck Rogers of IBM by seven guys who hadworked together at GE in Phoenix, then moved to the San Jose Bay Area.They wrote CALL/360 for a fixed-price, 10 month contract.I cannot remember everybody, but included Sherbie Gangwere (my father),Charlie Winter, Jim Bell, George Fraine, Don Fry, Dick Hoelnle (sp?) and ???(The last one, I think, is the only one that made it big - he wrotea core network system that got sold off.)Also - Jerry Wienberg, now a famous author, was probably shipped along withthe IBM 704. He was sent with the first 10 machines,and taught many how to program it.
The primary programming language (like in CALL/OS) was BASIC (another reasonwhy RSTS was chosen over UNIX, which didn't have BASIC), but Fortran andMacro-11 were also available. As I recall, the PDP-11/50 cost about $150,000.It occupied a fairly large room (208) in the Computer Center down the hallfrom the IBM machine room, and was comprised of four full-width cabinets (CPU,tape drive, communications, I forget what else) and a 92MB RP04 3330-type disk drive, plus a 2K fixed-head drive forswapping (RS04?). I took care of it myself (backups and all) for maybe ayear, then Ben Beecher joined me and later also some part-timers. Ben and Isat in the room with it full-time for a couple years. Our terminals wereDECwriters (later VT05, VT50, VT52, and finally VT100, and atone point a GE Terminet, that worked and soundedlike a bandsaw). But even without the Terminet, the room was so loud we hadto wear airport ear-protectors. Ben was RSTS manager after the DEC-20s camein 1977. Eventually RSTS had a user population of 1700. It was retired in1982.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I worked in Applied Physics and used thedepartmental computers for both work and EE/CS projects. The SEL (SystemsEngineering Laboratories, later Gould) 810B (1968) was the most advanced,since it had i/o devices and could be programmed in Fortran and assemblylanguage. It had 16K of memory, 2 registers, Teletype, paper tape, card reader, drum printer,and an oscilloscope-like CRT display for graphics; CLICK HERE to see a picture of the SEL 810A, which islike the 810B but without extra i/o devices. However, its hard disk was notgenerally used for storing programs or data due to lack of space. Instead,programs were read from cards or paper tape; this required toggling in abootstrap program on the console switches: a series of 16-bit words wasdeposited in successive memory locations and then executed to activate theTeletype as the control device, which could be used in turn to activate thecard or paper tape reader to read the program. Production programs weregenerally punched in object format onto paper tape (since the paper tapereader/punch was much faster than the card reader). CLICK HERE to see the SEL 810B Manual. The PDP-8computers in the same lab had no Teletype, card reader, or paper tape; theywere programmed directly from the console switches and i/o was magtape only.
The Physics Department in Pupin Hall had a DECPDP-4, several PDP-8s, a PDP-9, and a PDP-15; Electrical Engineering had aPDP-7 on the 12th floor of Mudd, that we studied downto the gate level in the 1970s EE/CS Computer Architecture course. (ThePDP-7 is also the machine for which the UNIX operating was originallywritten at Bell Labs in the late 1960s.) The keypunch room was on the 2ndfloor of Engineering Terrace near the back exit, connected by tunnel to theSSIO area. There were often long waits for punches. The 1976 Bulletin [7] also lists:
- A DEC PDP-11/45 and GT/40 Graphics Computer in Biology (Schermerhorn).
- A HP 2100 in Chemical Engineering (Prentis).
- A DG Nova 1220 and 3 DEC PDP-8s in Chemistry (Havemeyer).
- A DG Super Nova in EE/CS (Mudd).
plus various special-purpose computers for Fourier transforms, etc, some ofthem possibly analog (rather than digital) on campus, as well as all sortsof computing equipment at the outlying campuses (no doubt a tale in itself).
Nowadays most of the University conducts its business by e-mail, and it hasbeen an enormous productivity booster, eliminating telephone tag, enablingone-to-many messaging, and filling an ever-increasing role in instruction andresearch. As early as 1983 (the 9 Feb 1983 Newsletter, V15#2, is full ofallusions to this), professors were sending assignments to their classes bye-mail and collecting results the same way, with the added benefit ofquestions and answers and other discussions that could not fit in theclassroom schedule.
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Readers who were not exposed to electronic mail prior to the Internetexplosion of the mid-1990s probably won't appreciate how much more usefuland pleasant it was before then, even in its original text-only format.Today I typically have several hundred messages waiting for me each morning(after central filtering!), of which 98% are spam, advertisements,promotions, junk mail, get-rich-quick schemes, invitations to ExclusiveHigh-Powered Executive Webcasts and Enterprise Leadership Webinars, chainletters, be-my-friend-and-share-photos, inspirational Powerpoints, strategicpartnerships, 'office humor', world class enterprise solutions, body-partenhancements, business best practices, claim your lottery winnings, claimyour inheritance, claim your fund, 'Dear beloved', 'I am dying, I don't wantyou to feel sorry for me', 'Beloved in Christ', 'Dear beneficiary','Complements of the season', confidential matter, delinquent accounts, cashgrant award, designer watches, investment opportunities, work-at-homeopportunities, get your diploma, grow your business, increase yourprofitability, 'Dear entrepreneur', 'Take this five-minute survey', offersfrom soldiers in our many wars who found barrels full of money, 'I want toplace an order with your store', low-interest loans, 'your account isexpired', Viagra, Cialis, lonely hearts, Russian beauties, 'update yourinformation', bounce notifications about mail you didn't send, anddeliberate attempts at implanting viruses (Windows e-mail attachmentscontaining viruses or worms have no effect on my UNIX-based plain-text mailclient) -- or security alerts or complaints about all of these. In the1970s and 80s, by contrast, practically every e-mail message was legitimate,worth reading, and usually only 1-2K bytes in length, and could not possiblyhurt your computer (not strictly true; it was possible to put anescape sequence in an email message that, if it arrived intact at certainkinds of terminals, could make them automatically transmit any desired textback to the host, but even if you had a terminal that responded to the escapesequence, this rarely could cause any serious demage because an email clientwould be on the receiving end, not the system command prompt).
Even when e-mail is exchanged between consenting parties, the demands posedby multimedia attachments -- Microsoft Word documents, Powerpoints,spreadsheets, images, audio and video clips, even entire music CDs or motionpictures -- have coerced the University to constantly upgrade its networkand mail server capacity, and of course the costs are inevitably passed backto the consumer in the form of tuition or overheadincreases and/or cutbacks in other areas.
The DEC-20 was a member of the DEC's 36-bit PDP-10line of computers, which descended from the PDP-6, first produced in 1964, andwhich itself has its roots in the 36-bit IBM 700 series that goes back to1952. PDP-10s, however, were distinct from 20s: they had a differentoperating system (TOPS-10 instead of TOPS-20); they came in a variety ofmodels (KA, KI, KL, KS), whereas DEC-20s came in only KL and KS models;PDP-10s were more suited to hands-on lab work, with all sorts of devicesand attachments lacking from the -20s such as real-time bus-attachedinstruments; DECtapes, paper tape, and graphics devices; they could beinstalled in multiprocessor configurations; and they were blue rather thanorange. DEC-20s could run TOPS-10 applications in an 'emulation mode', butnot vice versa, and until the very end, quite a bit of DEC-20 software wasindeed native to TOPS-10 (e.g. the linker and most of the compilers).
The DEC-20 pioneered all sorts of advanced concepts such as a swappablemonitor (kernel), lightweight processes (threads), page mapping, shared pageswith copy-on-write, hardware assisted paging, and other techniques to allowlarge numbers of users access to a limited resource (CLICK HERE for details).Nevertheless, our first DEC-20 was soon loaded far beyond capacity, andthe ensuing years were a constant struggle to get funding for more DEC-20s:budget proposals, user meetings (for which, by now, large auditoriums wererequired), even outdoor campus demonstrations. But DEC-20s were expensive;they demanded copious floor space and air conditioning, as well as 3-phasepower with isolated ground (a 10-foot copper stake literally driven intobedrock outside the CUCCA loading dock). Annual maintenance alone wassomething like $100,000 per machine, and each one carried an additional$10,000 electric bill. Therefore adding DEC-20s was difficult and painful.There were all sorts of revenue-raising schemes and eventually we had 4 ofthem, CU20A through CU20D, serving 6000 users, up to 70 or 80 logged insimultaneously on each. Additional DEC-20s for instruction and research wereinstalled at Teachers College and in the Computer Science department.
DEC-20s were fairly reliable for their day. Unlike the IBM mainframe with itsscheduled two-hour nightly System Time, the DEC-20s were kept runningand available all the time except for a couple hours (usually outside of primetime) every week or two for 'preventive maintenance' by DEC Field Service.But by today's standards they crashed frequently anyway, usually because ofpower glitches; so often, in fact that somebody had a batch of%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING T-shirts made up (this was the dying gaspof the DEC-20 as it went down). Whenever a DEC-20 was up for more than 100hours, people became quite excited. The record was just shy of 800 hours(about a month); MTBF was under 100 hours (4 days). By comparison, today (8Feb 2001) I have an HP workstation in my office that has been up continuouslyfor 883 days (that's more than 21,000 hours), despite numerousbrownouts and momentary power failures, and that's without a UPS (eventuallyits running streak was interrupted at 900-some days when electricians neededto shut off power to the floor to replace the circuit-breaker panel).
For lots more about the Columbia DEC-20s,CLICK HERE.
(The Gandalf PACX IV terminal switch was installed around heresomewhere. Prior to that terminals were hardwired using various forgottentechnologies like 20mA Current Loop. The PACX was a speed-transparent1000x1000 switch, driven by little blue 'PACXboxes' on the user end, with thumbwheels to dial the desired service andan on/off switch.)
EMACS, by the way,was created at theMITAI Lab on a PDP-10 runningMIT's IncompatibleTimesharing System (ITS)by RichardStallman, building upon the venerable Text Editor andCOrrector, TECO, written in 1962-63for the DEC PDP-1 byDan Murphy, whowas also largely responsible forTOPS-20, the operatingsystem on our DECSYSTEM-20s. I first used TECO in 1972 on a PDP-11/20 withthe DOS/Batch operating, at the Teletype console. The first release ofEMACS was in 1976 and we were using it at Columbia on CU20A by 1977.Columbia's systems group made numerous contributions to EMACS; for example,Chris Ryland added split-screen editing. In the 1980s EMACS would becompletely rewritten inLISP,to become thenow-universal GNUEMACS, one of the most prominent surviving relics of the heyday of theDEC 36-bit mainframes.
(Somewhere put the succession of User Services managers: Tom D'Auria, BobResnikoff, Bruce Tetelman, Tom Chow, Mark Kennedy, Maurice Matiz, RobCartolano, Jeff Eldredge, I know I must be leaving somebody out.) and SSIO(Marianne Clarke, Lois Dorman, Chris Gianone, .) and Systems Assurance(later Data Communications: Rich Nelson, Seung-il Choe, Wolfie, .) andCUCCA business managers (Peter Bujara, Neil Sachnoff, Patty Peters, BobBingham, Julie Lai.) About User Services, Maurice Matiz adds:
User Services existed only up to early in my era. After Vace's appointmentand my appointment (I believe the only two managerial and higher levelappointments that required a trying and complete interview by the wholeUniversity occurred in late 1989) did the groups that now define AcIS getcreated except that User Services comprised three groups.User Services stayed until Jeff Eldrege's group was spun out of my group,which had grown to over 25 people, in late 1994. (My diagramed proposal isdated 11/28/94.) At that time we changed names. Jeff's group became theSupport Center and my group was renamed Academic Technologies. Also spunout at the time was what became EDS to report to Walter Bourne.
- Dec 1978:
- First mention of UNIX by CUCCA in public (referring to the BSTJ UNIX issue [15]). V10#18.
- 1979:
- The Computer Science Department was created as a separate entity (previouslyit was part of the EE Dept) with Joseph Traub from CMU as Chair, and a$200,000 donation from IBM. Joe had beena Watson Fellow in Applied Mathematics in 1958-59 [9].The Computer Science Building was constructed 1981-83[12]. Before long a DECSYSTEM-20, several VAX-11/750s,and numerous workstations (early Suns and others) would be installed in thenew CS facility.
- Jan 1979:
- Public terminals were available in SSIO (20),272A Engineering Terrace (14), Furnald Lobby (4), 224 Butler (4),and Hartley Lobby (4). V11#2. Systems Assurance staff (Bob Galanos) wouldmake the rounds on a daily basis to fix broken terminals, usually by replacingfuses taken out by students to 'reserve' terminals for their own use.
- Feb 1979:
- Scribe, Diablo, printwheel lore dominates the Newsletter.Big business in printwheels. The Diablo was atypewriter-like terminal with a daisy-wheel print mechanism capable ofproportional spacing, superscripts and subscripts, and even boldface (bydoublestriking) and italics (by swapping printwheels). The CUCCA newsletterwas printed on the Diablo for some years, and Diablos were deployed in publicareas for users. Scribe included a Diablo driver, which produced.POD ('Prince Of Darkness') files for it, and we wrote softwareto 'spool' these files to the Diablo itself, allowing pauses to change paperor printwheels. Printwheels were available in a variety of fonts andalphabets, but weren't cheap ($98 springs to mind).
- Aug 1979:
- COMNDJSYS package written for SAIL (so we could write user-friendly programsfor the DEC-20 in a high-level language). Andy Lowry and David Millman.
- Sep 1979:
- HP2621 industrial-strength video terminalsinstalled in Mudd and elsewhere, including anew lab in Carman Hall. This wasthe face of CUCCA to our users; many of them thought the DEC-20s were made byHP. These are monochrome text terminals with good editing capabilties (forEMACS) and solidly built. Some had built-in thermal printers. A few unitsare still to be found here in good working order.
- 1979-80:
- Chris Ryland and I write a 200-plus-page guide to DEC-20assembly-language programming. We were thinking of turning it into abook but Ralph Gorin of Stanford University beat us to it.
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- Machine room panorama.
- IBM 4341s in situ.
- The IBM Mass Storage System.
- Tape Drives.
- IBM Disk Farm.
The tug of war between demand and resources is a persistent theme inacademic computing. There has never been, and probably never will be, aclear linkage between demand and supply. Whenever resources (such as computertime, disk space, modems, network bandwidth) become scarce, as they always do,funding for expansion does not flow automatically (nor should it). Firstthere is a demand for a precise accounting of how, for what, and by whom thecurrent resources are being consumed, the gathering of which in turn taxes theresources still futher. Once the information is obtained, demands to flushout inappropriate use -- whose definition varies with the times (e.g.network capacity versus Napster in 2000) -- quickly follow.
Of course instructional computing on the DEC-20s was true to this pattern.CU20A drove itself near to melting by accounting for itself. And thencomplicated limits were imposed on CPU time, connect time, and every otherimaginable resource (using locally written software) until the interactivecomputing experience was surpassingly unpleasant for everyone: students,faculty, and staff alike. Relief was still more than a year away.
The music rebalance feature that lets you adjust the levels of different elements in a finished mix is pretty nuts. Using Reddit. Help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit. I'm in the same boat, I dislike most iZotope plugins, but RX7 is a crazy tool. The music rebalance is indeed the best source separating tool on the marked so far. I've compared it to a lot of other products and I think the biggest reason why RX7 is better is because it's trained to separate Vocals, Drums and Bass. It can separate a kick drum. Sep 13, 2018 Thoughts on iZotope RX 7? IZotope released RX 7 today. Found this video on what’s new from version 6. It would be so nice to have the Music Rebalance inside an Audio Interface to adjust it whenever we want:P. Using Reddit. Help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit gifts Communities Top Posts. Terms Content policy. https://nugreat941.weebly.com/blog/music-rebalance-rx7-izotope-download-reddit. Sep 13, 2018 Isolate mix elements from a single track with the new source separation module in RX 7, Music Rebalance. Easily reduce vocals in background music for clearer dialogue, learn how to remove vocals from a song, or separate vocal stems from a track for easy remixing. Wanted to share with the community a new tool that iZotope just released today called Music Rebalance, which is part of their audio plugin RX 7. It lets you adjust the gain of individual elements within a single mono, stereo, or multitrack file. Using Reddit. Help Reddit App Reddit coins Reddit premium Reddit gifts Communities Top Posts.
One of the measures taken to alleviate the load on CU20A was to abolish thefree perpetual student user IDs and replace them with class-related IDs thatlasted only for the duration of each course. While this ensured that theDEC-20 was used only for 'legitimate' purposes, it also made it impossible forstudents to build up a corpus of tools and information they could usethroughout their Columbia experience. A series of discussions took placethroughout 1980 exploring different possibilites for providing students withsome form of self-service, inexpensive, removeable media. The result was Kermit.
MM was used almost universally at Columbia for E-mail from 1980 until about1995, with usage trailing off thereafter as Windows and the Web took overfrom text-based computer access. When the DEC-20 line was cancelled, wewrote a new MM program in C for Unix which again, in the sharing spirit, wasmade available on the ARPANET (later Internet) and adopted by many othersites worldwide as they migrated from TOPS-20 to Unix. MM survives eveninto the 2010s (details).
The 360/91 was so big it had to be cut up with chainsaws to get it out ofthe building. The Gordian knot of cabling under the floor was unceremoniouslydisposed of with giant cable snippers the size of posthole diggers.The computer chunks were trucked away and thrown into acid baths to extractthe gold. Only the 360/91 console was spared. We had it moved to the lobbyof Watson Laboratory and arranged to donate it to the now-defunctComputer Museum in Massachusetts, but it took a year anda half for them to pick it up. In the interim, bits and pieces were removedby passersby as souvenirs. (More about this in the June1982 entry.)
- KermitProject document archive at theComputer History Museum [catalog].
- Kermit Project Oral History Transcripts at theComputer History MuseumHEREand HERE.
My personal theory is that IBM never expected the PC to be so successful.It was thrown together in a rush by a small group (not at Watson Laboratory!)from off-the-shelf components in an effort to get a foothold in thefast-growing microcomputer market. This was notIBM's first personal computer. Besides the 1956Auto-Point Computer ('personal' but by no meansdesktop), IBM had also tried and failed with the 5100and the CS-9000 in the 1970s and early 80s, bothpersonal desktop models (we had some 5100s here; the CS-9000 was targeted atchemical engineering applications as I recall, and had a special control paneland interfaces for instruments, but included a 32-bit CPU and modernprogramming languages like Pascal, and could easily have been the high-endworkstation of the early 1980s). According to a reliable source, IBMoriginally wanted the PC to have a Motorola 68000 CPU (which had a simple,flat 32-bit address space) like the CS-9000, but could not get such a productto market in time, so settled for the Intel 8088, a 16-bit segmentedarchitecture with 8-bit data paths. Worse, it had a primitive 16-lineinterrupt controller, which severely limited the number of devicesthat could be on the bus. The rest is history. I believe that if IBM hadknown that the PC would dominate the next two, three, four, or more decades,it would have invested more time, money, and thought in the original design.
(Obviously the situation is better in the 21st Century. Most of the earlykinks have been ironed out. PCs are cheap and reliable. Any quirks of thearchitecture are well-hidden from end users, and USB makes life immeasurablybetter when devices need to be attached. With Windows the dominantoperating system, the main problems now are performance – bloated OSand applications – and security. And stability.)
Enter manual ip address mac. The MSS cost about a million dollars, but Columbia got its MSS in an IBMgrant. In return, Columbia would add support for it to IBM's VM operatingsystem (in particular, it would add windowing and lookahead features to reduce'cylinder faults' and redundant cartridge fetches, and thus speed upsequential access; this was done by Bob Resnikoff of the Computer Center andAtes Dagli of the Center for Social Sciences (CSS)). CSS was responsible forloading the census data (which came on endless reels of 9-track magtape) and for arranging access to it fromwithin Columbia and from outside (V14#16). When the grant expired, Columbiawas able to purchase the MSS at a steep discount.
- The last one is broken into two lines for readability; it's really oneline. To get a good feel for the proliferation of networks and the tricksof navigating amongst them in the days before the Internet swept all elseaway, see John Quarterman's book, The Matrix[55]
- Jun 1982:
- CU20D, our third and final instructional DEC-20, was installed.
- Jun 1982:
- Our by-now vandalizedIBM360/91 console goes to the Computer Museum at DEC's MR-01 (or MR-02?)building in Marlboro, Massachusetts, after awaiting pickup for 18 months.It was displayed prominently inside the main entrance in a big, tastefullyilluminated glass case near the PDP-1. Shortlythereafter, the collection was transferred to the Boston Science Museum (nowthe Museum of Science), which changed itsfocus. Most of the computing artifacts went to the Computer History Museum,temporarily located at Moffett Field, California (an Air Force base, wherethe 360/91 console sat in 'deep storage' for many years before beingtransferred in about 2001 to deep storage at the Computer History Museum'snew site in Mountain View, California).
- Jul 1982:
- An Imagen laser printer was installed in Watson; our first laserprinter and our first printer capable of true typesetting. Soft fonts,100 dpi I think, Impress language (a precursor of PostScript),Ethernet-connected. It was only for internal CUCCA use (production ofNewsletter and handouts, etc).
- Aug 1982:
- The Xerox 9700 (PHOTO) [announced by Xeroxin 1977] arrived, replacing the Xerox 1200 after some overlap (V15#1). The9700 offered the first typesetting to the Columbia community at large, as wellas high-volume, high-speed plain-text printing. This room-sized 300dpiXerographic laser printer was installed in the back of the first floor ofWatson Lab (the present mail and network rooms) due to lack of space in theComputer Center, and it definitely needed the space. It printed 2 pages persecond, could handle duplex, portrait/landscape, 2-up, 4-up, etc, had Courier(fixed) and Helvetica and Times Roman (proportional) fonts, with italic andbold styles and selectable sizes. Formatting was done by Scribe and otherpackages and spooled to 9-track magnetic tapes that were delivered to Watsonevery evening and printed overnight. Xerox 9700 printing was available to allusers (students, faculty, staff, outside paid accounts) on all the DEC-20s andIBM mainframe systems. The DEC-20 Xerox 9700 spooling software ('PRINT/UNIT:X9700') was developed jointly by the combined CUCCA-CMU Systems Groupsover CCNET. Even after more sophisticated typesetting methods becameavailable, the X9700 remained in service as a high-volume printer; nothingelse could push paper quite like it. To this day, I think Controllers andRolmphone statements are still printed on a 9700 at a service bureau.)
- Sep 1982:
- VMM announced (e-mail for the IBM mainframe: MM for VM, Joel and thenVace).
- Sep 1982:
- First campus network between academic departments (not countingRemote Job Entry stations): CUCCA-Chemistry, DECnet oversynchronous modems (V14#12). By this time Chemistry had a VAX-11/780 and somesmaller VAXes.
- Sep 1982:
- TOPS-20 V5 installed on the CUCCA DEC-20s, featuring extended addressing(32 256KW sections = 36MB, instead of only one section), a new multiforkingExec (what we would now call 'job control'), and a programming language forthe Exec (CMU's PCL, what we would now call 'shell scripts'.see example).
- Oct 1982:
- About here we were looking into getting the AP Newswire online.Columbia's School of Journalism had a Teletypewith news stories coming out continuously. The plan was to feed this intoone of our DEC-20s and make a BBoard out of it, with a rather rapidexpiration of articles given the limited disk storage. But there werelicensing and bureaucratic impediments so it never came to pass. About1990, Columbia bought a subscription to ClariNews (in which the various newsservices are funneled to Usenet newsgroups). This lasted until 2003, bywhich time the Web had long since rendered it redundant.
- Nov 1982:
- The CUCCA Terminal and Plotter User Manual [14] was published, full of photos and detailedinstructions on using the equipment in our public areas. CLICK HERE to see a sampling of video terminals; notethe accompanying PACX boxes. NOW ON LINE insearchable PDF format. This was printed on our new Xerox 9700, one of thefirst laser printers capable of typesetting; it had two fonts, Helvetica andCourier. The manual itself should interesting to those who harbor a burningcuriosity over every minute detail in the life of President Obama,since the equipment described here is what he must have used when he was aColumbia student 1981-83, because there wasn't anything else. Check, forexample, this article he wrote inSundial Magazine, March 10, 1983. I suspect he composed it on theDEC-20, perhaps in EMACS, seated at one of the terminals in our terminalrooms; for example, the HP-2621s in Carman Hall.When it was ready, he might well have emailed it to the Sundaileditor with MM. Just a guess!
- Nov 1982:
- DECSYSTEM-20 Pocket Guide (click for PDFof the whole thing). The DEC-20 was an enormously powerful and usefulcomputing system, yet it was simple enought that we could publish anaccordion-fold pocket guide to just about all that it had to offer. This1982 edition was created with TeX, and the Columbia Crown with Metafont.The master was printed on our new Imagen Laser Printerand the printing and folding done at the Columbia print shop. It was givenout free to all comers (thousands of them).
- Dec 1982:
- The Teachers College DEC-20 connects to the campus DECnet.
- 1983-1986:
- Every Newsletter issue announces new BITNET and DECnet nodes.
- Jan 1983
- 20th Anniversary of the Computer Center.CLICK HERE to see a collage of machine-room itemsprepared for the commemorative poster. The commemorativefrisbee is at ComputerHistory Museum
- 1 Jan 1983:
- The ARPANETswitches from its original protocol, NCP, to TCP/IP. Prior to TCP/IP,the ARPANET was a private club with membership restricted defensecontractors. The fact that some of the defense contractors were also someof the top engineering and computer science universities (MIT, Stanford,CMU, etc) led to a lot of pressure from the non-military segment for moreopen access, and to a new design for the network itself. TCP/IP (TransportControl Protocol / Internet Protocol) was the result. Where ARPANET was anetwork of computers, TCP/IP provided for a network of networks; thatis, an Internet. Thus when the cutover took place, all the computers at agiven university (say, MIT), could be on the net, not just the ones used fordefense research. In this way the network was opened up, and therequirement for a defense contract for membership no longer made sense.Numerous networks such CSNET, NSFNET, and SPAN, were connected. ColumbiaUniversity as a whole got on the net in 1984 by virtue of its connection with NSF and over the next 15years, the network grew to cover the entire planet and membership was opento all.
- Jan 1983
- The Purchasing Office moves out of the Watsonbuilding and the space is occupied by ADP; now, 13 years after IBM left it,the Watson Lab building is 100% Computer Center and would remain thatway until 1991. ADP begins to offer office automation services, includingPC and LAN installations for administrative use.
- Jan 1983:
- IBM PC Kermit. Originally by Daphne Tzoar, adapted from BillCatchings' CP/M-80 Kermit (actually, if I recall correctly, Bill did theoriginal translation from 8080 MASM to 8088 Microsoft assembler in a singleEMACS session, and then Daphne made it work and added features). Later itpassed to Jeff Damens. We did versions 1.00 to 2.28 here, with variouspieces contributed from elsewhere.ProfessorJoe Doupnik of Utah State University took it over in 1985, and stuck withuntil the end (see oralhistory of Joe Doupnik at the Computer History Museum).We were actually ordered to write this program because severalprominent professors (Herb Goldstein, Bob Pollack, and Jonathan Gross)were using their new PCs to write a book,The Scientific Experience,that would be used in a new course, Science C1001-1002,Theory and Practiceof Science, in Columbia'sContemporary Civilization (the jewel in the crown of the Columbia CollegeCoreCurriculum) and wanted to be able to collaborate by uploading chapters toCU20B, where they could be shared. And they did. MS-DOS Kermit was a fixtureon the Columbia computing landscape until the Web took over in 1994-95,and popular all over the world. It's still remarkably popular today,providing VT320, Wyse, DG, ANSI, and Tektronix terminal emulation for Linuxunder dosemu, as well as data transfer for many DOS-based embeddedand experimental devices, such as THIS ONE in the InternationalSpace Station. CLICK HEREto visit the MS-DOS Kermit website.
- Jan 1983:
- Amdahl UTS installed on the IBM mainframe as a virtual machine under VM(Alan); this was the first UNIX on the central systems. But CS,Biology, and P&S had been running other forms of UNIX for some time ondepartmental minicomputers such as PDP-11s and VAX-11/750s.
(9-track magnetic tapes were big in these days,but every kind of computer used a different format: ANSI, DUMPER, BACKUP,MAGSAV, IBM OS SL, tar, cpio, etc, so writingtapeimport/export/conversion utilities was a regular cottage industry.)
Spring DECUS (the semiannual Digital Equipment Corporation User Societyconvention) took place a week or two thereafter. Ip changer free mac. At the June 2001 DECWORLD eventat the Computer Museum HistoryCenter, Roseanne Giordano, DEC's LCG [DEC-10 and DEC-20] product linemanager at the time of the cancellation, recalled that DECUS organizers,fearing violence from the crowd, installedplainclothes police in the front row to protect the speakers.
Sode Es Informatica Mac Manual Integracion Index 2017
(Around here, large departmental PC labs began to appear, for examplein the Business School and in the Learning Center.)
- 1986-1987
- West German hackers use Columbia's Kermit software to break intodozens of US military computers and capture information for the KGB, asdescribed by Cliff Stoll in his 1989 book, The Cuckoo's Egg [46]. At one point, while Cliffwatched on a jury-rigged T-connected terminal, the hackers were using Kermitto download a copy of the Telnet source code so they could implant apassword logger, upload the result, recompile it, and install it: 'Line byline, I watched Kermit shovel the program over to the hacker. But Icouldn't just kill Kermit. He'd notice that right away. Now that I wasclosing in on him, I especially didn't want to tip my hand. I found my keychain and reached over to the wires connected to the hacker's line.Jangling the keys across the connector, I shorted out his circuit for aninstant. This added just enough noise to confuse the computer, but notenough to kill the connection. It worked like a charm. I'd jangle mykeys, he'd see the noise, and his computer would ask for a replay of thelast line.' This slowed the transfer down so much that the hackereventually lost patience and gave up -- but it didn't stop Kermit! As longas the connection stays up, no matter how awful, Kermit pushes the filethrough. Cliff also measured the delay between Kermit packet andacknowledgment to estimate the hacker's distance from California (6000miles, a fairly accurate estimate of the distance to Hannover).
- 1 Jan 1986:
- CUCCA and Libraries merge. Information is information, right?(V18#2). CUCCA now reports to the University Librarian, Pat Battin.(In fact, it seems that CUCCA and Libraries merge periodically;in some sense, CUCCA has always reported to the University Librarian; inanother sense the real merger came only later, under Elaine Sloan.)The administrative half of CUCCA, ADP (now AIS, Administrative InformationServices), is severed and reports toLow Library, and eventually (1991) moves from Watson Lab to Thorndike Hall atTeachers College.
- Jan 1986:
- Columbia's first networked PC lab opensin 251 Engineering Terrace, populated with the UNIX (Pro/380), MS-DOS (Rainbow) and VAX workstations from the Hermit grant, plus eight 512K ('fat') Macintoshes and twoMac/XLs, a LaserWriter printing station, an IBM PC, and the original KermitSuperbrain (V18#2). The Pro/380 was a workstation made by DEC with a PDP-11 inside. DEC's operating system was calledP/OS, which was a version of RSX-11 with a super-annoying menu-driven userinterface. We adapted 2.8BSD UNIX to the machine for use in the lab, sothese were the first public Unix workstations deployed at Columbia.Furthermore, unlike the Rainbows, Macs, and the PC (which communicated onlythrough their serial ports with Kermit), they were on Ethernet, andtherefore on the Internet.
- Jan 1986:
- Kermit Project founded. Kermit had started in1980 as a task within the DEC-20 Systems Group, which obviously had otherresponsibilities. By the mid-80s, Kermit had become popular all over theworld, and we were receiving hundreds of requests for it every week from sitesthat were not on the network. Meanwhile, other sites were sending in newKermit implementations of their own. Fulfilling these requests andmaintaining the Kermit software archive (and mailing list, etc) had become afull-time job, so a full-time Kermit group, led by Christine Gianone (formerlythe business manager in SSIO), was created to manageand distribute the software and take over the online archive, the mailinglists, tech support, and so on. The programming was still done by members ofthe Systems group and external volunteers. Software distribution charges wereinstituted to cover costs. The old raised-floor machine room in the back ofthe 7th floor of Watson Lab (added in 1959 for the IBM 1620) became theKermit room, containing the Kermit Project computers andmedia production equipment.
- May 1986:
- The height of CCNET, which now includes Columbia, CMU, CWRU, NYU,Stevens, Vassar, and Oberlin (V18#5). An October 1986 listing shows about 200'nodes' on the network with DEC operating systems including TOPS-10, TOPS-20,VMS, Ultrix, RSX-11/M, and P/OS. Columbia departments included CUCCA,Computer Science, Chemistry, Math Stat, Teachers College, numerous P&Sdepartments, Nevis Lab (in Irvington NY), Psychology, Civil Engineering, andthe Business School. Other universities (mainly in Ohio) would join later,but in a few more years the Internet would make CCNET obsolete.
- May 1986:
- First public description of Columbia's Ethernet backbone network, andenunciation of policy for departmental connections to it (V18#5), which wasaccomplished by us writing a letter for the Provost to sign.
- Jul 1986:
- First issue of Kermit News.
- 16 Jul 1986:
- Columbia University as a whole (as opposed to only the ComputerScience Department) receives approval from the Defense Projects ResearchAgency to join the ARPANET (which would soon become the Internet)[SEE LETTER].
- Aug 1986:
- Mathematics joins Ethernet backbone.
- 1986:(month?)
- Richard Sacks takes over as acting CUCCA Director.(Howard leaves somewhere in here.)
- Sep 1986:
- The Scholarly Information Center (SIC) is proclaimed by Pat Battin,University Librarian.
- Sep 1986:
- More about the campus backbone:'A bright yellow half-inch coaxial cable runs throughthe steam tunnels up and across the west and north edges of the Morningsidecampus. This cable is the campus Ethernet backbone, a large part of which wasinstalled as part of an external research grant from Digital EquipmentCorporation [the Hermit Project].' (Alan Crosswell,Networks at Columbia, SIC Journal V1#1, Sep 1986).The backboneran from Watson Lab to Mathematics to Chemistry to the Computer Center toComputer Science to Mudd (DIAGRAM).At the time coax-based IBM PCNET and Token Ring PC networkswere commonplace networking methods for PCs.
- Oct 1986:
- Kermit,A File Transfer Protocol (Frank) published by Digital Press,with a Foreword byDonald Knuth. It remained in print for 14 years.
- Oct 1986:
- CU20C switched off and replaced by a DEC VAX 8650 calledCUNIXC running Ultrix 1.1, DEC's brand of UNIX, a 4.2BSDderivative. A pilot project assigned some CS courses to CUNIXC in Fall 1986.This was our first step in phasing out the DEC-20s after the line wasdiscontinued by DEC in 1983. This stung so severely that we would never run aproprietary operating system again (except on the IBM mainframes, of course).The attraction of UNIX was that it was available -- with relatively minorvariations -- on all kinds of computers, great and small. The 8650 wasapproximately equal to the DEC-20 in size, weight, and cost; it was chosenbecause we could recycle many of the DEC-20 peripherals, and because (unlikeother UNIXes) it supported DECnet, which we still used for departmentalconnections. Lots moreHERE about theconversion from TOPS-20 to Unix.
(About UNIX. There is much that appeals about UNIX. Its well-knownoriginal attributes (simplicity, terseness, consistent building-block tools)were spelled out in the seminal BSTJ issue [15]. Inaddition, it is platform independent, so sites like ours are not tied to aparticular vendor. Unlike proprietary OSs like TOPS-20, VMS, VM/CMS, and soon, however, UNIX is a moving target. Ever since control of UNIX left BellLabs, every implementation (Ultrix, OSF/1, AIX, HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX,Linux, FreeBSD, etc etc) is different in sometimes subtle but alwaysaggravating ways, and (with a few notable exceptions such as OpenBSD) everynew release of every varation tends to break existing applications (whereasprograms written for TOPS-20, VMS, MVS/TSO, or VM/CMS decades ago stillwork, without even recompiling). Any program more complicated than 'helloworld' is rarely portable from one UNIX to another without some 'porting'work at the source-code level. To compound matters, documentation isincreasingly scant. In the 1970s and 80s, every operating system (evenUNIX) came with a 'wall' of printed manuals that documented everything inexcruciating detail. But now documentation is considered a waste of timeand effort, since everything will change anyway. In modern UNIX, the onlyreliable documentation is the source code, and even that decays over time.)
- History of Administrative Data Processingby Nuala Hallinan
Prior to 1988, the Columbia University ID (CUID) was paper. With the Rolmsystem came laminated picture IDs with magnetic strips that worked inswipe-card readers all over campus, as well as in off-campus universitybuildings -- anyplace reached by Rolm wiring. The same wiring system thatwas used for telephones, serial-port terminal connections, and twisted-pairEthernet was also used to connect to the central access server that lets youopen doors.
Prior to this, PACX data installations required pulling wire from the PACX toeach destination, digging trenches, drilling holes through granite, etc, andcould take many months. With the CBX, it was just a matter of making somecross-connections in a distribution panel -- every phone jack was also anetwork jack. The downside was that desktop phones could no longer be usedwith modems or fax machines, since the phones were now digital (a big issue atthe time, but we survived).
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- Jan 1990:
- UsingMS-DOS Kermit (Christine) published by Digital Press, with ajacket blurb by Cliff Stoll (Yow!), author of The Cuckoo's Egg[46]. A second edition was published in 1992. Germanand French translations were also published, as was another book about MS-DOSKermit in Japanese (see theKermit Bibliography).
- May 1990:
- Vace Kundakci takes over as Director, renames CUCCA toAcIS (Academic Information Systems), as distinct fromAIS(Administrative Information Services, formerly ADP).
- Mid-1990:
- Alan Crosswell becomes Systems Manager, responsible for all centralacademic computing systems (IBM and other), a post last held by Howard Eskinand vacated 5 years before. By this time the only central computers thatmatter are Unix-based (DEC, then Encore, then Sun, plus workstations fromSun, NeXT, and HP) — the academic IBM mainframe is used mainly by theLibraries and a handful of external paying users.
(Somewhere around here CCNET was disbanded because of the Internet.)
- Jan 1991:
- The Senior Vice President of Columbia is bitten by the outsourcing bugand brings in a consulting firm, American Management Systems Inc (AMS), totake over and 'clean out' administrative computing (AIS). Seventeen peopleare fired. Although a couple of service improvements resulted (mainly a newStudent Information System, SIS), many millions of dollars were wasted on'cutting edge' projects that never panned out and a number of talentedpeople were lost. Eventually AMS left the scene and equilibrium was restored.
- 1991:
- We buy a truckload of NeXT UNIX (NeXTSTEP)workstations for both staff and labs (photo);a major commitment, and (I believe) anattempt to stem the tide of PCs and Macs, which were intrinsically unsafe andlabor intensive for their users and owners (the PCs more so than Macs, whichhave always had a great deal of support from a large contingent of thetechnical staff) and for AcIS staff in its role of support-giver. The NeXTswere configured and managed centrally; user logins were via network to thecentral University database; user directories were on centrally located,managed, and backed up NFS-mounted disks. But before long NeXT was out ofbusiness.
- 1991:
- There is much expansion, renovation, and upgrading of public computer labsduring 1991 (and ever since). The academic and administrative IBM mainframes(4381, 3090, and 3083) are all replaced by a single IBM ES/9121, which ispartitioned into separate academic and administrative virtual machines (afeature of IBM's VM operating system).
- Jan 1991:
- Three Sun-4/280s (full-sized cabinets) are installed in the machine room asCUNIXA, CUNIXB, and CUNIXD running SunOS 4.1. These (and the Encore) were soonreplaced by Sun pizza-box sized servers, and SunOS was replaced by Solaris.Where central computers once weighed tons, cost millions, filled acres offloor space, required massive cooling and exotic forms of power, now they'redirt-cheap commodity items running at unheard-of speeds with seeminglylimitless amounts of memory and storage, that can be carried under your armand plugged into an ordinary wall socket at ambient room temperature. Ofcourse, today's applications and data saturate this vast capacity just aseffectively as yesterday's simpler applications overwhelmed the resourcesavailable then, and so it shall always be.
- Mar-Oct 1991:
- Kermit protocol forconversion of Japanesetext among diverse encodings, and for efficient transfer ofpredominantly 8-bit text encodings over 7-bit transports.
(Around here, disk service begins to shift from locally attached disks toRAID file servers, and the backup system changes from the traditionalmanual 9-track tape operation to automated networkbackups to a DAT-drive 'juke box'. All the software was locallywritten and included all the academic servers, Sun as well as the IBMmainframe. Later a commercial backup system, Veritas, took the place of theoriginal homegrown one. Capacity as of Jan 2001: 400 x 40GB tapes = 16000GB(16TB) to cover 1.7TB usable space on the academic file servers.)
- Jan 1992:
- Conversion of Morningside campus backbone from Ethernet coax to opticalfiber begins; cutover in Spring 1992.
- Apr 1992:
- AIS moves out of Watson Lab to new quarters in Thorndike Hall atTeachers College (MAP)and in the Computer Center Building [20]. Floors 1 through 5 of Watson Lab were left vacantfor a period, and then, even though the AcIS space on floors 6-9 was (andremains) severely and increasingly overcrowded, the lower five floors— with their rich history and key role in science and computing— were converted to art studios.
- Nov 1992:
- UsingC-Kermit (Frank and Christine) published by Digital Press,concurrent with the release of version 5 of C-Kermit. A second edition wouldfollow in 1997, as well as a German translation.
- 1992-1993:
- Columbia's Kermit software handles the communications in theBritish relief missionto Bosnia.
- 1993:
- The era of the search engine begins. First there was Archie, thenHypertelnet, then Gopher, then the Web. In 1993, ColumbiaNet is hot, amillion accesses per year (a figure soon to be dwarfed by the Web, see Web statistics table). ColumbiaNet is a text-basedmenu-driven service (remember text?). Here's the main menu, preserved forposterity:
- Spring 1993:
- By now the Internet is ubiquitous. University TechnologyArchitecture published, setting University-wide standards fornetworking, a common TCP/IP-based network for all computing, administrativeand academic, at Columbia; this was the end product of NPG (see it here as a PDF). Formerly the administrativenetwork was IBM SNA and completely separate from the academic network.While this arrangement might have had its advantages from a securitystandpoint, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and for endusers to cope with.
- Summer 1993:
- The Schapiro Residence Hall (across 115th Street from Watson Lab) iswired for Ethernet as a pilot project for campus-wide networked dormitories.Schapiro is also the first building to be served by the new fiber backbone.
- Dec 1993:
- New AcIS modem pool announced, consisting of 80+ V.32bis 14400bps error-correcting — of course the noise is still there, but it's detected andcorrected by retransmission automatically by the modems and the IP and TCPnetwork layers, so you don't see it).
- Jan-Apr 1994:
- The Columbia website debuts; see statistics below. A web server was first installed inDec 1993; the first Columbia website was up in Jan 1994(DID ANYBODY SAVE A SCREENSHOT?),and the website was announced and publicized in Apr 1994.Early original content included the Architecture digital library (1994-95),the Art History digital library (1993-95), the Oversized Geology Maps project(1994-96), and the Bartleby full-text literature project[Source: Rob Cartolano]. Before long, a Web front end to NOTIS-basedCLIO library system was also available (DATE?).
- May 1994:
- In AIS News V4#2, the Directors of AcIS (Vace Kundakci) andAIS (Mike Marinaccio) present the full range of e-mail options available toColumbia: Pine, MM, VMM, MailBook, the newly emerging PC and Macintoshbased POP clients, and e-mail with MIME attachments.
- Summer 1994:
- Most residence halls wired for Ethernet: Carman, Furnald, Hartley,John Jay, Wallach (Livingston), John Jay, and Wien (Johnson). ResidenceHall Networking Option (RHNO) offered to students in the Fall. Thefirst electronic classrooms were set up.
- Sep 1994:
- The public labs are switched from NeXT to HP 9000/712 UNIX (HP-UX)workstations; a big attraction is their ability to run both Mac and PC(Windows) emulators as well as UNIX applications — perfect for the publiclabs but far too pricey for individual desktops.
- Sometime in 1994:
- I turn over my 'Network Tsar' responsibilities to Bill Chen and devotefull time to the Kermit Project, which I began 14 years earlier and couldnever quite give up. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Altman joins as asecond full-time developer. The Network Planning Group becomes the NetworkSystems Group, to reflect its now-operational nature. Token Ring and SNAnetworks phased out.
- Oct 1994:
- Columbia's Kermit software serves as the primary communications method inthe Braziliannational election, the world's largest election ever at the time.
- Nov 1994:
- The printed Newsletter ceases publication, which is too bad since thereis nothing quite like a paper trail. Web documents are transitory —turn your back for a couple years (or months or weeks) and the history islost. The newsletter was the Computer Center (or CUCC, orCUCCA)Newsletter until November 1988, after which it suffered a series ofmakeovers and name changes: Columbia Computing, Computing News, AcademicComputing, SIC [sic] Journal, etc, and then gave up the ghost.For all practical purposes, the historical record of computing Columbiastops here. There was an ASCII archive of newsletters through 1988 onthe DEC-20s, but it was lost when CU20B was switched off.
- Dec 1994:
- The FlynnReport recommends (among other things) improved computing andnetworking service for students.
- 1994-95:
- Windows and the Web take over. The diverse, rich, idiosyncratic historyof computing stops here. For the first time, computing and networking areopened up to the general public. The locus of computing and networking shiftsfrom science and academia to the mass market.
- 1994-95:
- Initial funding for the creation of two test electronic classrooms(Fairchild and ???) for the 1994-95 year.
- 1994-present:
- AcIS is primarily occupied with the Web, Web-basedservices, 'content', labs, kiosks, Sun servers and NFS'toasters', multimedia classrooms, wired dorms, mobile and wirelesscomputing, video conferencing, webcasting, distance learning, all the whilefending off attacks from within and without — viruses, spam, open mailrelays, junk mail, denial of service attacks, worms, etc — that occurcontinuously from all corners of the globe, and constantly struggling tokeep up with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, storage, and dial-inmodems, often just to accommodate services like Napster, Kazaa, InternetRelay Chat, Instant Messaging, and people emailing cartoons, photos, andmovies to each other or serving streaming video from their dorm rooms.Superficially, users rely on AcIS less than before, now that they have theirown desktop computers and applications. But in fact they rely on AcIS morethan ever for essential daily services like virus protection and screening,e-mail and Web access, not to mention the Sun and RAID server farms thatprovide these services — as well as safe, backed-up storage —and the unglamorous infrastructure of network wiring, hubs, and routers(installation, maintenance, updates, expansion, management, configuration),plus the ongoing 'feeds' from the administrative student information, humanresources, and alumni systems, allowing automated identity creation,security, web-based student services, web-based courses, and all the rest,serving virtually every student, staff, and faculty member of theUniversity, a community of over 40,000 users (plus another 50,000+ alumniwith e-mail service).
- 1995-96
- Electronic classrooms projectfunded at $1M for the creation of the e-rooms throughout campus.
- Oct 1995:
- Kermit 95 forWindows 95 released; this (and C-Kermit)would be the main preoccupation of the Kermit Project for the years to come,plus active involvement inIETF and Unicodestandards. Kermit is a laboratory where we can learn about, experimentwith, develop, and finally package, document, and deploy file transfer andmanagement protocols, Internet clients and servers, character-set translationtechniques, secure authentication and encryption methods, and algorithms ofall kinds big and small, even transport-level network stacks. Even aprogramming language.
- 1996:
- Pioneers in Computing (video), Brief history of Watson Lab, talk byHerb Grosch (minutes 43-50), Computer History Museum.
- 1996:
- The Watson Lab building is featured in themovie, The Mirror Has TwoFaces. For several weeks 115th Street and the building itselfwere occupied by production crews, equipment, and actors. The final shot inthe movie zooms in to a Watson window. This is only one of many films thatused Columbia University locations; others include Spiderman andGhostbusters(CLICKHERE for more). The Columbia neighborhood is also a frequent settingfor TV shows such as Law & Order (where 'Hudson University'is a fictionalized Columbia University) andNew YorkUndercover (1994-1998).
- Fall 1997:
- The 50th anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)passed unnoticed at Columbia, even though theACM was founded here.
- Jul 1999:
- Rolm Dataphone connections (top speed: 19200 bps) were discontinuedbecause by now everybody had Ethernet in their Rolmphone jacks; the Annex andCisco terminal servers to which the central data modules were connected wereswitched off and removed.
- Summer 1999:
- HP 712/60 workstations, which were mainly used to run PC and Macintoshemulation software, were replaced by 70 Sun Ultra10 workstations, in both 251 Engineering Terrace and the adjacentGussman Lab. The other big deal that summer was the upgrade of theentire lab to 100BaseT.
- Dec 1999:
- In Pupin Laboratory, site of the world'sfirst automated scientific calculations 65 years earlier,the Computational Field TheoryGroup of the Columbia University Physics Department, working with IBM TJ WatsonResearch Center andBrookhaven National Laboratory,begins construction of a multiteraflops supercomputing resource, theQCDOC machine(Quantum Chromodynamics On a Chip).In April 2002, the group received a fivemillion dollar grant from RIKEN, the JapanInstitute of Physical and Chemical Research in support of this work.CLICK HEREfor further information.
[ Early ][ 1920 ][ 1930 ][ 1940 ][ 1950 ][ 1960 ][ 1970 ][ 1980 ][ 1990 ][ 2000 ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
The new Web-centric CLIO is built on Endeavor Information SystemsInc. Oracle-based Voyager software, running on AcIS-administered Sun Solarisservers, and is also used at the US Library of Congress, the US NationalLibraries of Medicine and Agriculture, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Penn, andelsewhere. At this point, 92% of the University's holdings are catalogedonline, a total of 4 million records, with plans for the remainder (withexceptions like maps and rare books, plus divisions that never joined themain catalog such as the Law and TC Libraries) to be in the catalog by 2005.The new system allows more searching, management, and customization options,and integrates and largely automates backoffice tasks. Perhaps moresignificantly, it is designed to accommodate Unicode, potentially allowingnative-script cataloging of materials in Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew,Chinese, Japanese, and most other languages. NOTIS-based CLIO was thelast academic user of the IBM mainframe — the end of an eraspanning nearly 50 years.
COLUMBIA.EDU 20th anniversary. |
I have 30+ years of e-mail archives, and it is absolutely mission-criticalthat I own all of my mail files. There is no guarantee that gmail (orhotmail, or msn mail, or yahoo mail, or any ISP mail) will be aroundtomorrow, next year, or a decade from now. e-mail is a critical record ofinstitutional, governmental, and industrial work, and it needs to be ownedby those who created it, not given away to an outside source who is busymining it, and could lose or corrupt it.Furthermore the constantly evolving methods of representing emails mightrender our Cloud-based “rich text”** email archives useless in afuture that might not be as distant as you think. Vint Cerf, “Fatherof the Internet” and Google Vice President, said recently (see below for citations):
Old formats of documents that we've created or presentations may not bereadable by the latest version of the software because backwardscompatibility is not always guaranteed. And so what can happen over time isthat even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may notactually know what it is.Plain text, on the other hand, is eternal. ASCII, which serves for Englishand a few other languages, was (and is) a well-defined and mature nationaland international standard, as are subsequent standards like ISO 8859 andISO 10646 (Unicode) that increased the character repertoire to accommodateother languages and writing systems. Whereas presentation methods aredriven by corporate interests and competition and they never stop changing***.The medium swallows the message.
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| * | Columbia's Kermit 95software for Windows employs a Compose-Key mechanism that lets you enterany accented Roman letter without leaving the home keys, evenon a regular US-model keyboard.And a Russian keyboard mode for US keyboards, allowing Russian to be typed'phonetically'. |
| ** | It might be plain text when you enter it, but Google converts it toHTML and encodes it in Quoted-Printable notation. That's today; whoknows what it will do tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you want to embed HTML inyour Gmail message deliberately (for example, a table or a list).good luck! |
| *** | Ever-changing versions of HTML that render old pages 'uncompliant'.The supposedly immutable original version of HTML. Then XHTML, XML,HTML5. CSS, CSS2, CSS3. De facto 'standards' present and past:Microsoft Word, WordStar, WordPerfect, WPS-8, Multimate, PostScript, PDF,MacWrite, ., and going back a long ways:Runoff,Troff, NLS, . What the world needs and probably will never get is one single immutableinviolable universal standard for the digital representation and archivingof self-contained plain text. I would venture that we had one in the earlydays of email (lines of ASCII text, CRLF to separate lines, double-CRLF toseparate paragraphs), which need only to be expanded to specify UTF-8encoding rather than ASCII, so as to acommodate text in every language andwriting system. |
The choice of Linux is primarily market-based, not merely a matter of priceor source-code availability, but of market dominance. Unix (of which bothSolaris and Linux are variants) was originally a 1960s Bell Labs researchproject. Over time it became a proliferation of commercial products –“solutions” – that ran on specific hardware –Solaris for Sun, HP-UX for Hewlett-Packard, AIX for IBM, etc. – but all thesehave practically vanished by now. Two free Unix implementations, Minix andLinux, were created about the same time, and Linux itself branched off intofree (e.g. Debian, Slackware) and corporate (e.g. Red Hat Enterprise)versions. Another branch, descending from the Bell Labs original viaBerkeley Unix and including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and friends, remainsfree community-sourced software. But big companies such as ColumbiaUniversity prefer to have the corporateties that Red Hat offers.
I graduated from the school of General Studies in 1970 and left thedepartment to find a real job, and wound up driving a taxi in Bronx. Aftera while Lee asked me to come back and work in the department full-time asthe administrator for a newprogram he was in charge of, dealing with the social responsibilities ofengineers and ways they could be of public service. Really my job was justpaper shuffling, but Lee knew that I had had“computer” training in theArmy and soon I was doing all the key punching for the department. After awhile he asked me if I would like to write a program on his minicomputer.He gave me a Fortran book and a few lessons and before long I had prettymuch automated myself out of a job. Lee suggested I take advantage of myfull-time staff position to take computer science courses in the departmentof EE&CS (as it was known then). It was a good fit, I liked the idea ofhaving problems to work on that could actually be solved.
As a sideline, Lee was a consultant in nuclear medicine at Mt. SinaiHospital (click here for an example of hiswork there). When the Columbia project I was working on came to a close, hegot me my first real programming job in Mt. Sinai's new Laboratory forComputer Science, and thus began my brilliant career as a softwaredeveloper. Along the way I wrote some books and always featured him in theacknowledgments, as in my last book(UsingC-Kermit, 2nd Ed.): “. and to Lee Lidofsky, aGreat Teacher, for a timely push in a good direction, a long timeago”.
Incidentally, the computers at the Mt. Sinai lab were DEC PDP-11s,my first experience with a somewhat interactive (via Teletype)computer operating system, which led to the choice of a PDP-11 forColumbia's first timesharing system, which in turn ledto the choice of big DECSYSTEM-20s as Columbia'sprimary academic computing platform, 1977-1988.
Anyway, thanks to Lee I had a decent job with good salary and benefits thatallowed me to raise a family and put my kids through college. If notfor Lee, I'd probably still be driving a cab! Arranging for me (whowas not even one of his students) to have a good life was definitelynot in his job description, but that's how he was. I'm sure there area thousand other stories just like this one.| ______________________ | |
| * | In case the link goes stale,click here for a screen shot.Also see the See Burlington Free Press obituary |
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Epilog
The first paragraph below was written a long time ago and doesn't reallyapply more. In the new century, computing resources are mainly private andthe University happily supplies the mostly invisible infrastructure. Thereare no more budget battles as in the 1970s and 80s, nowadays nobodyquestions the importance of universal high-speed network availability andwhen the network needs expanding or upgrading, it happens without astruggle. Furthermore support staff is at an all-time high, by far, as isoffice space. But then, so is tuition, yet students get a lot less bang forthe buck in terms of employment prospects after graduation, not to mentionmany of them being saddled with enormous debt. Sometimes I wonder ifstudents 100 or 250 years ago didn't get a better education with justlectures, blackboards, and books.A theme that runs throughout this story is the neverending tug-of-war betweensupply and demand. Computers were extremely expensive in the early days, andspace has always been the most valuable resource at Columbia's confined urbancampus. The first computers were obtained largely through grants for specificresearch projects, but soon other uses were found for them and the Universitybecame increasingly dependent on them. After the grants expired the computershad to be continuously maintained, upgraded, and replaced. The eternalquestions have been: How to pay? What to sacrifice? Where to put theequipment? How to get the space? How to recoup the expense? How to increaseaccess? How to allocate limited computing resources? How to expand resourcesthat are swamped by increasing demand? Who subidizes and who is subsidized?
It's interesting to ponder the transformation of Columbia from a quill-penoperation in the 1700s to the 'wired' (and, increasingly, wireless) one it istoday. Computers, obtained originally for scientific work that could not bedone any other way, were also turned to administrative tasks such asregistration, student records, payroll, and so on. What was the cost inmoney, space, and personnel before and after? And then later when centralizedcomputing (based on a single multimillion dollar computer system) became fullydistributed, with a PC on every desk, how did that change the overallexpenditures, consumption of space and electrical power, personnel rosters,and the productivity of each person? Any clear answer would take a great dealmore research than was done here, but the following table is suggestive:
| 1925 | 2010 | Increase | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Students | 24188 | 27606 | 14% |
| Officers of Instruction | 1771 | 3630 | 205% |
| Officers of Administration | 92 | 5813 | 6218% |
| Full-Time Support Staff | 1198 | 3402 | 184% |
| Tuition (dollars per point) | 8 | 1372 | 17150% |
Sources: The 1925 figures come from Columbia's 1924-25 Catalog[5] and from the 1924-25 Annual Report[35]; the student count does not include another 12,916summer session students; the officers of administration include 38 who arealso on the faculty. The 2010 figures come from the Columbia University Statistical Abstract of the Officeof Planning and Institutional Research (on the Web). The growth in facultyis accounted for almost entirely by the Health Sciences campus, which didnot exist in 1925.
Although the role of computing in staff and tuition increases is far fromclear, it is evident that Columbia University was able to offer afirst-class education to about 20,000 students annually with a lot lessoverhead and at far less expense without computers than with them, evenaccounting for inflation (which averaged 3.1% per year from 1925 to 2000 or987% over the period; thus if tuition had merely kept pace with inflation,it would have risen only to $79 per point rather than $834 in 2000). Ofcourse, one can't necessarily blame computers alone for a topheavybureaucracy -- since the 1950s, huge amounts of additional work in the formof reports (compliance, demographic, financial, etc) mandated by government,suppliers, and contractors at every level. Anyway, as any student whoregistered in the old days (filling in countless forms by hand with the sameinformation and standing in about 50 lines to turn in each form) can tellyou, some of the new systems are an improvement. Columbia is also a farbigger employer than it was in 1925 and it's a good thing that more peoplehave work, even if it's pointless. Or if you take a closer look, maybeit's not such a good thing.
When the Computer Center opened in 1963, there was one big computer foreverybody to use, cared for by a small professional staff, initially just 15people. Today, the combined full-time staff of AcIS and AIS (now CUIT)numbers well into the hundreds, and this doesn't count an unknown number offull and part-time computer people in the administrative and academicdepartments, nor junior faculty and graduate students shanghaied intosystem-administration roles, nor the fact that almost everybody at theUniversity devotes copious time to 'managing' and fighting with their owndesktop computers into the bargain, not to mention dealing (or worse: not)with the constant onslaught of viruses, worms, and hacks from all corners ofthe world. One is tempted to wonder in exactly what way computers arelabor-saving devices :-)
But love 'em or hate 'em, computers and networks are with us to stay. Theyfirst came to Columbia for scientific and statistical work; now they areused mainly for social and entertainment purposes, plus taking notes inclass, preparation of papers, a certain amount of course work, and forcarrying on the business of the University, including a great deal of publicrelations. All students and faculty are presumed to have computer, network,and Web access; it is required in many courses and for numerous tasks suchas looking up class schedules, room assignments, and grades, and since Fall2001, also for registration.
The benefits of the Web are well known but its dangers little discussed, atleast not beyond the well-known safety hazards (credit-card theft, pedophiles,viruses) and annoyances (bugs and new features requiring constant softwareupgrades). Let's look at some of the more fundamental pitfalls that tend to beignored as we rush to replace all that is old by what is new:
- For good or ill, the Web has largely replaced the Library forundergraduate research. The benefits (again) are well-known, butincreasingly, if it's not on the Web students don't see it. Furthermore, it'soften difficult to assess the information one finds on the Web. Publishedbooks and journal articles, at least, have some measure of quality control andsome form of audit trail (you can check the primary sources yourself). At thevery least, they are substantial and immutable objects that can be referenced-- when you look at a book or article that I have referenced, you see thesame one I saw. Web pages are ephemeral, likely to move, change, or disappearat any moment, and in any case rarely have the authority of a refereed,printed publication.
- Since I wrote the previous item, the Web itself has been largelysupplanted by Google and Wikipedia for research. Wikipedia is handy, to besure, but how do you verify the accuracy of anything in it? Google, on theother hand, is a massive corporation whose only goal is making more and moremoney, and as part of achieving that goal, it controls the content we see.Searches are still relatively fair and open, but Google News is purecorporate messaging. Nevertheless, Google can throw a switch at any momentto hide entire bodies of knowledge or opinion it deems prejudicial to itscorporate health.
- In a new application of Gresham's Law, the Web tends to drive out reliableand detailed information, replacing it with unreliable and sketchy 'soundbites'. Libraries full of books and journals are increasingly viewed as'legacy' 'brick and mortar' operations that can no longer justify theirexistence in the age of electronic information. But those same librariescontain all that is known of history, culture, and science. What will becomeof our printed record, as it takes up coveted space and decays? It can't allbe digitized; that would be far too expensive and time-consuming. Thereforemuch -- probably most -- of it will be lost to posterity. And then whateverportion was digitized before the paper was discarded or crumbled will itselfbe subject to successive rounds of winnowing as the digital media, encoding,and formats become obsolete and require 'upgrading'. Repeated application ofthis process will leave only a tiny fragment of what was available to us in,say, 1980, and there will be no going back.
- New information is lost too. It was relatively easy to trace thehistory of computing at Columbia through 1994 by the paper trail ofnewsletters, books, paper correspondence files, and so on. After 1994, it'sjust a blur. If it was recorded at all, it was recorded on the Web or ine-mail, and there is no systematic archive of old Web pages and e-mails.
This history is itself a good example. Originally written in 2001, itsthen-correct HTML encoding decayed before our very eyes over the years. In2019 I converted it to HTML5, which (like most of its predecessors) issupposed be eternal. But before long HTML5 too will be 'legacy', 'deprecated', and eventually completely forgotten, as will this history.Compare with printed books, that never have to be patched or recoded orotherwise 'upgraded'.
- What is new today will be old tomorrow. The Web is not eternal.Something else is bound to appear that turns the Web into a 'deprecated'legacy' concept and the vast corpus of Web files will need conversion to thenext thing, and the winnowing process will continue.
I wrote the previous sentence about 15 years ago. Today I see Vint Cerf,'father of the Internet', saying the same thing at the American Associationfor the Advancement of Science conference in San José. Toparaphrase. Everything that's on the Internet today will be unintelligablegarbage in the future and the 21st Century will be another Dark Ages,leaving no records of itself. Here's alink: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389.Here'sanother: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11410506/Print-out-digital-photos-or-risk-losing-them-Google-boss-warns.html.But don't expect them to last. [Search]
—13 February 2015Meanwhile, as of 2014, cell phones have squeezed out desktop computers asthe main Web access method, forcing websites to adapt by showing lesscontent. i.e. sound bites instead of detailed information. Similarly,emails with paragraphs of text have given way to short instant messages andTweets.
Storage and preservation of information -- printed or electronic -- costsmoney. Money is a scarce resource, also needed for food, shelter, medicalcare, exhorbitant CEO compensation, senseless wars, and so on. The legacyof humanity belongs to those with the desire and the money to preserve it,and to keep preserving it, and they are ones who will decide what is worthpreserving and what to discard.
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Old News
- CU Computing History Site in Network World
- How toreally bury a mainframe (University of Manitoba),17 December 2007.
- Columbia University 250th Anniversary (2004)
- CLICK HERE to visit Columbia'sextensive website commemorating the university's 250th anniversary(andHEREandHEREandHEREfor some computing history bits).
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Tables
1. Number of Dialin Modems| Year | Old | New | Total | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | 23 | 0 | 23 | (V6#13: 5 CRBE + 18 Wylbur) |
| 1985 | 59 | 0 | 59 | |
| 1986 | 84 | 0 | 84 | (First 2400 bps) |
| 1988 | 84 | 0 | 84 | (Moved from PACX to Rolm) |
| 1993 | 84 | 10 | 94 | (First V.32bis) |
| 1994 | 84 | 82 | 166 | |
| 1995 | 84 | 154 | 238 | (First V.34, first SLIP/PPP) |
| 1996 | 0 | 250 | 250 | |
| 1997 | 0 | 298 | 298 | |
| 1998 | 0 | 482 | 482 | |
| 1999 | 0 | 644 | 644 | (All V.90 56K) |
| 2001 | 0 | 736 | 736 | |
| 2002 | 0 | 805 | 805 |
'Old' means no error correction, compression, or hardware flow control. 'New'modems are connected to (or integrated with) TCP/IP terminal servers; old oneswere connected to serial ports on the PACX or Rolm. Prior to 1985 it's hard tofigure out -- specific phone numbers went to specific computers, etc; fewcomprehensive tables were published in the Newsletter or Guides to Facilities.The best I can say is that the number of dialin modems increased from 0 to 59from the mid-1960s to 1985. Modem-pool expansion finally leveled off in2002-2003, when DSL connections became possible from the home and AcIS beganto bring neighborhood apartment buildings onto the high-speed campus network.
2.Columbia Web growth
| Year | Total | CU | AcIS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | 3580000 | 310000 | 220000 |
| 1995 | 63051290 | 10102390 | 3817480 |
| 1996 | 121977400 | 34795600 | 13646120 |
| 1997 | 242023100 | 103805700 | 24188300 |
| 1998 | 350233000 | 173890700 | 32039700 |
| 1999 | 496350208 | 248657952 | 41192400 |
| 2000 | 782613655 | 339680073 | 52106380 |
| 2001 | 975530540 | 442895314 | 103766239 |
| 2002 | 1203698999 | 597895887 | 72669298 |
| 2003 | 1347966061 | 682969914 | 96849101 |
| 2004 | 1394513293 | 534202948 | 143452610 |
| 2005 | 1425516685 | 576447890 | 149184118 |
The numbers reflect total accesses (hits) per year. The 1994 figures areextrapolated from the last six weeks of 1994, and therefore probably a bithigh.
3.Registered Network Addresses By Campus
| In later years the growth is exponential, not only with computers on everydesk, but Internet phones replacing the 20,000-phone Rolm system, and withwireless devices all needing their own IP addresses: cell phones, laptops,tablets, netbooks, etc etc. Network address assignment of client devicesis now almost completely dynamic. |
4.E-Mail Messages Per Week
| According to Columbia's Postmaster, Joe Brennan, in early 2011 Columbia'scentral mail servers were receiving about a two million messages a day, ofwhich about 50% are discarded as spam or attack mail. Of the remaining 50%,I'd estimate that at least 80% is also unwanted mail; the mail filtersdeliberately err on the side of not discarding legitimate mail. In anycase, a great deal of cycles, storage, and bandwidth are consumed by uselessand often harmful or offensive junk, and this must be paid for with realmoney. |
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Acronyms
AcIS Academic Information Systems (of Columbia University)ADP Administrative Data Processing (of Columbia University)
AIS Administrative Information Services (new name of ADP)
ANSI American National Standards Institute
APL A Programming Language (With Its Own Character Set)
ARPA (US Defense Department) Advanced Research Projects Agency
ASCC Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (early IBM computer)
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange
ASP Attached Support Processor
AUC Apple University Consortium
AUFS Appletalk UNIX File Server
BAL Basic (IBM 360 and 370) Assemly Language
BASIC Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
BASR Bureau of Applied Social Research (of Columbia University)
BCD Binary Coded Decimal
BCDIC Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code
BITNET Because-It's-There Network ('It' = RSCS')
BNF
Macbook Manual
Backus-Naur FormBPS Bits per Second
CAP Columbia Appletalk Package
CBX (IBM/Rolm/Siemens) Computerized Branch Exchange
CCNET Computer Center (or Columbia/Carnegie) Network (DECnet)
CE (IBM) Customer Engineer
CLIO Columbia Libraries Information Online
CMU Carnegie-Mellon University
COBOL Common Business Oriented Language
CPC Card Programmed Calculator
CP/M Control Program / Microcomputer
CPS Characters per Second
CRBE Conversational Remote Batch EntryCREN Consortium for Research andEducation Network
CRLF ASCII charactersCarriage Return and Line Feed - plaint-text line terminator
CRT Cathode-Ray Tube, e.g. a video terminal
CUCC Columbia University Computer Center
CUCCA Columbia University Center forComputing Activities, new name of CUCC
CUIT Columbia UniversityInformation Technology, new name of CUCCA
CUNY City University of New York
CWRU Case Western Reserve University
DACU Device Attachment Control Unit (early IBM Ethernet adapter)
DASD Direct Access Storage Device (IBM term for 'disk', pronounced dazdee)
DAT Digital Audio Tape
DCMUP Same as DCS (not sure what it stands for).
DCS Directly Coupled System (Columbia's IBM 7040 and 7094)
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation
DOS Disk Operating System
EAM Electric Accounting Machine (using punched cards)
EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code
EDUCOM blah blah
EMACS Editing Macros (video editor by Richard Stallman)
FORTRAN Formula Translator (first high-level programming language)
FE Field Engineer (DEC)
FS Field Service (DEC)
FSF Free Software Foundation
GNU GNU is Not UNIX (recursive acronym of the FSF)
GUI Graphical User Interface
HASP Houston Automatic Spooling Program
HP Hewlett Packard Corporation
IBM International Business Machines Corporation
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
JCL Job Control Language (OS/360, MVS, etc)
JSYS Jump to System (DEC-20 monitor call)
JVNCNET John von Neumann Supercomputer Center Network
KGB (Soviet) Committee forState Security
LAN Local Area Network (Ethernet, Token Ring, etc)
LCG (DEC) Large Computer Group
LISP List Processing (language)
LPM Lines per Minute(speed of line printer)
MINCE MINCE Is Not Completely EMACS (EMACS semi-clone for CP/M)
MOS Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (memory, as opposed to magnetic cores or vacuum tubes)
MSS (IBM) Mass Storage System
MTBF Mean Time Between Failures
MTTR Mean Time To Repair
NCR National Cash Register Corporation
NFS Network File System
NORC Naval Ordnance ReseachCalculator (early IBM computer built at Columbia U)
NPG Network Planning Group (of Columbia U)
NSF National Science Foundation
NSFNET National Science Foundation Network
NYSERNET New York State Education and Research Network
OCS Office of Communications Services (of Columbia University)
OS Operating System
PACX Private Access Computer eXchange
PDP Programmed Data Processor
PDS Partitioned Data Set
PL/I Programming Language One
PPP Point-to-Point Protocol
RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk
RHNO Residence Hall Networking Option (at Columbia U)
RJE Remote Job Entry
RSCS Remote Spooling Communications Subsystem
RSTS/E Resource Sharing Time Sharing / Extended (DEC PDP-11 OS)
SAIL Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (or Language)
SE Software Engineer (DEC); Systems Engineer (IBM) Also see: FE, CE
SEL Systems Engineering Laboratories
SLIP Serial Line Internet Protocol
SNA (IBM) Systems Networking Architecture
SNOBOL String Oriented Language (pun on COBOL)
SPITBOL (pun on SNOBOL)
SSIO Self-Service Input/Output (area at Columbia U)
SIC Scholarly Information Center (at Columbia University)
SOS Share Operating System(IBM 709)
SOS Son Of Stopgap(PDP-10, DEC-20 text editor)
SPOOL simultaneous peripheraloperations on-line or simultaneous peripheral output on line
TOPS The Operating System (for PDP-10s and DEC-20s)
UUCP UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Program
VT Video Terminal
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Glossary of Forgotten Terms
- Batch
- A way for users to run programs on shared computers. Jobs are submitted(e.g. as decks of cards) into a queue. Each job reaches the head of thequeue, executes, and then the results are delivered the user (e.g. as aprintout). This is a step up from the early days when users needed hands-onexclusive access to the computer in order to use it. Batch survives today ontimesharing systems such as Unix (as 'cron' jobs), VMS, and of course on IBMmainframes, but usually without the cards and printouts. Nowadays sharedcomputers are accessed mainly through timesharing. Meanwhile, personaldesktop computers have made hands-on exclusive access the norm once again.
- Control panel
- (See plugboard)
- Core
- This word is still used synonymously with 'memory', but in fact refers to aspecific memory technology used from about 1955 to 1975, in which each bitwas a ferrite core, whose charge was controlled and sensed by currents inwires passing through the core's hole. MORE HERE.
- CRT
- Cathode Ray Tube. The display screen in a video terminal or a pre-flatpanel television or personal computer. More generally, any vacuum tubeincorporating a mobile beam. 1950s-era computer memories were sometimesmade of CRTs; for example, the IBM 700-series CRTmemories packed 1024 bits into a single tube (contrary to the popularimage of one bit per tube).
- Drum
- Similar to a hard disk, except the recording surface is on thecircumfrence, rather than on the flat end(s), and the read/write headsare fixed rather than moving. Thus it is a spinning cylinder with astationary head array extending from end to end, with one fixed head pertrack. Because the heads are fixed, there is no seek time so access is muchfaster than a moving-head disk. Drums were used as main memory in earlycomputers like the IBM 650 and as swapping or pagingdevices in later computers such as the IBM 360/91 andthe DEC PDP-11. An example is the IBM 2301 drum storage, about 1960. Also:(1) Any fixed-head disk or, by extension, any swapping device;(2) A Data Cell cylinder around which a tape stripis wrapped for reading and writing;(3) The print mechanism used incertain kinds of line printers, such as the DEC LP20:a constantly rotating metal cylinder with allthe characters on it -- to print a specific character in a specific column,the corresponding hammer strikes the drum just when the desired character isbehind the paper and ink ribbon; (4) the electrostatic print-transfer mechanismin Xerographic or laser printers.
- Electric (or Electronic) Accounting Machine (EAM)
- EAMs were the workhorses of the 1930s-60s for accounting, payroll, and soon, before there were real stored-program computers. They were mainlymechanical; accumulating sums in gear registers. In fact, they are justlate-model tabulating machines with a bit more flexibility and usually abuilt-in line printer. CLICK HERE to seeexamples.
- Paper Tape
- A long strip of heavy paper, usually an inch wide, in which holes could bepunched, 5 to 9 per row. For computer use, usually 8 holes were used:7 data bits and 1 parity bit. Paper tape was also used in telecommunications(telex) and in the printing industry as the input medium for hot-metaltypesetting machines and is still used for numerical control of milling anddrilling machines. Computer applications of paper tape included automateddata input and output, as on the ASR33 Teletypeor the IBM 1620 computer,object-module output by compilers (on computers that did not have disks -- forexample, the output of a Fortran compiler), and printer control loops(see story at the end of this page). Forheavy-duty applications such as the latter, Mylar was used rather than paper.The typical recording density was 10 rows (bytes) per inch. Punching andreading speeds varied from 10 rows per second up to 2000. Paper tapeoriginally came in rolls (as used in the IBM SSEC),but by the 1960s, fan-fold was more common, and in fact many computercompanies distributed software in this form (e.g. for the DEC PDP-8). Anincorrectly punched row could be 'deleted' by punching all the holes; this isthe origin of the ASCII RUB (Rubout, Delete) character, 0x7F (all 1's).Editing could also be accomplished by cutting and splicing. More at the University ofAmsterdam Computing History Museum.
- Plugboard, Patch Board, Patch Panel, Control Panel
- IBM EAM equipment (accounting machines, sorters, reproducing punches,interpreters, etc) as well as some of its early calculators (computers) wereprogrammed through control panels — rectangular boards with anarray of holes, which are interconnected by wires to specify the desiredfunctions, e.g. which card columns are to be sent to which accumulator, orprinted to which printer columns, etc. Photos and more info:[HERE] [HERE] [HERE][HERE] and[HERE].
- Punched Card
- A stiff cardboard rectangle in which holes can be punched and then laterread by various devices (see Unit Record Equipment). Punchcards date back tothe 1700s, and can be found in many formats. IBM punchcards (after 1928) were7 3/8' inches wide and 3 1/4' high, with three rounded corners and the upperleft corner cut diagonally, and twelve 80-column rows for small rectangularholes. Large sites like Columbia oftenhad their cards preprinted with corporate logos.Until the early 1970s, virtually all computing jobs at Columbia were submittedon decks of cards punched on key punch machines.Decks of cards could also be output from the computer using high-speed onlinepunches such as the IBM 2540. Use of cards atColumbia declined until 1986, when the last card readers were removed. Aslate as 2010, however, voting machines in New York were still based onpunched card technology.
- Relay
- An electromechanical device or switch that automatically controls thecurrent in one circuit based on the current in another circuit, used in1940s-era calculators and computers such as theAberdeens, the SSEC,and the Bell relaycalcalators.
- Remote Job Entry
- Or RJE. In the mainframe era, before interactive terminals, jobs weresubmitted on decks of cards and results obtained on a line printer or otherlocal device. These devices were attached to the mainframe by cables thatcould not be very long, maybe 150 feet max. To access the mainframe fromgreater distances required a Remote Job Entry station: usually a card readerand line printer connected to some kind of controller, connected by (usuallysynchronous) modem to the central site. Typically an RJE user would put adeck of cards in the hopper, push Start, and wait an unpredictable amount oftime for the results to come out of the printer. One of many examples ofthe widespread use of RJE was the New York City public school system in the1970s, where each school had an RJE station connected to the bigmainframe(s) at Board of Education. The IBM RJE interface was fairly wellstandardized, so it also came to double as a connection for other kinds ofcomputers -- a kind of early networking, in which traffic in one directionwas in 80-column card images, and traffic in the reverse direction was132-column printer lines.
- Tabulating Machine
- A machine capable of reading punched cards and either sorting them intoselected bins or adding up the numbers punched into selected columns.Tabulating machines were used from 1890 through the 1950s or 60s forstatistical, financial, and even scientific applications.CLICK HERE for examples.
- Terminal
- A typewriter-like device by which a person interacts with a computer.It has a keyboard and either paper to print on or else a video screen(certain special kinds of terminals might also have Braille pads ortext-to-voice interpreters). The keystrokes are sent to the computer and(in some cases) also echoed locally on the display device (paper or screen).Characters arriving from the computer are sent to the display device. Videoterminals sometimes have an attached printer. Early hardcopy terminalsincluded Teletypes and electric typewriterswired for communication, such as the IBM 2741; laterones include dot-matrix models such asthe DECwriter. The best-known video terminal isthe DEC VT100; video terminals were popular fromthe mid-1970s until about 1990 (and are still used today in certainspecialized applications like data entry and transaction processing; untilnot so long ago, every winter TV news reporters visit the NYC Heat ComplaintBureau, and every year they were still using IBM 3270'green tubes'). The best-known graphics terminal is theTektronix 4010. Although few real terminals arestill in operation, terminals are widely emulated by the PC, Macintosh, andother workstation software that allows us to access our 'shell accounts'.
- TTY
- Teletype (see Terminal).
- Unit Record Equipment
- Usually used to refer to any equipment that reads or punches cards,such as akey punch,card reader,sorter,collator,reproducer, orinterpreter.Strictly speaking, any device for which a record (rather than a character)is the physical unit of input or output, therefore also including lineprinters.
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Sources
- My recollections and notes, 1965-present.
- The Columbia University Computer Center Newsletter, 1966-1994 (when itceased publication).
- Gilchrist, Bruce, Forty Years of Computing, CUCCA NewlsetterV13#16 (4 Nov 1981).
- Bashe, Charles J.; Lyle R. Johnson; John H. Palmer; EmersonW. Pugh,IBM's Early Computers, MIT Press (1985).
- Columbia University Catalogue,1924-1925.
- Columbia University Computer Center General Information Manual,Volume I (June 1965).
- Columbia University Bulletin: ComputingActivities (1976).
- Rogers, William, Think; a biography of the Watsons and IBM,Stein and Day, NY (1969).
- Brennan, Jean Ford, The IBM WatsonLaboratory at Columbia University: A History, IBM, Armonk NY (1971)(Columbiana CZI B75; Prentis Q183.5 .W3 B7).
- Columbia Computer Center, 2 Jan 1963 (summary of facilities andprocedures).
- Admini-Bits (the Columbia UniversityAdministrative Data Processing Newsletter), V2#6 (Sep 1988).
- Dolkart, Andrew S., Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture andDevelopment, Columbia University Press, 1998, and correspondencewith Prof. Dolkart (Jan 2001).
- McCullers, Carson, and Dews C.L. Barney,Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of CarsonMcCullers, University of Wisconsin Press (1999).
- Asteroff, Janet, CUCCA Terminal and Plotter User Manual (Nov1982).
- Bell System Technical Journal:Special issue devoted to UNIX 7th Edition, Volume 57, Number 6, Part 2(August 1978).
- Brader, Mark, A Chronology of Digital Computing, to 1952(online).
- Koenig, Seymour H., Interview (22 Jan 2001).
- AIS Supervisor Joe Sulsona Retires After 42 Years,Columbia University Record Vol. 26, No 11 (19 Jan 2001).
- Gilchrist, Bruce, Report to the Committee on InstructionalComputing (the Collery Committee), Columbia University (21 April 1980).
- Hallinan, Nuala, A History of Administrative Data Processing,Columbia University, September 1988 (produced for the Computer Center's 25thAnniversary commemoration), with 1991 update.
- Announcement of the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory anda Program of Graduate Studies in Applied Mathematics, ColumbiaUniversity Bulletin, Fifty-eighth Series, No.39, September 27, 1948.
- Arctander, Eric, Trig Homework? Consult Watson Labs,Columbia Daily Spectator, 18 October 1948.
- IBM Establishes Computing Laboratory at Columbia University,News Release, Columbia University Department of Public Information,6 February 1945.
- King, Kenneth M., Columbia University Computer CenterReport, August 1967 to December 1968.
- Guide to Facilities, Columbia Computer Center, September 1972.
- Sills, David L., Paul F. Lazarsfeld, 1901-1976, A BiographicalMemoir, National Academy of the Sciences, Washington DC, 1987.
- Barton, Judith S., ed., Guideto the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Clearwater PublishingCo., Inc, New York City, 1984.
- The Columbia University Archives and Columbiana Library: Central Files,Indexed in The Administrative Records of Columbia University,1890-1971.
- Halford, Ralph S., Proposal to the National ScienceFoundation for Support of a Computing Center to be Established at ColumbiaUniversity, May 1961.
- News Release #10,099, Columbia University News Office, 18 Jul 1963.
- Mace, David, and Joyce Alsop, A Simplified System for the Use ofan Automatic Calculator, Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory,Columbia University / IBM, 1957 (COVER).
- Proposal for IBM 360 Model 92 [sic], to Dr. Kenneth M. King, ColumbiaComputer Center, IBM, 21 May 1965.
- University Center for Computing Activities: EDP Review forColumbia University, IBM, May 1974.
- Strauss, Robert, When Computers Were Born, The Times MirrorCompany, 1996.
- Annual Report of the President and Treasurer to the Trustees withAccompanying Documents for the Year Ending June 30, 1925, ColumbiaUniversity, New York, 1926.
- Letter of Dean Ralph S. Halford to Prof. Maurice Ewing, 19 Aug 1963(9 pages), Columbiana Archives.
- 'Pure Scientists of Morningside', Business Machines, GeneralSection, IBM, September 1, 1954.
- Aspray, William, 'Was Early Entry a Competitive Advantage? USUniversities That Entered Computing in the 1940s', IEEE Annals of theHistory of Computing, Volume 22, Number 3, July-September 2000.
- Lippsett, Laurence, 'Maurice Ewing and the Lamont-Doherty EarthObservatory', Columbia Magazine, Winter 2001.
- Pugh, Emerson W., Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and itsTechnology, The MIT Press (1995).
- Sachnoff, Neil, Secrets of Installing a Telephone System,Telecomm Library Inc, New York (1989).
- 'There's a Computer on the Columbia Campus', Columbia Reports,March 1971.
- Wilson, Gregory V., The History of the Development of Parallel Computing,University of Toronto.
- Austrian, Geoffrey, Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing,Columbia University Press (1982).
- Grier, David Alan, WhenComputers Were Human, Princeton University Press (2005).AND.Grier, David Alan, 'The First Breach of Computer Security?',IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 23,Number 2, April-June 2001. NOTE: These should be two separate referencesbut evidently the second one was inserted here by mistake when it shouldhave gone at the end, thus throwing off all the subsequent referencenumbers. Sorry!
- Stoll, Clifford, TheCuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of ComputerEspionage, Doubleday, New York (1989).
- Black, Edwin, IBMand the Holocaust, Crown Publishers, New York (2001).Also search for 'holocaust' at the IBMwebsite.
- Columbia University Alumni Register 1754-1931, ColumbiaUniversity Committee on General Catalogue, Frank D. Fackenthal (Chairman),Columbia University Press, New York (1932).
- Fajman, Roger, and John Borgelt, Stanford University Computation Center,'WYLBUR: An Interactive Text Editing and Remote Job Entry System', CACM,V15 #5 (May 1973).
- Eckert, W.J., Punched Card Methods in ScientificComputation, The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau,Columbia University, Lancaster Press, Inc., Lancaster PA (January 1940).Reprinted in 1984 by the Charles Babbage Institute, MIT, and Tomash Publisherswith a new introduction by J.C. McPherson.
- IBM Oral History Project on Computer Technology, Interview TC-1, with W.J.Eckert (11 July 1964).
- Mackenzie, Charles E., Coded Character Sets, History andDevelopment, Addison-Wesley (1980).
- Trimble, George R., 'A Brief History of Computing',IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 23,Number 3 (July-September 2001).
- Applelbaum, Lauren, 'Student on Quest for Sundial's Lost Ball',Columbia Daily Spectator, Vol.CXXV No.139 (5 Dec 2001).
- Quarterman, John S., TheMatrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems WorldwideDigital Press (1990).
- Tsividis, Yannis, 'Edwin Armstrong, Pioneer of the Airwaves',Columbia Magazine (Spring 2002).
- Grosch, Herbert R.J., Computer: BitSlices from a Life, Third Millenium Books, Novato CA (1991), ISBN 0-88733-085[3rd ed mss].
- 'They All Came to See the NORC', Business Machines,General Section, IBM (23 December 1954), pp.8-9.
- Grosch, Herb, private correspondence (May 2003 - 2010).
- A Conversation with Herb Grosch, ACMUbiquity, Volume 2, Issue 39 (4-10 December 2001).
- Schreiner, Ken, private correspondence (May 2003).
- Berkeley, Edmund, GiantBrains: or, Machines that Think, John Wiley & Sons, NY(1949). The first book about computers for a general nontechnical audience.
- Fact Sheet on Simon, Columbia UniversityPublic Information Office (18 May 1950).
- Eckert, Wallace J, and Rebecca Jones, Faster,Faster: a simple description of a giant electronic calculator and theproblems it solves, McGraw-Hill, New York (1955).
- King, Kenneth, private correspondence (July-August 2003).
- Hankam, Eric, interviews (11 July and 4 November 2003).
- Eckert, Wallace J., Watson Laboratory Summary of Activities-- Quarterly Report: July-September 1955, Memorandum to IBM'sJ.C. McPherson (17 November 1955).
- 'W.J.E.' (Wallace J. Eckert), The I.B.M. PluggableSequence Relay Calculator, MathematicalTables and Other Aids to Computation, Volume III, Number 23 (June 1948),pp. 149-161.
- Aspray, William (Ed.), Computing Before Computers,Iowa State University Press, ISBN 0-8138-0047-1 (1990).
- Ceruzzi, Paul E. Reckoners:The Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored ProgramConcept, 1935-1945 (Contributions to the Study of Computer Science,No.1), Greenwood Press (1983).
- Bergin, Thomas J. (Ed.), 50 Years of Army Computing:From ENIAC to MSRC, A Record of a Symposium and CelebrationNovember 13 and 14 (1996), Aberdeen Proving Ground.
- Ceruzzi, Paul E. 'Crossing the Divide: ArchitecturalIssues and the Emergence of the Stored Program Computer, 1935-1955',IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 19 No. 1 (1997).
- Winegrad, Dilys, and Atsushi Akera,'A Short History of the Second American Revolution', Universityof Pennsylvania Almanac, Vol.42 No.18 (30 Jan 1996).On the Web HERE.
- John McPherson, Computer Engineer, an oral historyconducted in 1992 by William Aspray, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University,New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
- Grosch, Herbert R.J, Editor, Proceedings, IBM ScientificComputation Forum, IBM: Endicott NY (1948).
- W.J.E. (Wallace J. Eckert), 'The IBM Pluggable Sequence RelayCalculator', Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation,Vol.3, No.23 (Jul 1948), pp.149-161.
- W.J.E. (Wallace J. Eckert) and Ralph F. Haupt, 'The Printing ofMathematical Tables', Mathematical Tables and Other Aids toComputation, Vol.2, No.17 (Jan 1947), pp.197-202.
- McPherson, John C., Introduction and Biographical Note on WallaceEckert in the 1984 reprint of [50].
- Stibitz, G.R., 'A Note on 'Is' and 'Might Be' in Computers',Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, Vol.4, No.31(Jul 1950), pp.168-169.
- W.J.E. (Wallace J. Eckert), 'Mathematical Tables on PunchedCards', Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation,Vol.1, No.12 (Oct 1945), pp.433-436.
- Eckert, Wallace J., 'Calculating Machines',Encyclopedia Americana (1958).
- Eckert, Wallace J., Letter to Mr. G.W. Baehne, IBM, 270Broadway, NYC (9 Jan 1934).
- Eckert, W.J., 'Electrons and Computation', The ScientificMonthly, Vol. LXVII, No. 5 (Nov 1948).
- Eckert, Wallace J., Transcript, Systems Service Class No. 591(Aerial Navigation) for the US Army Air Corps; Department of Education,International Business Machines, Endicott NY (8 Sep 1944).
- Jones, Walter D., 'Watson and Me: A Life at IBM', edited byDon Black, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing,Vol. 25 No. 3 (Jul-Sep 2003), p.15.
- Eckert, W.J., 'The Astronomical Hollerith-Computing Bureau',Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,Vol.49, No.291 (Oct 1937), pp.249-253.
- Smith, Harry F., interview, 8 Sep 2003.
- Eckert, Wallace, Correspondence and papers, 1935-1971,archived at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
- Eckert, W.J., 'Facilities of the Watson Scientific ComputingLaboratory', Proceedings of the Research Forum, IBM, Endicott NY(Aug 1946), pp.75-84.
- Gutzwiller, M.C., 'Wallace Eckert, Computers, and the NauticalAlmanac Office' in Fiala, Alan D., and Steven J. Dick (editors),Proceedings, Nautical Almanac Office Sesquicentennial Symposium,U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington DC, March 3-4, 1999, pp.147-163.
- Baehne, George W. (IBM), Practical Applications of thePunched Card Method in Colleges and Universities,Columbia University Press (1935); hardbound, 442 pages, 257 figures.
- Seidelmann, P. Kenneth, Research Professor, University ofVirginia Astronomy Department, private correspondence, Sept-Oct 2003and April 2004. Prof. Seidelmann was at the US Naval Observatory from 1965to 2000 and is a historian of the Naval Observatory.
- Interrogation NAV No. 75, USSBS No. 378, Tokyo, 13-14 Nov 1945:Admiral Soemu Toyoda (Chief of Naval General Staff from May 1945), UnitedStates Strategic Bombing Survey [Pacific], Naval Analysis Division:Interrogations of Japanese Officials, Volume II, OPNAV-P-03-100(1946), p.319.
- The United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Japan'sStruggle to End the War. Chairman's Office,1 July 1946, p.13.
- Stimson, Henry L., and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Servicein Peace and War, Harper, NY (1948), p.618.
- Krawitz, Eleanor, 'The Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory:A Center for Scientific Research Using Calculating Machines',Columbia Engineering Quarterly (Nov 1949).
- IBM Technical Newsletter, No.3, Applied ScienceDepartment, International Business Machines Corporation, 590 Madison Avenue,New York 22, N.Y., 22-8823-0-3M-LB-P (Dec 1951).
- IBM Watson Lab Three-Week Course on Computing, Class Lists(1947-56).
- Buderi, Robert, The Invention That Changed theWorld ('How a small group of Radar pioneers won the Second World Warand launched a technological revolution'), Simon & Schuster, New York(1996).
- Grosch, Herbert R.J., 'Early Women in Computing',Communications of the ACM, Vol.38 No.4 (April 1995)(1996).
- Dick, Steven J., Sky and Ocean Joined: The U.S. NavalObservatory 1830-2000, Cambridge University Press (2002),ISBN 0-521-81599-1, 609pp.
- Backus, John, private correspondence, July 2004.
- Eames, Charlesand Ray,A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age, Harvard University Press.First Edition 1973; Second Edition 1990. Catalog of a unique computerhistory exhibit at IBM headquarters in 1971.
- Knuth, Donald, The Art of Computer Programming,Vol.3 'Sorting and Searching', Addison-Wesley (1973);Section 5.5, pp.382-384 [the link is to the 1998 revised edition].
- Eckert, W.J., 'The IBM Department of Pure Science and theWatson Scientific Computing Laboratory', Educational Research Forum Proceedings, IBM, Endicott NY (Aug 1947), pp.31-36.
- Bellovin, Steve, personal correspondence, January 2006. Now amember of Columbia's Computer Science faculty after many years at Bell Labs/ AT&T Labs, Steve, as a Columbia student in 1968-69, worked at the IBMWatson Lab building on 115th Street doing system administration tasks on an IBM1130.
- Pugh, Emerson W.; Johnson, Lyle R., Palmer, John H.,IBM's360 and Early 370 Systems, MIT Press (1991).
- Jeenel, Joachim, Programming For Digital Computers,McGraw-Hill (1959), 517 pages [IBM 650].
- Andree, Richard V., Programming the IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Computerandhttp:>
- Heide, Lars, Punched-CardSystems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880--1945(Studies in Industry and Society), Johns Hopkins University Press (2009).
- Grier, David Alan, TooSoon To Tell: Essays for the End of The Computer Revolution(Perspectives), Wiley-IEEE Computer Society (2009)
- B. Gilchrist, J. Pomerence and S.Y. Wong, 'Fast carry logicfor digital computers', IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers, EC-4 (Dec.1955),133-136.
- Digital Computer Newsletter, Office of Naval Research,Mathematical Sciences Division, Vol.10, No.4, October 1958[PDF].
- Digital Computer Newsletter, Office of Naval Research,Mathematical Sciences Division, Vol.12, No.3, July 1960[PDF].
- Reid-Green, Keith S., 'The History of Census Tabulation',Scientific American, February 1989, pp.98-103.
- Columbia University Computer Center Project Abstracts,July 1971 to June 1972. Paperbound, about 250 pages (COVER).
- Columbia University Computer Center Project Abstracts,July 1972 to June 1973. Paperbound, about 250 pages (COVER).
- Geschichteder IBM in Deutschland (IBM).
- National Science Foundation,TwelfthAnnual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1962:Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Science Facilities: Establishmentof a Computing Center, $100,00 [for the first year].
- Tanenbaum, Andrew S.,LessonsLearned from 30 Years of MINIX,CACM, Vol.59 No.3, March 2016, pp.70-78.
- Jones, Steven E, Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Card, Routledge (2016). Includes chapter on theSSEC.
Sources are listed in the order they were encountered. Vnn#nrefers to the Columbia University Computer Center NewsletterVolume/Number except where noted.
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Links to Related or Similar Sites
Web links are notoriously unstable; don't be surprised if any or allof the following don't lead anywhere.Columbia University:
- Just aBeginning: Computers and Celestial Mechanics in the Work of WallaceJ. Eckert, Ph.D. Dissertation of Allan Olley, 31 August 2011.
- Harold Hunter Channer, Interview with BruceGilchrist (former directory of the Columbia Computer Center), 31 May 2007.(Youtube).
- TheOrigin and History of the Internet, address by Kenneth M. King(first director of the Columbia Computer Center), 17 February 2011(Youtube).
- Columbia University's 250thAnniversary
- Columbia University 1968, the student uprising.
Books (see Sources for other books):
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- Bruderer,Herbert, Meilensteinede Rechentechnik, Band 1: Mechanische Rechenmaschinen, Rechenschieber,Historische Automaten und WissenshaftlicheInstrumente; De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2018).
- Bruderer, Herbert, Meilensteine de Rechentechnik,Band 2: Erfindung des Computers, Elektronenrechner, Entwicklungen inDeutschland, England und der Schweiz; De Gruyter Oldenbourg (2018).
- Computers,John Savard.
- Computer History: Storage, Software and Memory, mHelpDesk.com.
- Zukunft braucht Herkunft(German technology notes in the Rhein-Main area).
- Programming with Punched Cardsby Dale Fisk of IBM (PDF)
- Technikum19Living Museum (beautiful photos of punch-card equipment)
- The National Museum of Computing (UK)
- ColossusCracking German Codes (video)
- ComputerHistory Museum Youtube Channel.
- Thewritings of Allan Olley, University of Toronto Including:
- Just a Beginning: Computers and Celestial Mechanics in the Work ofWallace J. Eckert, op.cit.
- Existence Precedes Essense - Meaning of the Stored-Program Concept (originally published in IFIP 325, 2010, pp.169-178.
- Digitized Measurement: Automatic Scientific Table Making,Originally published in the Proceedings of teh XXV Scientific InstrumentCommission “East and West The Common European Heritage”, 2006,pp. 289-293.
- A History of Computer Programming Languages, Onlinecolleplan.com.
- IBM WatsonLaboratory (in Korean)
- DoNot Fold, Spindle or Mutilate, the 'Hole' Story of Punched Cards byGeorge A. Fierheller, 2006 (PDF).
- Punch Card Compendium(Donald Whittemore).
- RememberingSome Early Computers (1948-1960) by Bruce Gilchrist, January 2006(Dr. Gilchrist was Columbia's Computer Center Director 1973-85).
- Charles Babbage Institute(University of Minnesota)
- History of FORTRAN and FORTRAN II, Paul McJones (ed.), Computer HistoryMuseum.
- A BriefHistory of Computing Technology, 1943 to 1950 (Derek J. Smith).
- Chronology ofPersonal Computers (Ken Polsson).
- Chronology ofWorkstation Computers (Ken Polsson).
- Historic ComputerImages (US Army)
- ENIAC 50th Anniversary (University of Pennsylvania)
- The IBM 7094 and CTSS (MIT)
- IBMSTRETCH (Eric Smith)
- IBM Stretch (7030)-- Aggressive Uniprocessor Parallelism (Mark Smotherman)
- My IBM Careerand Some Thoughts Along the Way (Terry Judkins)
- Interview with Ken Olsen (Smithsonian Institution).
- A History of MTS -- 30 Years of Computing Service (U of Michigan)
- The MichiganTerminal System (U of Michigan)
- 40Years of Computing at Newcastle (U of Newcastle)
- How toreally bury a mainframe (University of Manitoba), Network World,17 December 2007.
- PunchedCards - A brief illustrated technical history, Douglas W. Jones,University of Iowa.
- Programming with Punched Cardsby Dale Fisk of IBM (PDF).
- Punched Cards: ABrief Tutorial by Robert V. Williams, IEEE Annals of the History ofComputing.
- 'Do not fold, spindleor mutilate': A cultural history of the punch card by Steven Lubar.
- StanfordUniversity History Exhibits.
- National Archive for theHistory of Computing (UK)
- Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum (formerly PDP Planet, aPDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-8 restoration and preservation project)
- The Core Store (DEC section)
- The Core Store (IBM section)
- Computermuseum über die Entwicklung der Rechentechnik in der DDR (in German).
- Robotron P8000 (an East German desktop workstation from 1987 still running in 2016) (in English) (German).
- Fédération desEquipes Bull
- Conhe莽a um bocado da Hist贸ria dos Computadores.
- The North American Data CommunicationsMuseum (NADCOMM)
- Dennis Ritchie's homepage (Unix history)
- Intheir own words: Unix pioneers remember the good times
- Computer History as'seen by' Bob Bemer (and sometimes 'made by') (Bob Bemer died in 2004)
- Al Kossow (computer manual archive)
- Ed Thelen(online documents)
- 1968 DougEngelbart Mouse Presentation (videos). More about EngelbartHEREand HERE.
- The Computer History SimulationProject -- Original documentation and software, emulators and simulators.
- Dusty Decks (old software)
- History of Spam(i.e. junk e-mail).
[ Introduction ][ Timeline ][ Epilog ][ Tables ][ Acronyms ][ Glossary ][ Sources ][ Links ][ SEARCH ][ FAQ ]
Frank da Cruz / fdc@columbia.edu /Columbia University Computing History /2001 - 2019