William Aspray
Abstract. This paper uses the history of the Institute for Advanced Study computer built in Princeton, New Jersey, between 1946 and 1952 as a case study. The case study introduces computer practitioners who might be interested in writing about the history of early computers to some of the concepts that have been used by business and other kinds of historians of technology. These concepts include organizational mission, project objectives, organizational buy-in, organizational capabilities, technology transfer, value and impact,
technological and other obstacles, first-mover advantages, and organizational continuity.
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Introduction
The Institute for Advanced Study computer, built in Princeton, New Jersey, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was one of the most important early computers. It deserves this recognition on account of the scientific work that was conducted on it, the people who were trained upon it, and to some extent for the computer design principles that it embodied. Several historical accounts of this machine already exist,1 and it is not the purpose of this paper to duplicate this literature.
There is a vast body of literature, written during the past twenty years by computer practitioners, historians, and journalists, about the computers built in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, more has been written about this aspect of computing history than any other. Despite the considerable attention these early computers have received, our understanding of them is incomplete. Raúl Rojas, for example, has recently contributed the first detailed
analysis of the working of Konrad Zuse's early computers.2 Other papers in this volume have similar aspirations for other early computers. Rojas's book and these papers give what might be called a "technical reassessment"
of early computing machines.
1 See, for example, William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990; Julian Bigelow, "Computer Developments at the Institute for Advanced Study," in N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, eds. A History of Computing in the Twetieth Century, pp. 291– 310. New York: Academic Press, 1980; Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.
This paper has a somewhat different purpose. It intends to identify for computer practitioners interested in writing about the history of early computers some concepts that have been used by business and other kinds of historians of technology, and to suggest through one brief case study how these concepts can be applied to the study of early computers. The concepts that are discussed here include organizational mission, project
objectives, organizational buy-in, organizational capabilities, technology transfer, value and impact, technological and other obstacles, first-mover advantages, and organizational continuity. Although these concepts were developed to understand how companies functioned, they can also be applied to other organizations that create technology, such as the Institute for Advanced Study.
Many existing accounts of early computers touch on one or more of the historical concepts addressed in this paper, but a deeper understanding of these computers might result from paying more explicit attention to these concepts. Thus this paper is as much about a conceptual vocabulary for rewriting the history of early computing machines as it is about the IAS computer. The length of this paper does not permit a more complete
enumeration of the concepts being applied by historians of technology, nor a detailed treatment of any one of those concepts that are addressed. Thus this paper is intended to be merely suggestive of a way to think about computing machine history.
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Background
Before turning to the discussion of these concepts, it is useful to give a brief history of the IAS computer project and a brief biography of the project director, John von Neumann. Von Neumann (1903–1957) grew up in Budapest, Hungary, in an upper middle class family. His formidable intellectual abilities were recognized at an early age, and he was given an excellent education in Hungary's best private school. His first love was
mathematics, and he wrote his first publishable paper as a teenager. He completed a doctorate in mathematics at a university in Budapest, while simultaneously pursuing an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the technical university in Zurich so as to assure his family that he would learn a practical skill. Upon graduation, for several years he held postdoctoral positions in mathematics in Germany, where he came under the influence of the distinguished mathematician David Hilbert. During his few years in Germany he developed the
mathematical foundations of quantum theory, wrote some early papers on game theory and economic theory, and worked on Hilbert's program to secure a logical foundation for mathematics.
2 R. Rojas, ed., Die Rechenmaschinen von Konrad Zuse, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998.
With his international mathematical reputation already secure, a lack of professorships available in Germany, and looming political problems in Europe, von Neumann decided to emigrate to America in 1930. He first held a visiting position in the mathematics department at Princeton University. Then he became the most junior of the five faculty members originally appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study, a think tank established in Princeton in 1932, which rented space in the university's mathematics building until it built its own buildings across town in 1939.
Von Neumann continued his active research program in pure mathematics in Princeton, but beginning around 1937, through the influence of his colleague Oswald Veblen, he began to take an interest in applied
mathematics, especially applications to war-related problems. During the war he worked for several different military organizations, most importantly for the national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The
computational problems associated with a triggering device for the atomic bombs being developed at Los Alamos led von Neumann to the computing projects at the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he joined the Penn group as a consultant in 1944, the ENIAC design had been frozen, development was advanced, and discussions had begun on the design of a successor computing device, the EDVAC. Von Neumann joined these group discussions about the design of the EDVAC and in 1945, based partly on these discussions, he wrote the Draft Report on EDVAC, which introduced the basic description of the stored-program computer.
By early 1945, even before the war was over, von Neumann had decided that the computer could be a
breakthrough technology for scientific research and that he wanted to build a computer for these purposes. He secured permission to build a computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, with funding at first from the IAS, Army, and Navy (and later from the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission), with in-kind support provided by RCA and Princeton University. The project began in 1946, and the computer reached working order in 1952. The IAS continued to operate the computer until 1957, when it was sold to Princeton University.
The university operated it for another three years, before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution for public display as an historic artifact.
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Organizational Mission
Some historical accounts of early computers unfortunately pay little or no attention to the organizations in which the computers were built. Computers at this time were large, capital items that consumed significant amounts of organizational resources (funding, space, staff). The decision to build or buy a computer was generally an important decision for an organization, made (or at least approved) at the highest levels of management. When good management practice was followed, the decision involved careful consideration of how the computer would fit with the mission of the organization. But no matter how good the management, the organizational mission typically shaped the kind of project and whether and how it succeeded.
The organizational mission of the Institute for Advanced Study was to pursue world-class research in a few selected areas of study. The areas selected for study in the 1930s were mathematics and theoretical physics.
Faculty were free of all normal university duties such as committee work, administration, teaching, and student advising so that they could concentrate on their research. Subjects such as biology, although they offered promise of fundamental breakthroughs, were avoided at the Institute because they involved a large research support investment, such as laboratories and technicians, which were both costly and thought to detract from the protected environment in which the elite faculty did its scientific thinking. Thus it was not at all clear that a computer project, which required laboratories, technicians, programmers, and operators, and which led to the building of an artifact that could be used for business and military purposes, would be welcome at the Institute.
Von Neumann politicked assiduously to convince the director and trustees of the institute that the computer would be a breakthrough technology for science, especially in the study of nonlinear physical phenomena–an area of scientific research that he noted had been largely stagnant since the nineteenth century.
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Project Objectives
It is useful to examine not only the objectives of the organization, but also the objectives of the computer project itself. In an entrepreneurial start-up, there are typically only a small number of projects, and they tend to have objectives that are closely aligned with the mission of the organization. But in larger, more established organizations a project might have many different possible objectives, not necessarily closely tied to the
organization's mission. The commitment to a project and the resources assigned to it will depend on the project objectives. A computer manufacturer is likely, for example, to provide greater support to a project that results in a product that is a key of fering than it is to satisfy the intellectual interests of a staff member. The objectives of the project also set the standards for success.
The main objective of the IAS computer project was to explore the value of the computer as a scientific instrument. This objective shaped both the machinery that was built and the way in which it was used. In the Draft Report on EDVAC von Neumann had advocated building synchronous computers with serial architecture and no floating-point. These choices were believed to simplify the overall design and construction of the hardware at a time when nobody had yet built a stored program computer.
But in the IAS computer project, von Neumann did not follow his own advice.3 He returned to first principles to decide what kind of machine would be most suitable for scientific research. He chose to use parallel memory and parallel arithmetic, and to make the machine asynchronous. All of these choices were made to increase the speed of the machine. It proved to be a major task to work out the circuitry for this design, but once it was done, the machine was indeed fast (so long as it was supported by a fast random-access memory). The computing community was somewhat surprised that this design led to a physically small machine (by standards of those days), with fewer tubes and a simpler control mechanism than in the EDVAC. Speed of basic operations and size of the memory were determined both by the available components and by von Neumann's calculations about the capacity a computer would need to have in order to solve certain classes of scientific problems.4
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Organizational Buy-In
An organization might allow a project to be carried out without committing itself to the project fully –
intellectually, emotionally, or in terms of the resources that are allocated to it. Such a project might be tolerated because it seemed as though it had potential to be important to the organization, or it was strongly desired by some sector or key individuals in the organization; but it was not yet seen as core to the mission of the
organization. Projects without strong organizational buy-in often have difficulty in succeeding. Resources for carrying out the project are likely to be meager. Almost every project has some stage at which it experiences problems, and it is difficult to acquire the extra resources or time to overcome these problems if the
management does not have faith in the proposal. Management is quick to terminate such projects, and the proponents are likely to be disappointed and may even become bitter.
3 A good account of this is given in Michael R. Williams, A History of Computing Technology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall, 1985, pp. 353–359.
4 This issue is discussed at length in Aspray (1990), chapter 3.
In order to succeed, von Neumann needed to have organizational buy-in at four places: from the IAS board of trustees, the IAS director, the other faculty, and the financial and technical partners. Von Neumann worked first on the director, Frank Aydelotte. Von Neumann was a productive and valued member of the faculty (of which there were then only six), and Aydelotte worked hard to see that the faculty was happy and well supported.
There was a strong belief that, as some of the best scientists in the world, the faculty should be given great freedom in choosing the projects they wished to conduct. Thus, the culture was supportive of von Neumann's decision to pursue a study far removed from that typical in mathematics. However, von Neumann recognized that his computer project would seriously disturb the think-tank atmosphere of the Institute. He solicited support from his colleague Oswald Veblen, who had been instrumental in locating the Institute in Princeton and
focusing it on scientific rather than medical research.
Von Neumann himself used a ''carrot and stick" approach. Aydelotte and the trustees were seeking a
breakthrough to more firmly establish the Institute as a world-class operation. While the Institute did have the world-renown Albert Einstein and other distinguished mathematicians on its faculty, it was still a young organization and Aydelotte believed that it needed some new achievements to secure its reputation. Von Neumann convinced Aydelotte that the computer might have this effect. He also made it clear that he was determined to build a computer, emphasizing this point by soliciting offers of faculty positions from Chicago, Columbia, and MIT. With Veblen and Aydelotte's encouragement, the Trustees voted to approve the project and provide $100,000 of initial funding.
During the course of the project, Robert Oppenheimer succeeded Aydelotte as director of the Institute.
Oppenheimer was familiar with the importance of advanced scientific tools from both his university research as a physicist and his Los Alamos experience during the war. Not surprisingly, he seems to have had no major objections to the presence of a computer project at the Institute. His objection was instead to some of the uses of the computer. Having renounced at the end of the war any further personal role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, he was distressed by the heavy use the Institute computer was receiving from weapons designers at Los Alamos, as well as by von Neumann's involvement in this work. But Oppenheimer adhered to the laissez faire practice that let Institute faculty decide for themselves what work they would pursue. Although Oppenheimer and von Neumann were not friends, and although they were diametrically opposed politically, they displayed strong mutual respect for one another as professionals. For example, von Neumann set aside his political beliefs in order to testify in Congress on Oppenheimer's behalf, when Oppenheimer was in danger of losing his security clearance.
Veblen and perhaps one or two of the other Institute faculty were supportive of the computer project. However, that support was mainly vested in support for von Neumann, not in the intellectual merits of the project itself.
This became clear in the later years of the project. Beginning around 1952, von Neumann began to spend more time in Washington, D.C. than in Princeton. He was working closely with the Atomic Energy Commission and eventually became one of its five commissioners. He was also doing active consulting for the Air Force on intercontinental ballistic missiles and for the predecessor organizations of the National Security Agency on cryptanalysis. He eventually decided to resign his faculty position at the Institute because he believed the intellectual climate was not conducive for his research on scientific computing and because he was eager to escape from a town he had always regarded as provincial. He signed a faculty contract with the University of California, Los Angeles, to become effective once his term at the AEC had ended. He believed that UCLA would be more accommodating to his research. This move would also locate him in his beloved southwestern United States, where the weather, cuisine, and geography were all to his liking. While in Washington, however, he became gravely ill with cancer. He died in 1957, before he could move to California.
As soon as it became clear that von Neumann was not going to return to the Institute, support within IAS for the computer project evaporated. Staff began to leave for other research organizations, and the computer was sold to Princeton University. This computer was rapidly becoming obsolete, but no serious consideration was given to building or buying another computer for the Institute or to continuing the research program in scientific computation.
Von Neumann also had to obtain institutional buy-in from his financial and intellectual partners in the project.
The support from the military services and the Atomic Energy Commission was quite strong. It was not at all clear at the end of the war that the federal government would be willing to support a computer project at the Institute. The military was already supporting projects at the University of Pennsylvania, nobody knew how much of a need there was for high-powered computers, and one could question why the government should support a computer devoted to scientific research rather than to military objectives. However, the military leadership had great respect for von Neumann on account of his contributions during the war, his obvious intellectual abilities, his congenial hawkish political views, and his willingness to continue in peace-time to make his extraordinary talents available to the military. It should be remembered that von Neumann was virtually alone among the early computer designers in having already achieved a strong, international scientific reputation, and this no doubt helped in both giving scientific legitimacy to computers generally as well as in gaining support for his own project.
Von Neumann designed a plan whereby the IAS computer would receive substantial financial support from the armed services but would nevertheless be free from doing operational calculations for them. This was
accomplished by positioning the IAS computer as the testbed for computer design for machines that the military and energy laboratories would build for their own use in the Cold War. This plan was fully endorsed by the military, and later by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the project was adequately funded throughout its lifetime, even during the early years when progress on the construction of the machine was slow.
The organizational buy-in from the other partners was less strong. This was certainly true of Princeton
The organizational buy-in from the other partners was less strong. This was certainly true of Princeton