Others were ignored, too
John Mauchly was only one of the great computer pioneers to be
ignored by their universities and forgotten by history. Our
favorite inventor of the "first" electronic digital computer is
Howard Aiken, who was briefly a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital
in the early 1970s. His doctor, Phillip Tumulty, knew Aiken was a
computer pioneer with a potentially deadly disease, and [Tumulty]
asked us to show [Aiken] our early computer reporting system for
Radiology to take his mind off his fate. The brief computer
demonstration instantly relieved Aiken's back pain and we were
privileged to have several lectures and some amazing predictions on
computers, which looked accurately three decades into the
future.
Aiken was the head of Harvard's Computer Lab, which was funded by
Navy ballistics contracts during World War II. He gave his design
for a digital computer to Monroe Calculator, which turned him down.
IBM listened and his Mark 1 with 18K diodes blasted that company on
a meteoric trajectory. Universities should name departments and
buildings after founders of industries, but Aiken is forgotten at
Harvard and a recent article about him in its magazine by a
computer professor referred to him as a "cranky" pioneer.
Alan Turing, a mathematical genius, broke an "unbreakable" German
code during World War II and is considered the intellectual father
of the digital computer, but a British postal service electronics
expert who worked for him designed the machine some consider the
"first" computer.
These men were focused, practical, hard-working, brilliant, and
resourceful, but they vanished in the wake of a tremendous growth
industry. You did justice to the Hopkins pioneer. Now I wish
someone would write a decent article on Aiken and one on how seats
of learning--like Harvard, Penn, and Hopkins--could forget their
superstars.
Paul Wheeler, MD
Johns Hopkins Hospital-Radiology
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