Customer Reviews

Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957 (History of Computing)

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This book is loaded with details, but it carries little understanding or feel for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). Also it does contain outright errors. The BINAC's cycle time was not reduced to 2.5 megacycles. It ran at 4 megacycles, but the cycle time of the UNIVAC was 2.5 megacyles because of the difficulties with fine tuning the Binac. In fact, Pres Eckert was so concerned that the mercury delay line memory might not work for the UNIVAC that he secretly had me and Art Gehring do the logical design of the UNIVAC using electrostatic storage. This machine was microcoded. I believe it was the first one microcoded. Of course, it was never built because the mercury delay-line memory worked.

Northrop played a big role in the Binac's problems. The missle boys were in charge at Northrop, and they were paranoid about security. They didn't want any of EMCC's personnell on their site. So they crated up the BINAC and shipped it to California then laid the parts out on a hangar's floor and had a newly graduated electrical engineer put it together. Despite this, it did run. It was never flown controlling a Snark Missle, which was later cancelled. By the way, I never tried to program chess. What I programmed was the trajectory of the Snark Missle for Binac. Claude Shannon at Bell Labs had suggesed that a computer could be programmed to play chess so somebody introduced me to him, knowing I had spent one afternoon programming gin rummy.

Norberg doesn't give much time to Strauss of American Totalizator who had funded EMCC. He was a wonderful man and had the confidence of both the employees and Eckert and Mauchly. His untimely death was a real tragedy to the company.

Also, Norberg doesn't give enough credit for EMCC's problems to security clearance. This was the Joe McCarthy era when the unproven accusation by anyone could ruin another person's chances for security clearance. UNIVAC contracts were cancelled because the company's security was questioned, mainly due to questions about Bob Shaw and John Mauchly. When Kay Mauchly received John's FBI Report on his clearance after the Freedom of Informatin Act was passed, the big problems with his security were that he belonged to Consumers Union, which the Unamerican Activities Committee declared as communist, and he belonged to the American Association of Scientific Workers, which was also a questionable organization. John said he never joined it but may have signed up for a reprint from them at some scientific event.

Bob Shaw's was due to his car being parked on a street in Washington, D.C. when a so-called communist oriented march was taking place. Bob was a much more important member of the UNIVAC design team than Norberg gives him credit for. He was brilliant and drew all the logical block diagrams for the UNIVAC in about 6 weeks. Of course, they were based on the design settled on by many staff meetings. Still, an amazing feat. Bob was an albino with very poor eyesight. He drew the diagrams on 3X4 foot graph paper. Because of his eyesight, he could not drive a car, but he was quite social. Cars were not as plentiful then as now, so he bought a car and had various people drive him to social and business functions. One of his drivers asked to borrow his car one weekend to drive to Washington to visit a friend. It turned out to be on the day of the parade. The car was parked on the street, and the police came along and took down license plate numbers. Thus, Bob was supposed to be at the march. To add further madness to that era, the charges against one were also classified, thus one didn't know what the problems were.

When Remington Rand took over EMCC after Strauss's death, they were unbeleivably ignorant about computers and handling such a merger. I worked in Washington, D.C. for RemRand in 1950-1951 for H. H. Goodman whose main claim to fame was that he had reached his high position at RemRand without even graduating from the eighth grade in school. He basically told me that RemRand had more money than EMCC thus RemRand was smarter. The EMCC designers were dreamers and it would take a company like RemRand to lead them. They had no sales plans, no training plans, and no idea what it would take to run a computer installation. They waltzed me around to talk about the UNIVAC then the salesmen sold them typewriters and accounting machines. We had a wonderful computer ready for delivery and didn't sell it. In the meantime, IBM ran around town talking about a Defense Calculator, not even on the drawing board.

I had worked with brilliant engineers in an open, exciting atmosphere in which we knew we were pushing back frontiers, and here I was working with these incompetents. I knew they would lose the industry. That's when I decided to take time off and have a family.

I know nothing about ERA, but I've read about Seymour Cray and I am sure he was of the Pres Eckert and John Mauchly mold, brilliant, exciting and always on the frontier.