Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1946, ing an enormous load,” say the minutes of the first
a handful of electronic engineers showed up at the meeting of the Electronic Computer Project. The
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and circuitry would be modular, because “this sort of
requested a place in the basement to plug in their design is favorable for mass production,” added the
tools. They were out of luck. “The only really use- engineers. “Words coding the orders are handled
able space in our basement is that adjoining the in the memory just like numbers,” explained von
men’s lavatory, to which you are most heartily wel- Neumann, breaking the distinction between num-
come,” Electronic Computer Project director John bers that mean things and numbers that do things,
von Neumann was told. Despite this inauspicious ensuring that all hell would break loose.
welcome, the engineers moved in, and in April, the Instead of importing a few mathematical logi-
project’s accountants recorded the first $4 for cians into a lab full of engineers, von Neumann
“electrical work.” imported a handful of engineers into a place run
The Institute for Advanced Study was established by mathematicians. Although they had to start out
in 1930 as a refuge for scholars in mathematics, by building their own workbenches at the Institute,
physics, history, and art. There were no laboratory and scrounge for war-surplus components as best
facilities of any kind. “What could be wiser than they could, there was no one around to say, “Well,
to give people who can think the leisure in which Dr. von Neumann, this looks interesting, but we
to do it?” the founding director Abraham Flexner build computers like this ...”
had been advised in 1939. Not a word about work- The lead engineer was Julian Bigelow, former col-
benches or tools. league of Norbert Wiener and co-author of the 1943
John von Neumann was a pure mathematician paper “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” around
who, along with many of his colleagues, had been
drawn over to the applications side of things dur- Every single bit of the digital
ing World War II. He liked it there, and refused to universe we now inhabit can
leave. Having been exposed to the powers of digital be traced back directly to those
computing through his involvement with the nuclear first binary digits that flickered
weapons program at Los Alamos, he was impatient to life in the summer of 1951.
to build the next generation of computers, and was
well aware of the implications of Alan Turing’s 1936 which the beginnings of the cybernetics movement
results on Universal Machines. “We are building coalesced. His job was to take the logical design as
one,” he told his arriving engineers, and the copy of laid out in the abstract by Burks, Goldstine, and von
Turing’s paper in the IAS library has been so heavily Neumann, and coax it to life as a machine. “
consulted that its binding has come unglued. Julian would have the ideas, and Ralph Slutz
Other groups were engaged in similar projects, but would kind of detail the ideas, and then James
none quickly and boldly enough for von Neumann. Pomerene and I would go try and make the
“If he really wanted a computer,” explained Arthur electrons do their thing,” explains Willis Ware, one
Burks, “the thing to do was to build it.” of the original engineers. “Julian was the architect
Burks and Herman H. Goldstine, an Army colonel of that machine.” Bigelow’s gang soon outgrew
transplanted from the ENIAC project at the Moore their room in the basement of Fuld Hall, and were
School in Philadelphia, were installed on the sec- pushed outside to a hastily constructed building
ond floor of Fuld Hall in a small office belonging to at the edge of the Institute’s 600-acre woods.
logician Kurt Gödel, where they set to work, under At the Institute for Advanced Study, it was easier
the guidance of von Neumann, outlining the logical to find an expert in quantum mechanics than
architecture of the machine. someone who worked on their own car. Bigelow was
References:
Archives