I recently cowrote an article about Augusta Ada Lovelace, the colleague and friend of 19th-century computer pioneer Charles Babbage, and the woman after whom the computer language Ada is named. My coauthor, Betty Toole, has been studying Ada for over a decade and has written two books about her. One of the first papers Betty read on Ada was written by Harry and Velma Huskey and published in a 1980 issue of the Annals of the History of Computing.
Harry Huskey is one of the pioneers of our industry, and has been involved with several landmark projects. While a mathematics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943, he worked on ENIAC, the first electronic, digital computer. He then spent some time in England working on Pilot ACE, the British computer effort that had been initiated at the National Physics Laboratory by Alan Turing. He returned to the United States in 1948, and as a member of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), managed the design and construction of SWAC, the first electronic, digital computer built on the West Coast. Huskey continued to contribute to the field in many important ways, including as a professor of computer science at U.C. Santa Cruz.
In the mid-1980s, Betty tried to locate the Huskeys about their article on Ada, but was unable to do so. Harry had retired from U.C. Santa Cruz, and was not listed in the San Francisco area. When Betty related this story to me this past year, we assumed that Harry had passed on.
I was pleased to discover recently that we were dead wrong. In January 1998, Harry, 82 years young and happily retired, gave a talk, sponsored by Bay Area Computer History Perspectives, on SWAC. Although SWAC has been documented in several books, having the opportunity to hear several personal anecdotes and to understand the motivations behind many of the technical decisions was a unique and remarkable experience. It also gave me the opportunity to ask some burning questions I had about "the way it was" -- questions not adequately addressed in the existing literature.
The French archeologist Pierre Leroi-Gourhan noted that we cannot truly understand tools without their proper context. We can look at a 10,000-year old chunk of stone, and determine from its shape and condition that it was probably used as a hammer or cutting tool. But we cannot determine the reasoning behind its basic design or the cultural role it played, because the tool's context is lost forever.
Because the computer field is so young, the context for our own "ancient" tools still exists in the minds of the creators and users of these tools, many of whom are still alive. An old technical manual could tell you that the SWAC had a square root instruction (as most early computers did), but it wouldn't tell you why. And only the creators could explain why SWAC was unofficially known as "Zephyr," or why some rival NBS engineers on the East Coast affectionally called the machine "Sirocco." Is there any value to this information beyond historical curiosity? Knowing that "sirocco" means "hot wind coming from the desert" doesn't make anyone a better engineer, but it does enrich our cultural past, humanizing a field that is too often portrayed as dry and austere.
There's a lot we can learn from our past about engineering as well. In the case of computers, ignorance of the history of our field is ignorance of the field itself. That's why books like Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming and Fred Brooks's The Mythical Man Month, both first published over a quarter century ago, are still considered standard references. That's why it's a crime that other classics, such as Elliott Organick's The Multics System, are out of print and inaccessible to new generations of programmers who could benefit from them.
Not everyone will have the good fortune I have had of hearing and talking to some of the early pioneers in our field. But you don't have to talk to an industry giant to learn something valuable about our past. Everyone who has worked in our field for some time -- be it a senior engineer at your work, teacher, or parent -- has valuable stories that need to be heard. The biggest crime of all would be not to listen.