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“science of the mind”) rather than computer science. Synnoetics was
Fein's term for “the cooperative interaction, or symbiosis of people,
mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that
results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its
individual components.” In many ways, synnoetics was much more akin
to the contemporary discipline of cybernetics that to the modern disci-
pline of computer science.
Computer Bureaus and Computing Laboratories
Computing in the universities did not begin with the electronic computer.
Small-scale computing projects organized around mechanical calculators
and human computers had existed for decades in departments of physics
and astronomy.
28
For the most part, however, these human computing
projects had no identity independent of that of their host department.
They were funded and staffed locally, and regarded computing as impor-
tant only in the context of a larger scientifi c agenda.
By the 1930s a few research universities had established computing
centers that did serve multiple faculties. Many of these were operated in
collaboration with computing equipment manufacturers. IBM started
donating tabulating equipment to Columbia University in the 1920s, for
example, and in 1934 helped establish what would become the Thomas
J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, operated jointly by IBM,
Columbia, and the American Astronomical Society. The bureau attracted
researchers from mathematics and physics as well as astronomy, and in
1945 was transformed into the Watson Scientifi c Computing Laboratory,
which provided computing services to a broad range of scientists
at Columbia and beyond. In 1946 the laboratory began offering an
introductory course in scientifi c computing that over the next two
decades enrolled more than sixteen hundred researchers from twenty
countries.
29
At Harvard, a young graduate student in physics named Howard
Aiken convinced the IBM Corporation to construct for him an electro-
mechanical computer intended to help fulfi ll the pressing need “for more
powerful calculating methods in the mathematical and physical sci-
ences.”
30
The Harvard Mark I, as it came to be known, was a truly
massive machine: fi fty feet long, weighing more than fi ve tons, comprised
of more than seven hundred thousand individual parts. During the war
the Mark I served as the foundation for the Harvard Computational
Laboratory (commanded by Aiken, who was a Naval Reserve offi cer).
