Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
After the war Aiken transformed the laboratory into a center for training
and research in the emerging fi elds of computer science. By 1947, Harvard
had established a one-year master's degree program in applied mathe-
matics “with special reference to computing machinery.”
31
The following
year, with funding from the U.S. Air Force, the program began offering
doctoral degrees. By 1954, it had graduated nineteen MA and eight PhD
students. It was not until 1962 that an academic program in computer
science was established outside the Computational Laboratory.
32
MIT had a similarly long tradition of scientifi c computing that began
in the 1920s with Vannevar Bush and his colleagues in the electrical
engineering department. By this time MIT was already known for its
close ties to business and government, and its infl uential electrical engi-
neering department represented the cutting edge of scientifi c computing
in this period. Bush's differential analyzer, which solved differential
equations by mechanical integration, was only the most well-known of
the analog computing devices developed at MIT during the interwar
period. In the late 1930s, funding from the Carnegie Corporation helped
found the MIT Center for Analysis, in which differential analyzers,
network analyzers, and IBM punch card calculators were harnessed to
serve the computational needs of a wide variety of faculty, industry, and
government users. Although the Center for Analysis collapsed, somewhat
inexplicably, shortly after the end of the war, other computing activities
helped propel MIT to the forefront of computing research.
33
The
real-time computing Project Whirlwind was not only transformed, in
1951, into the Digital Computing Laboratory but also spun off the
infl uential Lincoln Laboratory (and ultimately, the System Development
Corporation). Project MAC was an Advanced Research Project Agency-
funded project that produced important innovations in time-sharing and
networking, and in 1975 became the MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science. Other projects and laboratories at MIT incorporated computing
into programs in communications, library science, and operations
research.
34
Despite the central role that MIT played in postwar computing
research, it was not until 1969 that the university offered an undergradu-
ate major in computer science. Its graduate program in computer science
would not be established for another decade. This is not to say that
courses in computing were not offered at MIT prior to this period;
indeed, as early as 1935 Samuel Caldwell was teaching a graduate
seminar in machine computation. But prior to the late 1960s, instruction
in computer science was distributed throughout various departments and
