An Early Graduate Program in Computers and Communications

Abstract

This is the story of how, in 1957, John Holland, a graduate student in mathematics; Gordon Peterson, a professor of speech; the present writer, a professor of philosophy; and several other Michigan faculty started a graduate program in Computers and Communications—with John our first Ph.D. and, I believe, the world's first doctorate in this now-burgeoning field. This program was to become the Department of Computer and Communication Sciences in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts about ten years later. It had arisen also from a research group at Michigan on logic and computers that I had established in 1949 at the request of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. When I first met John in 1956, he was a graduate of MIT in electrical engineering, and one of the few people in the world who had worked with the relatively new electronic computers. He had used the Whirlwind I computer at MIT [33], which was a process-control variant of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Computer [27]. He had also studied the 1946 Moore School Lectures on the design of electronic computers, edited by George Patterson [58]. He had then gone to IBM and helped program its first electronic computer, the IBM 701, the first commercial version of the IAS Computer. While a graduate student in mathematics at Michigan, John was also doing military work at the Willow Run Research Laboratories to support himself. And 1 had been invited to the Laboratories by a former student of mine, Dr. Jesse Wright, to consult with a small research group of which John was a member. It was this meeting that led to the University's graduate program and then the College's full-fledged department. The Logic of Computers Group, out of which this program arose, in part, then continued with John as co-director, though each of us did his own research. This anomaly of a teacher of philosophy meeting an accomplished electrical engineer in the new and very small field of electronic computers needs some explanation, one to be found in the story of the invention of the programmable electronic computer. For the first three programmable electronic computers (the manually programmed ENIAC and the automatically programmed EDVAC and Institute for Advanced Study Computer) and their successors constituted both the instrumentation and the subject matter of our new Graduate Program in Computers and Communications.