Howard Hathaway Aiken

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Howard Hathaway Aiken

Howard H. Aiken (* 8. March 1900 in Hoboken , New Jersey ; † 14. March 1973 in St. Louis , Missouri ) was an American computer pioneer, who developed one of the first digital mainframe computer in the world, the Mark I .

life and work

Aiken studied at the University of Chicago , the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University , where he received an MA ( Master of Art ) in 1937 and a Ph.D. in 1939. (Doctor of Philosophy). After a few years in the electrical industry, he was appointed to a chair at Harvard, where he taught mathematics from 1941 to 1946 and became director of the laboratory for computer technology. The machines from Herman Hollerith used at the time could only count on positive numbers, which made them unusable for scientific use. Therefore, from 1939 to 1944, together with IBM engineers (Clair Lake, Frank E. Hamilton, Benjamin Durfee, James W. Bryce), Aiken constructed the second digital mainframe computer in the world after Konrad Zuse , the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), which directly was programmed after commissioning by Grace Hopper . He was later Mark I renamed. This imposing, 17 meter long and 2.50 meter high colossus went down in the history of computer technology. Mark I consisted of 760,000 individual parts, including 3,000 ball bearings and 80 kilometers of wire. Aiken used electrically driven decadic counting wheels as computing elements and for storage. The program was saved on a 24-lane punched tape. The project was largely funded by IBM .

The computer world owes the term debugging to its successor, the Mark II . Grace Hopper reported:

“The summer of 1945 was very hot, we worked in a room without air conditioning, so we left the windows open. Suddenly Mark II stopped. Of course, we immediately crawled into the machine to locate the fault. After a long search we found the defective relay : inside there was a moth, which unfortunately had blessed the time. I took out the insect with tweezers, put it in the log book and stuck it with ScotchTape ( adhesive tape ). Now Commander Aiken had the habit of suddenly bursting in and asking us: 'Are you making any numbers?' embarrassed. If we didn't 'make' numbers, we had to have an excuse ready. From the time of the moth on there was no longer any need. We just claimed that we were debugging . "

The term bug has long been used in English among engineers to denote malfunctions. Grace Hopper therefore commented on the moth in the logbook with the sentence “First actual case of bug being found.” (“The first time that a bug was actually found.”). This moth, the first actual computer bug, can be viewed in the Museum of the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia . In the computer context , debugging still stands for the detection of errors in a computer system, but mainly software errors, while the moth caused a hardware malfunction by blocking the relay and the software of the Mark II was not faulty.

In addition to his construction of computers, Howard Aiken also published articles on systems theory and developed the Aiken code named after him , a complementary BCD code that is still used today in digital watches , pocket calculators and similar devices. For his services to computer technology, he received numerous awards and honors, including from Germany .

membership

In 1947 Aiken was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

literature

  • K. Jäger, F. Heilbronner (ed.): Lexikon der Elektrotechniker , VDE Verlag, 2nd edition from 2010, Berlin / Offenbach, ISBN 978-3-8007-2903-6 , pp. 17-18

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 11, 2015