Electronics, Technology and Computer Science, 1940-1975: A Coevolution

Annals H~.st Comput (1989) 10 257-275

G American Federation of Information Processing Socletles

Electronics Technology and

Computer Science,

1940-l 975: A Coevolution

PAUL CERUZZI

This paper explores the relationship between two disciplines: electrical

engineering and computer science, over the past 40 years. The aufhor

argues that it was the technology of electronics-the exploitation of the

properfies of free electrons--that final/y permitted BabbageS concepts of

automatic computing machines to be practically realized. Electrical

Engineering (EE) activities thus “took over” and dominated

the

work of

those involved with computing. Once fhaf had been done (around the mid-

195Os), the reverse takeover happened: the soence of computing then

“took over” the discipline of Electrical Engineering, in

the

sense that its

theory of digital switches and separation of hardware and

software

offered

EE a guide

to

designing and building ever more complex

arcuits.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: K. 2.

[Computing Milieux]:

History

of Computing-hardware, software, systems, theory. A. 1,

[General

Literature]:

Introductions and Survey.

General Terms: Des/gn, Reliability, Theory.

Additional Terms: Computer

Science.

Electrical Engineering.

Introduction

In 1976, a colorful brochure put out by the IBM

Corporation had a startling title: “It Was to Have

Been the Nuclear Age. It Became The Computer

Age: the Evolution of IBM Computers” (Figure

11.’ Leaving aside the question whether it is proper

to identify any period of time by a piece of tech-

nology, the title does call attention to the fact that

the computer seems to have sprung up suddenly

and unexpectedly. to dominate much of the na-

tion’s technology, economy, and culture.

cades, and not sooner? A complete answer to this

question would include a mix of economic and so-

cial as well as technical factors. This essay fo-

cuses on an aspect of the internal development

of computer technology that was as important as

any: namely that after 1940, Babbage’s concep-

tual formulation of an computer was joined to an-

other technology that was well suited to its re-

alization. That technology was electronics.

Annals of the Hlstory of Computing, Volume 10, Number 4, 1989 . 257

But a sophisticated description of a digital

computer appeared in the writings of Charles

Babbage in the 1830s. Why, then, the appear-

ance

of a “computer age” in the past three de-

‘An earlier version of the paper was presented to the an-

nual meeting of the Society for History of Technology (SHOTi,

October 23, 1986. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Author’s Address:

Dept. of Space Science and Exploration,

National Air and Space Museum. Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C. 20560. (202) 357-2828.

Electronics emerged as the “technology of

choice” for implementing the concept of a com-

puting machine between 1940 and 1955. As it did

so, it enabled persons not trained in Electrical

Engineering to exploit the power and versatility

of computers. This activity led to the sbudy of

“computing” independently of the technology out

of which “computers” were built. In other words,

it led to the creation of a new science: “Computer

Science.”

The term “coevolution” implies that there was

a continuous and reciprocal interaction between

electronics and computing. Such interaction did,

P. Ceruzzi

l

Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Science

in fact occur. As computer science matured, it re-

first automatic calculators, finally, after years of

hope and promise, came into existence. But al-

most from the start they were eclipsed by ma-

chines using the much faster vacuum tube as its

computing element. The story of the invention of

the electronic digital computer has been told

elsewhere, and in that story the issue of the vac-

uum tube’s perceived unreliability, as well as its

heavy power demands, are among the difficulties

cited for the initial skepticism as to its practi-

cality. These were indeed serious issues, but they

were addressed. Once they were, vacuum tube

technology, with its higher operating speeds, was

perceived as an alternative to relays.

paid its debt to electronics by offering that en-

gineering discipline a body of theory which served

to unify it above the level of the physics of the

devices themselves. In short, computer science

provided electrical engineering a paradigm, which

I call the “digital approach,” which came to de-

fine the daily activities of electrical engineers in

circuits and systems design.2

Though continuous, the interaction between

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering was

marked by two distinct phases. In the first phase,

between 1940-1955, electronics took over the

practice of computing. In the second, from 1955

to 1975, computing took over electronics. I shall

look at each in turn.

Between 1940 and 1950, a scattered group of

persons, without knowledge of one another, put

Babbage’s ideas into working machinery. These

inventors were interested in building machines

that could carry out a sequence of elementary

arithmetic operations, store intermediate results,

and recall those results automatically as needed,

and display or print the final results of the cal-

culation. They were not, for the most part, con-

cerned with the engineering details of their im-

plementation, except insofar as they wished to

have a machine that worked reliably (Cohen

19851. As things turned out, the first reliable,

working computers-in other words, the first

machines to implement Babbage’s idea of an au-

tomat.ic computing machine-used relays or sim-

ilar electromechanical elements to carry and ma-

nipulate numbers. Using relays (a technology

borrowed from the telephone industry), George

Stibitz of Bell Laboratories and Konrad Zuse of

the Henschel Aircraft Company in Berlin each

built calculators that could carry out three to five

arithmetic operations a second. And using a com-

bination of relays and toothed wheels borrowed

from punched-card accounting machines, How-

ard Aiken at Harvard built a powerful “Auto-

matic Sequence Controlled Calculator” with a

similar operating speed (Ceruzzi 1981).

Relay computers played the vital role of intro-

ducing the concept of automatic, sequential cal-

culation to an often skeptical community. It was

with electromechanical relay technology that the

Throughout this paper I ~111 be concentrating on that

branch of Electrical Engmeenng that IS more accurately de-

scribed as “electronic” engineering This term ~111 be defined

later in the text, but essentially I will not address that branch

of EE that deals with Power Engineering or the so-called

“Heavy Currents.”

One reason for the rapid ascendancy of elec-

tronic devices for computing elements was that

events during the war, mainly unrelated to

building computers, had transformed electronics

itself, raising it above the level considered (and

rejected) by the computer pioneers like Aiken or

Stibitz. One development-radar-was critical,

and became the bridge across which electronics

entered the realm of computing.

The role of radar is not usually considered as

Paul Ceruzzi was born

in Bridgeport,

Connecticut, and

attended Yale University,

where he received a

B.A. in 1970. He

attended graduate

school at the University

of Kansas, from which

he received his Ph.D. in

American Studies in

1981. His graduate

studies included a year as a Fulbright Scholar at

the Institute for the Hisfory of Science in

Hamburg, West Germany, and he received a

Charles Babbage Institute Research Fellowship in

1979. Before joining the staff of the National Air

and Space Museum, he taught History of

Technology at Clemson University in Clemson,

South Carolina.

Dr. Ceruzzi’s main scholarly work has been in

the history of computing since 1935. His has

written a book on this subject (Reckoners, the

Prehistory of The Digital Computer, 1935-

1945, Greenwood Press, 19831, and he is

presently working on a major new gallery at the

National Air and Space Museum about the

computer’s impact on air and space flight.

258

l

Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 10, Number 4, 1989

P. Ceruzzi

l

Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Science

IT V&S TO

i

t-!AVE BEEN THE

NUCLEAR AGE.

IT BECAME...

I

Figure 1. Brochure from IBM, undated, about 1976

(IBM Corporation).

part of the generational lineage of computer his-

tory, in contrast to, say, the invention and mar-

keting of mechanical adding machines. Yet among

those involved in modern computing’s first de-

cade, there was no question as to its influence.

Radar required vacuum tube circuits that han-

dled discrete pulses of current at high frequen-

cies, in contrast to radio transmitters and receiv-

ers which had been the mainstay of prewar

electronics engineering. Both these requirements

matched the needs of computer engineering. Ra-

dar sets typically contained over a hundred tubes,

again in contrast to the more modest four- or five-

t.ube radio sets of the day.

One link from radar to the computer was the

mercury delay line: an ingenious and tricky de-

vice developed with some difficulty for storing

radar pulses. After the war those who had ex-

perience with it ie.g. Maurice Wilkes at Cam-

bridge University in England and Presper Eckert

in Philadelphia) could adapt it for use as a com-

puter memory device. Those who were less fa-

miliar with it had less success, many (e.g. Aiken)

believing that such a device was so fragile that

it would never work in a computer (Wilkes 1985,

p. 128). Mercury delay lines were indeed difficult

to build and operate; nevertheless they played the

role of being the memory device for four of the

first five stored program computers to be built in

the United States and England:

EDSAC, BINAC,

SEAC,

and Pilot

ACE

(the exception was the

Manchester computer, later called “Mark I,” which

used a Williams-tube memory.3

In 1953, when the

IRE Proceedings

issued a

special “Computer Issue,” Werner Buchholz, the

guest editor, stated that although many com-

puter projects were started during WW II,

. .

Still, the present growth of the computer in-

dustry did not start until the results of the enor-

mous development of electronic technology dur-

ing World War II were brought into the field. It

is interesting to note that many computer proj-

ects started around a nucleus of wartime radar

experts. Electronics not only provided the tech-

nological means for greatly increased speed and

capacity, and thereby enhanced the usefulness of

computers many times, but the availability of

cheap, mass-produced components and of engi-

neers trained to use them made it possible to ex-

periment on a greater scale and at a lower cap-

ital investment than before (IRE 1953, p. 12201.

As a result of that development of electronics

technology between 1939 and 1945, employment

in the American electronics industries had risen

from 110,000

to 560,000 (Electronics

1980, pp. 150-

210).

The vacuum tube ascendancy was not imme-

diate, however. Experience with radar had at-

tacked many of the problems of reliability, but

these problems still remained. Just as serious was

the fact that the much faster operating speeds of

tubes required a rethinking of the overall struc-

ture of a computing machine, especially the way

it received its instructions. High electronic speeds

meant nothing if the computing circuits received

their orders by mechanical devices such as paper

tape or punched card readers. Likewise the high

arithmetic speeds had to be carefully matched to

equally high speeds for storing and retrieving in-

termediate results from memory devices. It was

also recognized that higher arithmetic speeds re-

quired greater memory capacities. Each of the first

electronic calculators (i.e., machines whose com-

puting program was not directed by a stored pro-

“See Table 1 for a full listing of these and other early com-

puters and their memory devices.

Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 10, Number 4, 1989

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259

P. Ceruzzi

l

Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Science

gram), namely the Atanasoff computer, the

ENIAC,

the British Colossus, and the IBM SSEC,

addressed these problems in different, and in

hindsight inelegant, ways. Electronic computing

was held up by the need for a consensus on what

a digital computer ought to look likea

faults) with relays (Stibitz 1945). What that meant

This last bottleneck was broken in 1945, with

the emergence of the concept of the stored pro-

gram principle as the way to organize the various

units of a computer. The origins of this concept

are a matter of controversy, but the informal dis-

tribution, in 1945 and 1946, of a “First Draft of

a Report on the

EDVAC"

by John von Neumann

was what brought the computing community a

general awareness of the concept (van Neumann

1945).

Von Neumann’s report described the

EDVAC

in

terms of its logical structure, using a notation

borrowed from neurophysiology. The

EDVAC'S

im-

plementation in vacuum tube circuits, though

mentioned, is not the focus of von Neumann’s

energies. Instead he focuses on the main func-

tional units of the computer-its arithmetic unit,

its memory, input and output, and so on. The re-

port also described the idea, and the advantages,

of storing both instructions and data in one, high

speed internal memory.

The “First Draft” had an effect on every aspect

of computing. One effect was to hasten the de-

mise of the relay and assure the place of elec-

tronic circuits as the technology of choice for

building a computer. Once the logical design of

a digital computer was laid out in a way not tied

to a specific technical implementation (as von

Neumann’s was), then it became no more diffi-

cult to construct a computer according to that de-

sign using vacuum tubes than it was to construct

it out of relays or anything else. There were

problems of reliability with tubes, but these were

not overwhelming, nor were they that much

greater than similar problems (e.g. transient

‘It is sometimes argued that those who were skeptical of

vacuum tube technology because of its alleged unreliability

were correct, as evidenced by the fact that vacuum tubes were

eventuallv themselves replaced by the presumably more re-

liable “&d-state” devices such as diodes, transistors, and later

on integrated circuits. Transistors did offer far greater reli-

ability and lower power consumption than tubes, but it was

a full decade after the transistor’s invention that it became

practical to produce transistors in quantity with uniform

characteristics such that they could be used in computers. In

the invervening decade (1948-19581, it was questions first of

logical structure, and then of memory technology, that dom-

inated debates over computer design.

was that for an incremental investment of time

and money to utilize vacuum tube technology, one

got a thousandfold increase in speed. That ad-

vantage was overwhelming, and it meant that the

argument of tubes vs. relays was over before it

had a real chance to begin.

Maurice Wilkes, whose

EDSAC

was among the

first stored program computers to be completed,

in 1949, was among those who saw the Report as

the answer to many of the organizational prob-

lems associated with building computers:

. . .

In [the

EDVAC

Report], clearly laid out, were

the principles on which the development of the

modern digital computer was to be based: the

stored program with the same store for numbers

and instructions, the serial execution of instruc-

tions, and the use of binary switching circuits for

computation and control. I recognized this at once

as the real thing, and from that time on never

had any doubt as to the way computer develop-

ment would go (Wilkes

1985, p. 1091.

As the first stored program electronic com-

puters finally began operating in the early 1950s

their superiority was quickly recognized. The Ab-

erdeen Proving Ground provided a good test en-

vironment-at that facility a variety of mechan-

ical and electronic calculators, relay sequence

calculators, and stored program computers were

installed by 1953. Franz Alt, who was at Aber-

deen at that time, later remarked:

. . I

relay computers were in competition with

them [electronic computers], and they didn’t hold

their own. They were much too slow by compar-

ison . . .

After a few years people lost interest

in

them. They had been built as an insurance

against the possibility that electronic computing

might not work t Alt 1969).

The range and evolution of machine types, and

the emergence of the stored program approach,

is revealed by the listing in Table 1 of digital

computer installations, broken down by their type

of design. (Analog computers and devices are ex-

amined in a separate section). Table 1 summa-

rizes the various types of automatic computing

machines built and installed between 1940 and

1955. For each machine, a date is given for its

completion or first installation, followed by an

260

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Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 10, Number 4, 1989

P. Ceruzzi

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Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Science

Name

Table

1, Computer Installations, 1940-l 955.

Year

I. Electromechanical and Electronic Calculators

A. Relay or Mechanical Calculators

No. Installed

Bell Labs Model 1 1940

1

Zuse Z-3

1941 1

Bell Labs Model 2 1942

1

Harvard Mark I

1944 1

Bell Labs Model 3

1944 1

Bell Labs Model 4 1945

1

Zuse Z-4

1945 1

Bell Labs Model 5

1946 2

Harvard Mark II

1947 1

ARC (see text)

1948/52 1

Bell Labs Model 6 1949

1

ONR/ERA relay computer “Abel”

1950 1

BARK

1950

1

AURA

1952 1

NEC Mark I (Tokyo)

1952 1

8. Electronic Calculators, General Purpose but Externally Programmed

IBM PSRC

1944 5

ENIAC

1945 1

IBM 603 Multiplier

1946 100

IBM 604 1948

5600 eventually

IBM SSEC 1948 1

Harvard Mark Ill 1949

1

Northrop Aircraft/IBM CPC 1949

700

Harvard Mark IV i 952

1

ERA Logistics Computer 1953

1

Burroughs E-l 01

1955 100

Monrobot

1955 5 approx.

Elecom 50 1955

2

C. Special Purpose Electronic Calculators

Jaincomp

USAF Fairchild

OMIBAC

Teleregister

SPEEDH

Reservisor

BAEQS

Magnefile

TRADIC

(Bell Labs)

MDP-MSI

Haller Ray & Brown

MIDSAC

1950

1950

1950

1952

1952

1953

1954

1954

1954

1955

D. Digital Differential Analyzers

4

1

1

>4

1

1

>3

1

>1

1

1

Northrop

MADDIDA

1949 15

CRC 101 & 105

1951 >5

QUAC

1952

1

Bendix D-l 2 1954

2

Wedilog

1

Annals of the History of Computtng, Volume

10,

Number 4, 1989

l

261

P Ceruzzr

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Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Science

Table i. Computer Installations, 1940-l 955. (continued)

Name Year No. Installed

II. Stored Program Electronic Computers

A. Serial,

“EDVAC

type”

-- ---_.___

BiNAC 1949

1

EDSAC 1949 1

SEAC 1950 1

Pilot ACE

1951 1

RAYDAC 1951

1

UNIVAC

1951 46 eventually

C.S.I.R.O. Mark I (Australia)

1952 1

CUBA

(France)

1952

1

EDVAC 1952

1

LEO

1952

1

DYSEAC 1953 1

FLAC 1953 1

MIDAC 1953 1

DEUCE 1954 3

by 1955, 32 eventually

B. Drum Memory, “ERA 1101 type”

ERA 1101

OARAC

Burroughs Laboratory Comp.

CADAC

102

Elecom

100

PTERA

Bendix G-15

CALDIC

CIRCLE

Hughes Airborne

IBM 650

MINIAC

ALWAC

ORDFIAC

WISC

PENNSTAC

LGP 30

READIX

1950

1952

1952

1952

1952

1952

1953

1953

1953

1953

1953

1953

1954

1954

1954

1955

1955

1955

1

1

5 approx.

14

5

approx.

1

>400 eventually

:

5 approx.

>2000 eventually

3

5

1

1

1

>lOO after 1955

1

C. Parallel Memory. “von Neumann type”

Whirlwind

1950

I

SWAC 1950

1

Manchester (Ferranti) Mark I

1951 9

AVIDAC

1951 1

IAS (von Neumann)

1951 1

ILLIAC 1952 1

IBM 701

1952

19

by 1955

MANIAC

1952

1

NAREC

1952

1

ORDVAC 1952

1

ARC (see text)

1948/52 1

ERA 1103

1953 IO

JOHNNIAC 1953

1

IBM 702 1954

14

Ferranti Mark II

1954 19

NOW

1954

1

ORACLE

1954

1

IBM 704 1955 1 in 1955, many later

262 4 Annals of the Htstory of Computing, Volume IO, Number 4, 1989

P. Ceruzzi

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Coevolutlon of Electronics and Computer Science

estimated number of installations iin many cases

form of magnetic cores) until the end of this era.

Perhaps symbolic of this phase of the history

of the computer was the

ARC

computer, built by

A. D. Booth of London’s Birkbeck College, and

first operational in 1948. Booth had followed the

American developments closely, and was con-

vinced early on of the advantages of the von

Neumann, stored program approach to computer

design. He proceeded to design and build a com-

puter along these lines, however using relays in-

stead of vacuum tubes in the interests of saving

money and time. But almost as soon as the

ARC

was completed, he set out replacing the relay cir-

cuits with their equivalent vacuum tube circuits

to implement the same logical functions (Booth

1949).

” this information is approximate).’

The figures verify Alt’s impressions of this era:

relay calculators and computers initiated the dig-

ital era, but they were quickly eclipsed by elec-

tronic devices. Of the electronic machines, gen-

eral purpose calculators having a limited degree

of programmability (e.g. Northrop/IBM CPC, IBM

603/604) were installed in large numbers in the

early part of this period, and served as the work-

horse of digital computation until inexpensive

stored program computers became available, be-

ginning around 1953. Special purpose electronic

machines, including the Digital Differential

Analyzer, likewise fall into this category.

Stored program electronic computers did not

begin to appear in large numbers until around

1953, especially with the introduction of the IBM

650. Those that were installed in large numbers

tended to be the slower, but less expensive, drum

types (such as the 6501. These numbers should be

considered in the context of the greater speed,

memory capacity, and overall computing power

of the large scale machines such as the

UNIVAC

and IBM 701, of which only a few were installed

in the early years.

The “Von-Neumann type” design (stored pro-

gram, parallel memory access), which provided

the fastest performance, and which became the

standard architecture down to the present day,

was slow in being established in the form of in-

stalled machines, even though its advantages were

widely known through a series of reports by von

Neumann and others at the Institute for Ad-

vanced Study after 1946. This was mainly due to

the fact that the viability of the parallel archi-

tecture depended on a reliable, fast, and rela-

tively cheap memory device; something which did

not really become commercially available tin the

‘This table is a summary of a report that has been com-

piled from various sources. primarily the ONR Digital Com-

nuter Newsletter. and the Ballistic Research Laboratorv’s

s~rtqv nf‘Automorzc Conrpulers. three volumes of which were

also published during this interval (Weik 1955) The complete

Itsting. with references for each machine, IS on file at the

Computer Museum. Boston, and the Charles Babbage insti-

tute. Mmneapolis. In lookmg at this table it is important to

recognize that the defmnion of computtng machme was not

constant during that period. to the extent that a machine that

might appear on the table as a “computer” m 1945 would not

qualify as a .‘computer”

by 1955.

However m all cases I base

sought to include machmes that went at least a step beyond

performmg simple arithmetic on a pairs of numbers. but whtch

could with some degree of automatic control evaluate math-

ematical expressions of at least a modest length.

Beginnings of Computer Science,

1955-l 975

Bet.ween 1955 and 1975, a science of computing,

in North America adopting the name “Computer

Science,” emerged. Its focus was on the elec-

tronic, stored program digital computer (with its

magnetic core memory) invented in the previous

decade. As this new science emerged, the elec-

tronics technology from which it sprang changed

in response. The first change was a steady pro-

gression of computer related papers in the Elec-

tronics journals6 Eventually it affected the very

definition of “electronics” itself. Before examin-

ing the emergence of a science of computing after

1955, consider the accepted definition of “elec-

tronics” at that time.

The many changes in the practice of electron-

ics during the Second World War, of which com-

puting was but one, led electrical engineers to

reexamine the nature of the discipline. The orig-

inal definition of electronics was that of the

movement of electrons in a gas or vacuum, and

was intended to distinguish radio and commu-

nications work from the power engineering out

of which Electrical Engineering first emerged

iMcMahon 1984). This definition stemmed from

Edison’s observation in 1883 that an evacuated

tube could carry a current, and from the inven-

There is a steady increase of computer related papers, as

indexed in Science ilhsfracts. B (Electrical Engineering). from

zero in 1945 to 10s; in 1965. In 1960, computer papers were

divided into analog and digital, with analog papers dropping

off to about 25 in 1965. After 1965. as argued later in this

paper, digital computing began to dominate all electronics

papers, so that the frequency of computer papers indexed is

no longer a measure of its dominance in the field.

Annals of the Hlstory of Computtng. Volume 10, Number 4, 1989

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263

P. Ceruzzl

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Coevolution of Electronics and Computer Scrence

tion of the diode and triode vacuum tubes in the

first decade of the 20th century.7

With the advent of servomechanisms, radar,

computers, and the transistor (which did not in-

volve movement of electronics though a vacuum),

the definition had to change. In a guest editorial

in a 1952 issue of the IRE Proceedings, William

Everitt proposed a new definition:

Electronics is the Science and Technology which

deals primarily with the supplementing of man’s

senses and his brain power by devices which col-

lect and process information, transmit it to the

point needed, and there either control machinery

or present the processed information to human

beings for their direct use (Everitt 1962, p. 899).

In subsequent issues, several readers objected,

saying that the notion of “information” was too

vague. Many felt that Everitt was correct in

broadening it beyond the movement of electrons

in a vacuum, but they suggested that a better,

yet still precise, definition might be something

along the lines of “the movement of electrons, in

solid, gas,

or vacuum (McMahon 1984, pp. 231-

232).”

The increasing awareness of the computer as

a machine that integrates all aspects of infor-

mation handling, including communication, was

implied in a 1959 address by Simon Ramo, of

Hughes Aircraft, to the Fifth National Commu-

nications Symposium, where he proposed a new

term, “Intellectronics,” defined as “the science of

extending man’s intellect by electronics (Ram0

1959).“8 And Zbigniew Brzezinski coined the term

“Technetronics” to describe essentially the same

transformation of society (Brzezinski 19701.

By 1977 the computer-and-information defi-

nition had become accepted, at least as a general

overall definition of electronics, as indicated by

the lead article by John Pierce for a special issue

of Sczence on “the Electronics Revolution”:

‘Shortly after Edison’s observation. J. J. Thompson ex-

plained the effect by hypothesizing that a stream of nega-

tively charged particles carried the current through the vac-

uum. In 1994 these- particles were given the name “electrons”-

hence “electronics”---by the Irish physicist George Stoney.

Alan Turing, whom I shall describe later in this paper as one

of the founders of Computer Science. was a distant relative

of Stoney. (Hodges 1983).

‘Ramo’s term did not catch on. although a decade later a

group of engineers working in what has since become known

as “Silicon Valley” founded a company called “Intel,” a con-

traction of either Ramo’s term or of the words “Integrated

Electronics;” (Hanson 1982, Chapter 51. Today, what in

America is known as “Computer Science” is called “Infor-

matics” in Continental Europe.

mat is electronics? Once we associated elec-

tronics with vacuum tubes, but vacuum tubes are

almost obsolete. Perhaps electronics is semicon-

ductor devices. But then, what of magnetic cores

and bubbles and liquid crystals? I think that

electronics has really come to mean all electrical

devices for communication, information process-

ing, and control . . . (Pierce 19771.’

Recent publications hint at a new definition

that is in the same spirit as Everitt’s 1952 defi-

nition of electronics as a matter of communica-

tion and control. Mainly as a result of the de-

velopment of so-called very large scale integration

tVLSI&--integrated circuits with hundreds of

thousands of elementary devices on one chip-

there is a perception that it is the job of electri-

cal engineers to “manage complexity.” Although

it is still of concern to design the elementary

transistors, resistors, and so on, what is now the

critical issue is how to interconnect thousands,

even millions of similar and fairly simple devices

to one another.

In the final chapter of Karl Wilde’s and Nilo

Lindgren’s book on the history of Electrical En-

gineering and MIT, for example, several current

faculty and administrators are asked to define

what they see as the essence of their depart-

ment. Most agree that the computer, and espe-

cially its implementation in VLSI circuits, had

come to dominate the practice of the electrical

engineer.” For one of the administrators inter-

viewed (Fernando Corbato), “if there is a single

theme . . . it is the problem of complexity (Wildes

and Lofgren 1985).“l’ This last definition, if it

becomes generally accepted, reveals a strong in-

‘Notice that although the definition of electronics-as-in-

formation resolved the question of whether solid-state devices

like the transistor and integrated circuit properly belonged

to electronics, it introduced the confusion of allowing electro-

magnetic relay devices to be included. While in the general

view there is nothing wrong with this inclusion, when applied

to the context of the early digital computer era. it is inap-

propriate.

‘“They further agreed that the decision made in the late

1970s to keep Computer Science as a part of EE and not let

it break off as did many other universities was a wise one;

the name of the department is now Electrical Engineering

and Computer Science. I shall have more to say on this later.

“One example might serve to illustrate the increase in

complexity of eiectronyc circuits that has taken place over the

oast few decades: When the World Trade Center was built m

Lower Manhattan beginning in the late 196Os, it displaced a

block known as “Radio Row”: a group of shops selling surplus

radio parts. mainly of World War II vintage. Though many

lamented the passing of this area, it should be noted that in

terms of active circuits, the entire contents of all the shops

on Radio Row are today contained on one or two VLSI chips.

264

* Annals of the History of Computing. Volume 10, Number 4, 1989