IP: From Willis Ware -- Yet even more on " The SWAC"

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Fri, 08 Jan 99 11:23:37 PST
From: "Willis H. Ware" <willis () rand org>


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Folder: YES

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Dave:

Here are a few other angles on Harry Huskey and the SWAC project.

RAND had gotten into the analogue computer business in the late 1940s with
a machine from Reeves.  It was nearly hopeless to use because the
DC-coupled amplifiers (that are essential to an analogue computer) would
constantly drift.  William F.  Gunning, who had come to RAND at the
beginning, invented and implemented the chopper-stabilized DC amplifier which
made analogue computers practicable devices to work with.  He also
innovated an arbitrary-function input device, and the concept of
programming an analogue machine via an IBM plugboard.  The RAND-revised
REAC machine hosted some very early work on space trajectories for getting
to the moon.

Then RAND decided to move into digital computing, to build a machine, and
the question became: how to transition analogue-experienced engineers into
digital ones?  This occurred when Harry Huskey was starting SWAC and RAND
assigned Bill Gunning to Harry's team on a full time basis, in part to get
experience with digital things but also to help build the SWAC. I don't
recall the dates precisely but it would probably have been the last few
years of the 40's decade.

UCLA had a number of temporary war-time buildings, and one of them housed
Harry and the SWAC.  A major user of SWAC was the mathematics department,
and the titular focal point for computing at UCLA became the Math
Department, whose head was (I think) Prof Derreck Lehmer.  As I recall the
history, there was also an ongoing contest between the Math Department and
the EE Department as to which should "own computing" on the campus -- an
early example of many similar arguments elsewhere in academia.

Finally, Harry's building was also the meeting place for the earliest
monthly meetings of the local computer group which eventually became the
west cost contingent of the IRE's Professional Group on Electronic
Computers -- now the IEEE Computer Society.  The politics of reconciling the
east and west-coast contingents of IRE's early computer groups is another
story.

                        Willis