Howard Aiken

INDUCTED IN THE CLASS OF 2004

Notable accomplishments:

• Lead designer on the IBM Harvard Mark I (1937-1944)
• Helped design the Mark II, Mark III and Mark IV (1947-1952)

Quotes:
“I recognized very early that the thing that would be required to make this computer go was money and a lot of it. By then, I had decided that I should build the first machine out of somebody’s existing parts, rather than to start out with metal and wire or go ahead, but try and use somebody’s pieces. Well, there were lots of different pieces to be used. There were the pieces of the computer industry at that time. There were the pieces of the step switches and so forth of the telephone industry. The telephone industry also had teletype and that was wire control printers, and they had punched paper tape, and I could foresee that it didn’t make any difference whether you used tape or cards for input. The tape was harder to edit and you couldn’t sort with it, but nevertheless, it would work and it had advantages. So all these different techniques — printing telegraph techniques, telephone switching techniques, computer industry techniques — were all grist for my mill, at that time, largely as a promoter, trying to find out where to get these pieces so that this machine
could be put together.” (National Museum of American History, 1973)

Suggested reading:
“Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer” by I. Bernard Cohen (1999)

Learn more:
IEEE Computer Society entry