DARTMOUTH EVENT OF 1940 MADE COMPUTER HISTORY

Back in September of 1940 the American Mathematical Society met in Hanover. On the agenda was the first public demonstration of a wondrous new device, the electrical calculator." Accounts of that demonstration provide an interesting commentary on the 24-year development of computation equipment and attitudes toward it.

The "electrical calculator" was a forerunner of today's computers. It was designed by Dr. George Stibitz of the Bell Laboratories, who has come to Dartmouth this fall as research associate in physiology at the Medical School. Wonderful things were claimed for it. It could add, subtract, multiply or divide large, complex numbers, even what mathematicians call imaginary numbers, and return the answer in written form within a short time. Dr. Stibitz demonstrated the device and confounded the assembled mathematicians even further by telling them that the calculator was in New York and that the teletypewriter was connected to it by telegraph cable.

To test it one mathematician asked that this problem be computed: .56785432, minus i12564532 (i for imaginary) multiplied by .45632450 plus i45367899. In 40 seconds the answer came back: plus .31612847 or plus .20028853.

Prof. Thomas E. Kurtz, director of the Kiewit Computation Center, was asked recently to verify this problem. Yes, Stibitz and his calculator were right. The time recorded by the 1964 machine was 0 seconds. Professor Kurtz explained that, no, the machine hadn't as yet revised our concepts of time. It was just that any problem requiring less than half a second registered as 0.

The contemporary accounts also showed traces of skepticism. The Associated Press, for instance, inserted such words as "reputedly can solve," "he declared," and so forth. It was almost as if the reporters suspected that a little man with a large slide rule or pencil was in the New York laboratories.

The old New York Sun said: "No attempt has been made to explore the general commercial possibilities of the calculating machine and the Bell Laboratories have no plan to spread its use beyond their own needs, which are specific. They have not the remotest idea that with their machine they ever will be able to perform a service for any outside industry and they do not foresee the time when Johnny, aged 12, will be able to pick up his telephone receiver and ask the operator for the answer to seven times nine."