Hall of Famer

George R. Stibitz, professor of physiology emeritus at the Medical School, who invented the first electric digital computer, was inducted into the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's National Inventors Hall of Fame during National Inventors Day ceremonies in Arlington, Va., in February.

Stibitz's digital computer was first demonstrated publicly at Dartmouth in 1940 while the inventor, then a research mathematician at Bell Laboratories, was attending a meeting here of the American Mathematical Society. Sitting before a teletypewriter in McNutt Hall, he sent his computation commands via telephone line to the digital computer at the Bell Laboratories, then in New York City. In a patter of seconds, to the amazement of a skeptical audience, he received the answers, to the computation problems he had posed.

The event, now noted by a bronze plaque on the main stairway wall of McNutt Hall, is considered the first demonstration of a remote data link, now regarded as commonplace. Stibitz's pioneer relay computer, using the theory of binary notations, had a very limited range of operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division but even before his 1940 demonstration at Dartmouth he was thinking about computers that could be programmed. Of the four computers he and a fellow inventor built for the National Defense Research Council during World War II, one was the first programmable computer.