The Innovators

  26. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”

  27. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1493. See also LeAnn Erickson, “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII” (Video, PBS, 2002); Bill Mauchly, ENIAC website, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/; Thomas Petzinger Jr., “History of Software Begins with Work of Some Brainy Women,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 1996. Kathy Kleiman helped bring recognition to the women programmers after first meeting them when researching her Harvard undergraduate thesis on women in computing in 1986, and she coproduced a twenty-minute documentary called The Computers, which premiered in 2014. See ENIAC Programmers Project website, http://eniacprogrammers.org/.

  28. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, “The Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Story,” ENIAC website, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli.

  29. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”

  30. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1480.

  31. Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention (Rutgers, 1995), 443.

  32. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”

  33. Oral history of Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton, conducted by Henry Tropp, Smithsonian, Apr. 27, 1973.

  34. Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.

  35. Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.

  36. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 557.

  37. Eckert and Mauchly, “Progress Report on ENIAC,” Dec. 31, 1943, in Nancy Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC (Digital Press, 1981).

  38. John Mauchly, “Amending the ENIAC Story,” letter to the editor of Datamation, Oct. 1979.

  39. Presper Eckert, “Disclosure of a Magnetic Calculating Machine,” Jan. 29, 1944, declassified trial exhibit, in Don Knuth archives, Computer History Museum; Mark Priestley, A Science of Operations (Springer, 2011), 127; Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC, 28.

  40. In addition to specific notes below, this section draws on William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (MIT, 1990); Nancy Stern, “John von Neumann’s Influence on Electronic Digital Computing, 1944–1946,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Oct.–Dec. 1980; Stanislaw Ulam, “John von Neumann,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Feb. 1958; George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (Random House, 2012; locations refer to Kindle edition); Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, 1972; locations refer to Kindle edition).

  41. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 41.

  42. Nicholas Vonneumann, “John von Neumann as Seen by His Brother” (Privately printed, 1987), 22, excerpted as “John von Neumann: Formative Years,” IEEE Annals, Fall 1989.

  43. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 45.

  44. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3550.

  45. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1305.

  46. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1395.

  47. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Jan. 7, 1969.

  48. Bloch oral history, Feb. 22, 1984, Charles Babbage Institute.

  49. Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (MIT Press, 1987), 88; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 9.

  50. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3634.

  51. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3840.

  52. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 199; Goldstine to Gillon, Sept. 2, 1944; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 120. See also John Mauchly, “Amending the ENIAC Story,” letter to the editor of Datamation, Oct. 1979; Arthur W. Burks, “From ENIAC to the Stored Program Computer,” in Nicholas Metropolis et al., editors, A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (Academic Press, 1980).

  53. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27, 1973.

  54. McCartney, ENIAC, 116.

  55. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27, 1973.

  56. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 53.

  57. Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 161; Norman Macrae, John von Neumann (American Mathematical Society, 1992), 281.

  58. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 178.

  59. Presper Eckert oral history, conducted by Nancy Stern, Charles Babbage Institute, Oct. 28, 1977; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1952.

  60. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” U.S. Army Ordnance Department and the University of Pennsylvania, June 30, 1945. The report is available at http://www.virtualtravelog.net/wp/wp-content/media/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf.

  61. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1957. See also Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing.

  62. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. See also McCartney, ENIAC, 125, quoting Eckert: “We were clearly suckered by John von Neumann, who succeeded in some circles at getting my ideas called the ‘von Neumann architecture.’ ”

  63. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 518.

  64. Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, “The Patent, Used as a Sword,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 2012.

  65. McCartney, ENIAC, 103.

  66. C. Dianne Martin, “ENIAC: The Press Conference That Shook the World,” IEEE Technology and Society, Dec. 1995.

  67. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1878.

  68. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”

  69. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1939.

  70. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27, 1973.

  71. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 672, 1964, 1995, 1959.

  72. T. R Kennedy, “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1946.

  73. McCartney, ENIAC, 107.

  74. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 2026, 2007.

  75. Jean Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.

  76. McCartney, ENIAC, 132.

  77. Steven Henn, “The Night a Computer Predicted the Next President,” NPR, Oct. 31, 2012; Alex Bochannek, “Have You Got a Prediction for Us, UNIVAC?” Computer History Museum, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/have-you-got-a-prediction-for-us-univac/. Some reports say that CBS did not air the Eisenhower prediction because preelection polls had predicted that Stevenson would win. This is not true; polls had predicted an Eisenhower win.

  78. Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum, Dec. 1980.

  79. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 277.

  80. Von Neumann to Stanley Frankel, Oct. 29, 1946; Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind (Washington Square Press, 1984), 204; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1980; Stern, “John von Neumann’s Influence on Electronic Digital Computing.”

  81. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.

  82. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 5077.

  83. Crispin Rope, “ENIAC as a Stored-Program Computer: A New Look at the Old Records,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Oct. 2007; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 4429.

  84. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”

  85. Maurice Wilkes, “How Babbage’s Dream Came True,” Nature, Oct. 1975.

  86. Hodges, Alan Turing, 10622.

  87. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 2024. See also Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 5376.

  88. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 6092.

  89. Hodges, Alan Turing, 6972.

  90. Alan Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society,” Feb. 20, 1947, available at http://www.turingarchive.org/; Hodges, Alan Turing, 9687.

  91. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 5921.

  92. Geoffrey Jefferson, “The Mind of Mechanical Man,” Lister Oration, June 9, 1949, Turing Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/44.

  93. Hodges, Alan Turing, 10983.

  94. For an online version, see http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html.

  95. John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980. See also “The Chinese Room Argument,” The Stanford Encyc
lopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/.

  96. Hodges, Alan Turing, 11305; Max Newman, “Alan Turing, An Appreciation,” the Manchester Guardian, June 11, 1954.

  97. M. H. A. Newman, Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R. B. Braithwaite, “Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?” 1952 BBC broadcast, reprinted in Stuart Shieber, editor, The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (MIT, 2004); Hodges, Alan Turing, 12120.

  98. Hodges, Alan Turing, 12069.

  99. Hodges, Alan Turing, 12404. For discussions of Turing’s suicide and character, see Robin Gandy, unpublished obituary of Alan Turing for the Times, and other items in the Turing Archives, http://www.turingarchive.org/. His mother, Sara, liked to believe that Turing’s suicide was actually an accident caused when he was using cyanide to gold-plate a spoon. She sent to his archive a spoon she found in his lab with her note, “This is the spoon which I found in Alan Turing’s laboratory. It is similar to the one which he gold-plated himself. It seems quite probable he was intending to gold-plate this one using cyanide of potassium of his own manufacture.” Exhibit AMT/A/12, Turing Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/A/12.

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRANSISTOR

  1. Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin, 2012; locations refer to the Kindle edition). In addition to specific citations below, sources for this section include Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley (Macmillan, 2006; locations refer to the Kindle edition); Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen (National Academies, 2002); Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (Norton, 1998); William Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology,” National Bureau of Standards Special Publication, May 1974, 47–89; William Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor,” IEEE Transactions of Electron Device, July 1976; David Pines, “John Bardeen,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Sept. 2009; “Special Issue: John Bardeen,” Physics Today, Apr. 1992, with remembrances by seven of his colleagues; John Bardeen, “Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor,” Nobel Prize lecture, Dec. 11, 1956; John Bardeen, “Walter Houser Brattain: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of Sciences, 1994; Transistorized!, PBS, transcripts and interviews, 1999, http://www.pbs.org/transistor/index.html; William Shockley oral history, American Institute of Physics (AIP), Sept. 10, 1974; Oral History of Shockley Semiconductor, Computer History Museum, Feb. 27, 2006; John Bardeen oral history, AIP, May 12, 1977; Walter Brattain oral history, AIP, Jan. 1964.

  2. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 2255.

  3. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2547.

  4. John Pierce, “Mervin Joe Kelly: 1894–1971,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, 1975, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/kelly-mervin.pdf; Gertner, The Idea Factory, 2267.

  5. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 178.

  6. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 231.

  7. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 929; Lillian Hoddeson, “The Discovery of the Point-Contact Transistor,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12, no. 1 (1981): 76.

  8. John Pierce interview, Transistorized!, PBS, 1999.

  9. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 935; Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”

  10. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1022.

  11. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1266.

  12. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1336.

  13. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  14. Pines, “John Bardeen.”

  15. Bardeen, “Walter Houser Brattain.”

  16. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  17. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 126.

  18. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor”; Michael Riordan, “The Lost History of the Transistor,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2004.

  19. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 121.

  20. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  21. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 131.

  22. Bardeen, “Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor,” Nobel Prize lecture.

  23. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  24. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  25. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 1876.

  26. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 4, 137.

  27. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 139.

  28. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 1934.

  29. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”

  30. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  31. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 148.

  32. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”

  33. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”

  34. Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor”; Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1717.

  35. Brattain interview, “Naming the Transistor,” PBS, 1999; Pierce interview, PBS, 1999.

  36. Mervin Kelly, “The First Five Years of the Transistor,” Bell Telephone magazine, Summer 1953.

  37. Nick Holonyak oral history, AIP, Mar. 23, 2005.

  38. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 207; Mark Burgess, “Early Semiconductor History of Texas Instruments,” https://sites.google.com/site/transistorhistory/Home/us-semiconductor-manufacturers/ti.

  39. Gordon Teal talk, “Announcing the Transistor,” Texas Instruments strategic planning conference, Mar. 17, 1980.

  40. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 211; Regency TR1 manual, http://www.regencytr1.com/images/Owners%20Manual%20-%20TR-1G.pdf.

  41. T. R. Reid, The Chip (Simon & Schuster, 1984; locations refer to the Kindle edition), 2347.

  42. Regency trivia page, http://www.regencytr1.com/TRivia_CORNER.html.

  43. Brattain oral history, AIP.

  44. John Bardeen to Mervin Kelly, May 25, 1951; Ronald Kessler, “Absent at the Creation,” Washington Post magazine, Apr. 6, 1997; Pines, “John Bardeen.”

  45. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 3059; Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2579.

  46. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 231 and passim.

  47. Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers, Arnold O. Beckman: One Hundred Years of Excellence, vol. 1 (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2000), 6.

  48. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9.

  49. Sources for the passages on Silicon Valley include Leslie Berlin’s The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, 2005; locations refer to the Kindle edition), 1332 and passim. Berlin is the project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford and is writing a book on the rise of Silicon Valley. Also: Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (University of California, 1997); Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity (HarperBusiness, 2014), Infinite Loop (Doubleday, 1999), The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (Doubleday, 1985), The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook, 1963–2001 (Wiley, 2002), Bill and Dave (Portfolio, 2007); Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley (MIT, 2007); C. Stewart Gillmore, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Stanford, 2004); Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005); Thomas Heinrich, “Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley,” Enterprise & Society, June 1, 2002; Steve Blank, “The Secret History of Silicon Valley,” http://steveblank.com/secret-history/.

  50. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1246; Reid, The Chip, 1239. In addition to these two sources and those cited below, the section draws on my interviews with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove; Shurkin, Broken Genius; Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity (Harpers, 2014); Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, Dec. 1983;
Bo Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering (Springer, 2007); notebooks and items in the Computer History Museum; Robert Noyce oral history, conducted by Michael F. Wolff, IEEE History Center, Sept. 19, 1975; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by Michael F. Wolff, IEEE History Center, Sept. 19, 1975; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by Daniel Morrow, Computerworld Honors Program, Mar. 28, 2000; Gordon Moore and Jay Last oral history, conducted by David Brock and Christophe Lécuyer, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Jan. 20, 2006; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by Craig Addison, SEMI, Jan. 25, 2008; Gordon Moore interview, conducted by Jill Wolfson and Teo Cervantes, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 26, 1997; Gordon Moore, “Intel: Memories and the Microprocessor,” Daedalus, Spring 1966.

  51. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2980, from Fred Warshorfsky, The Chip War (Scribner’s Sons, 1989).

  52. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 276.

  53. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 432, 434.

  54. Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.”

  55. Robert Noyce interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013; Malone, The Big Score, 74.

  56. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 552; Malone, Intel Trinity, 81.

  57. Leslie Berlin writes that the transistors did not arrive until 1950, after Noyce graduated: “[Bell’s research head] Buckley did not have any devices to spare, but he did send Gale copies of several technical monographs that Bell Labs had written on the transistor. These monographs formed the basis of Noyce’s initial exposure to the device. No textbooks addressed transistors, and (although prevailing mythology claims otherwise) Bell Labs did not ship Gale a transistor until after Noyce graduated” (The Man Behind the Microchip, 650). Berlin cites as her source for this a March 1984 letter written by Professor Gale to a friend; Berlin writes in an endnote, “Gale mentions an ‘attached original shipping invoice [for the transistors, sent from Bardeen to Gale] dated March 6, 1950’ (now lost).” Berlin’s reporting conflicts with Noyce’s recollections. Noyce’s quote that “Grant Gale got hold of one of the first point contact transistors . . . during my junior year” is from Noyce’s September 1975 IEEE History Center oral history, cited above. Tom Wolfe’s Esquire profile of Noyce, based on his visits with Noyce, reports, “By the fall of 1948 Gale had obtained two of the first transistors ever made, and he presented the first academic instruction in solid-state electronics available anywhere in the world, for the benefit of the eighteen students [including Noyce] majoring in physics at Grinnell College” (“The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”). Reid, The Chip, 1226, based on his 1982 interviews with Robert Noyce, writes, “Gale had been a classmate of John Bardeen in the engineering school at the University of Wisconsin, and thus he was able to obtain one of the first transistors and demonstrate it to his students. It was not a lecture the student was to forget. ‘It hit me like the atom bomb,’ Noyce recalled forty years later.” Bardeen and other engineers at Bell Labs did send out many transistor samples to academic institutions that requested them beginning in July 1948.