Howard Aiken

Aiken was twelve when his father, a drinker prone to hitting his mother, set off one more episode in the house in Indianapolis; Aiken grabbed the fireplace poker and drove the man out for good. His father never came back, and the paternal side of the family cut the boy off with him. Aiken left school after eighth grade to work as a telephone installer and support his mother and grandparents, until a teacher intervened and found him night work at a utility company running switchboards, letting him attend high school by day. He graduated in 1918, worked his way through the University of Wisconsin on a physics assistant's pay, and spent a decade afterward as a working electrical engineer before Harvard let him back into a classroom.

At Harvard, differential equations from his research into vacuum tubes convinced Aiken that a machine could do the arithmetic no one wanted to do by hand, and IBM funded and built it to his design: the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, fifty-one feet long, finished in 1944 and known ever after as the Harvard Mark I. He ran the Harvard Computation Laboratory that grew out of it, produced three more Marks through 1952, and in 1947 started the country's first graduate program in what would later be called computer science. Grace Hopper joined his team as a programmer partway through the Mark I's construction and became, in time, the more famous name.

IBM chairman Thomas Watson had put his company's engineers and considerable money into building the machine, and he expected the credit to say so. At the Mark I's public unveiling at Harvard on August 7, 1944, the press instead heard mostly about Aiken, and Watson, by every account that survives of the day, did not forgive it. IBM and Harvard's working relationship curdled soon after. Aiken, for his part, ran his own laboratory the way he had learned to run a household at twelve — by force. Colleagues remembered him arriving unannounced at four in the morning to ask whether the machine was "making numbers" yet, and expecting an answer.

Aiken retired to Florida at sixty, ran a consulting firm and taught at the University of Miami, and kept working almost to the end; he died in his sleep in St. Louis in 1973 on a business trip. Electronic computers built on entirely different principles overtook the electromechanical Mark I within a decade of its debut, and Aiken's reputation settled into a narrower category than he might have wanted — not the inventor of the computer, a title history gave to faster machines built elsewhere, but the man who proved a room-sized automatic calculator could be built at all, and who trained the university department that followed.

Howard Aiken's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Harvard Mark I (ASCC) invention
  Fifty-one feet long, funded and engineered by IBM 1944
• Harvard Mark II invention 1947
• Harvard Mark III invention
  Introduced magnetic drum memory 1950
• Harvard Mark IV invention
  Fully electronic, with magnetic-core memory 1952
• Harvard graduate program in computer science other
  The first U.S. graduate program of its kind 1947

• circa 1912 aged ~12 Drives his abusive father from the family home in Indianapolis
• 1918 aged ~18 Graduates high school after years of night work to pay his way
• 1923 aged ~23 Earns a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin
• 1939 aged ~39 Completes a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard
• 1944 aged ~44 Completes the Harvard Mark I with IBM funding and engineering
• August 7, 1944 aged 44 The Mark I is unveiled to the press at Harvard Thomas Watson, unhappy with the credit IBM received, never fully reconciled with Aiken.
• 1947 aged ~47 Starts Harvard's graduate program in computer science
• 1960 aged ~60 Retires to Florida and starts a consulting firm
• March 14, 1973 aged 73 Dies in his sleep in St. Louis, Missouri, on a business trip

• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. hired as a programmer for
• Thomas J. Watson Sr. 1874–1956
  Executive who built IBM into the dominant punched-card and business-machine company before the computer age. feuded with over credit
• Herman Hollerith 1860–1929
  Invented punched-card tabulating machines used in the 1890 census and founded a corporate predecessor of IBM. built on the punched-card machines of
• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. wartime computing counterpart