Many years ago, I had an office in the Howard Hathaway Aiken Computation Laboratory on the campus of Harvard University. During my employment there, the building was demolished to make room for a much larger and more modern facility (renamed Maxwell-Dworkin, after the maiden names of the mothers of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who donated the money for the new laboratory).
Aiken is a largely-unknown pioneer in computer architecture; many people have never heard his name, and yet anyone reading this posting is doing so via technologies he had a major role in developing. But perhaps the most obscure aspect of Aiken’s work is that he owed some of his key inspiration to work done by an even earlier pioneer who had been nearly forgotten by his time.
Aiken came to Harvard with a proposal to build a calculating machine–a machine that could be modified (or “programmed”, as we would say today) to perform arbitrarily complicated computations at the rate of dozens or perhaps even hundreds per second. It was perhaps the first design recognizable as a modern computer. Harvard turned down his initial proposal. When asked why, they told him that it was because they already had one.
And they did, or parts of one. After the death of Charles Babbage, another great pioneer, and a man who was far ahead of his time (his designs for his “Difference Engine” were unbuildable in his day, because contemporary machine tools were unable to build parts with the necessary tolerances–a hundred years later, the machines were built, and worked), his widow had tried to donate his writings and other work to various British Universities and other institutions, but had largely been met with indifference. Despairing, she boxed it all up and sent it to Harvard, where it sat in a storage room for many years, unused but unforgotten, until Aiken came along.
As Aiken read through Babbage’s writing, he was struck by an eerie feeling, as if, in his own words, “… Babbage was addressing [him] personally from the past”. Aiken always credited Babbage with much of his inspiration and many of his ideas.
Many years later, I walked through the Aiken Laboratory for a last time before the building was demolished. I wanted to salvage a piece of it to take with me. I found an old store-room in the basement, filled with boxes and odds and ends. Poking around, I found an ornate picture frame. Wiping the dust from the glass, I tried to make out what beneath. It was an old manifest, handwritten in a large, bold hand. It had faded considerably over time, and I had to take it into the light before I could make out what it said. It began:
“Contents of box: One piece, Difference Engine …”
I kept it in my office for many years. And I read Aiken’s work, and felt like he was speaking to me through the years.
When I left Harvard, I gave the frame to a junior professor. I hope it works for him.
Have you ever read something written by a stranger separated from you by time and experience, and felt that it could have been written directly to you?
