Browsing by Subject "Honeywell, inc."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert, Kathleen Mauchly, William Cleaver, and James McNulty
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1980-01-23) Cleaver, William; Eckert, J. Presper (John Presper), 1919-; Mauchly, Kathleen; McNulty, James
    The interviewees describe their experiences at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in the 1940s. Eckert outlines disputes he and John Mauchly had with the University administration over the assignment of patent rights to the ENIAC, and disputes over other issues with John G. Brainerd, the first director of the ENIAC project. Eckert and McNulty share their views on John von Neumann's influence on the ENIAC and EDVAC projects. The group discusses the Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand litigation and the judgement against Eckert and Mauchly's patent claim to the electronic digital computer. They uniformly dispute the court's finding in favor of John V. Atanasoff's contribution. Other topics include: the use of the ENIAC in atomic bomb tests, and the programming and memory systems of the ENIAC, EDVAC, and UNIVAC.
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    Oral history interview with Richard M. Bloch
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1984-02-22) Bloch, Richard M. (Richard Milton)
    This interview describes Bloch's work at the Harvard Computation Laboratory and his subsequent career in computing. Bloch begins with his early life through his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Harvard. He entered the Navy in 1943 and recounts how he first met Howard Aiken while giving him a tour of the Naval Research Laboratory. Aiken had him transferred back to Harvard just as the Mark I was being shipped from IBM, where Bloch was involved with programming and maintenance of the machine. He describes the architecture and operation of the Mark I, including a discussion of the improvements made after the machine arrived at Harvard. He also discusses a number of the problems solved on Mark I, including one for von Neumann on spherical shock waves in an atomic implosion. He also describes Aiken's personality and attitude toward computer commercialization. In 1947 Bloch left Harvard for Raytheon, eventually heading their computer division. He discusses the government RAYDAC and commercial RAYCOM computers, as well as his own contributions to the development of parity checking. Raytheon sold its computer division to Honeywell in 1955, and Bloch became director of computer product development there. He describes the 200, 400, and 800 series of Honeywell computers, the development of an error detection machine which he claims opened the field of fault tolerant computing, and competition in this period between IBM and Honeywell. In 1968 Bloch joined General Electric as division general manager to develop large computer systems to compete with IBM. When GE left the computer field, Bloch moved into private work on venture capital, acquisition-divestiture, and high-level corporate consulting in the computer industry. He recounts how he became chief executive officer of Artificial Intelligence Corporation, a company developing a product to use natural English to query databases.
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    Oral history interview with Severo Ornstein
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1990-03-06) Ornstein, Severo
    Ornstein describes his experience at Lincoln Laboratory which included work on the SAGE, TX2 and LINC computers. He discusses his involvement with the LINC project, including its move to Washington University, and the later work there on DARPA/IPTO sponsored macromodule project. As the principal hardware designer of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) for the ARPANET, Ornstein describes the IMP design work at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the working environment of the group at BBN, his relationship with Lawrence Roberts, his interactions with Honeywell, and his work on the Pluribus multi-processor IMP. Ornstein also discusses the contributions of Wesley Clark and Norman Abramson, his involvement with the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and his views on artificial intelligence and time-sharing. This interview was recorded as part of a research project on the influence of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the development of computer science in the United States.