Cuthbert Corwin Hurd (April 5, 1911 – May 22, 1996) was an American
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
and
entrepreneur, who was instrumental in helping the
International Business Machines Corporation develop its first general-purpose computers.
Life
Hurd was born April 5, 1911, in
Estherville, Iowa. He received his
B.A. in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
from
Drake University in 1932, his
M.S. in mathematics from
Iowa State College in 1934, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the
University of Illinois in 1936. Waldemar Joseph Trjitzinsky was his advisor, and dissertation was ''Asymptotic theory of linear differential equations singular in the variable of differentiation and in a parameter''.
He did post-doctorate work at
Columbia University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He was assistant professor at
Michigan State University
Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...
from 1936 to 1942.
During
World War II Hurd taught at the
US Coast Guard Academy
The United States Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) is a service academy of the United States Coast Guard in New London, Connecticut. Founded in 1876, it is the smallest of the five U.S. service academies and provides education to future Coast Gu ...
with the rank of
Lieutenant Commander, and co-authored the textbook for teaching Mathematics to mariners. From 1945 to 1947 he was dean of
Allegheny College.
In 1947 he moved to
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about west of downtown Knoxville. Oak Ridge's population was 31,402 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Knoxville Metropolitan Area. Oak ...
, where he worked for
Union Carbide as mathematician at the
United States Atomic Energy Commission facility
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He taught and later served as a technical research head under
Alston Scott Householder. At Oak Ridge he supervised the installation of an
IBM 602 calculating
punched card machine to automate the tracking of material in the facility, and saw the potential for automating the massive amounts of computation needed for
nuclear Physics research. In February 1948 he was invited to the dedication of the
IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator
The IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) was an electromechanical computer built by IBM. Its design was started in late 1944 and it operated from January 1948 to August 1952. It had many of the features of a stored-program computer, ...
(SSEC), a custom-built machine in
New York City. He asked if the SSEC could be used for calculations being done at Oak Ridge for the
NEPA project to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor, but the demands for the SSEC produced a backlog. In the meanwhile, he requested that the first
IBM 604 calculating card punch be delivered to Oak Ridge. It was, but the calculations remained slow with the limited electronics in the 604.
IBM
From 1949 to 1962, he worked at
IBM, where he founded the Applied Science Department and pushed reluctant management into the world of computing.
Hurd hired
John von Neumann as a consultant. The eccentric genius was known for his fast driving, and IBM often would pay von Neumann's traffic fines. They developed a personal friendship, with Hurd visiting von Neumann in
Walter Reed Army Medical Center as he was dying of
cancer.
At the time, IBM calculators were programmed by plugging and unplugging wires manually into large panels. The concept of storing the program as well as data in computer memory was generally called the
Von Neumann architecture (although others developed the concept about the same time).
IBM had built the experimental stored-program SSEC, but company president
Thomas J. Watson favored basing commercial products on punched card technology with manual programming. Hurd hired a team who would be the first professional
computer software writers, such as
John Backus and
Fred Brooks.
The first step was to offer a calculator that could be programmed on punch cards in addition to a manual plugboard. This was the
Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator, announced in May 1949. It was essentially a commercialized version of experiments done by
Wallace John Eckert and customers at
Northrop Corporation, but became a very popular product, shipping several thousand units in various models.
Based on this demand, Hurd advised new company president
Tom Watson, Jr. to build the first IBM commercial stored program computer, first called the Defense Calculator. It was marketed as the
IBM 701
The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe computer, which was announced to the public on May ...
in 1952.
There were 18 model 701 machines built (in addition to the Engineering development machine).
In 1953 Hurd convinced IBM management to develop what became the
IBM 650
The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine is an early digital computer produced by IBM in the mid-1950s. It was the first mass produced computer in the world. Almost 2,000 systems were produced, the last in 1962, and it was the first ...
Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine.
Although the
UNIVAC I (and
Ferranti Mark 1 in England) had been introduced earlier than any IBM computer, its high price (while IBM offered monthly leases) limited sales. The lower expense of the 650 meant it could be purchased in much larger quantities. Almost 2000 were produced between 1953 and 1962, to commercial customers as well as academics.
On January 19, 1955, Hurd became director of the IBM Electronic Data Processing Machines Division when
T. Vincent Learson was promoted to Vice President of Sales. In 1955, Hurd made a proposal to
Edward Teller for a computer to be used at the
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. This would evolve into the
IBM "Stretch" project. The ambitious promises made for the performance of the machine were not met when it was finally delivered in 1961 as the model 7030, although techniques developed and lessons learned in its design were used on other IBM products.
California
After 1962, he served as chairman of the
Computer Usage Company, the first independent computer software company, and president from 1970 through 1974.
He then consulted for various firms in
Silicon Valley, and served as an expert witness in the IBM
antitrust cases. From 1978 to 1986, Hurd served as chairman for Picodyne Corporation, which he co-founded with
H. Dean Brown
Harold Dean Brown (August 13, 1927 – June 24, 2003) was an American scientist. His fields ranged from physics and mathematics to computer software and philosophy.
Early life and education
Harold Dean Brown (generally known as Dean Brown) was b ...
.
Hurd was a founder of Quintus Computer Systems in 1983 with William Kornfeld, Lawrence Byrd, Fernando Pereira and
David H. D. Warren
David H. D. Warren is a computer scientist who worked primarily on logic programming and in particular the programming language Prolog in the 1970s and 1980s. Warren wrote the first compiler for Prolog, and the Warren Abstract Machine execution ...
to commercialize a
Prolog compiler.
Hurd was president and chairman until Quintus was sold to
Intergraph Corporation in October 1989.
In 1967.
Drake University awarded Hurd an honorary
LLD
Legum Doctor (Latin: “teacher of the laws”) (LL.D.) or, in English, Doctor of Laws, is a doctorate-level academic degree in law or an honorary degree, depending on the jurisdiction. The double “L” in the abbreviation#Plural forms, abbrev ...
degree.
In 1986 he received the
IEEE Computer Pioneer award by the
IEEE Computer Society for his contributions to early computing.
In his later life he lived in
Portola Valley, California, became an avid gardener and studied native California plants. A variety of ''
Arctostaphylos manzanita'' is named Dr. Hurd for him. He died there May 22, 1996.
He endowed scholarships in Mathematics and Computer Science at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
.
Publications
*
*
* 1943, ''Mathematics for Mariners'' with Chester E. Dimick. New York: D Van Nostrand Company Inc, 1943.
* 1950, "The IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator" in: ''Proceedings, Seminar on Scientific Computation November, 1949'', IBM, p. 37-41.
* 1955, "Mechanical Translation: New Challenge to Communication Ornstein", in: ''Science'' 21 October 1955: pp. 745–748.
*
* 1983. ''Special Issue: The IBM 701 Thirtieth Anniversary - IBM Enters the Computing Field'', Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 5 (No. 2), 1983
* 1985, "A note on early Monte Carlo computations and scientific meetings", in: ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing archive'', Volume 7, Issue 2 (April 1985) pp 141–155.
* 1986, "Prologue," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 6–7, Jan-Mar, 1986
See also
*
List of pioneers in computer science
*
History of computing
*
Timeline of computing
Timeline of computing presents events in the history of computing organized by year and grouped into six topic areas: predictions and concepts, first use and inventions, hardware systems and processors, operating systems, programming languages, an ...
*
History of computing hardware
The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers. Before the 20th century, most calculations were done by humans.
The first aids to computation were purely mechan ...
*
IBM 700/7000 series
References
Further reading
* 1954
"Russian is turned into English by a fast electronic translator"by Robert K.Plumb in: ''The New York Times'', 8 January 1954, p. 1 (front page),col.5.
* 1996, "Update," in: ''Computer'', vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 92–94, Jul., 1996
*
External links
Cuthbert C. Hurd Papers, 1946-1992at the
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
* Three oral history interviews with Cuthbert Hurd
20 January 198118 November 1994an
August 28 1995 Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Hurd discusses
International Business Machines research in computer technology, IBM's support for academic research on computers, and his own work at IBM—especially on the IBM 701, 704 and 705 computers. He also describes
John von Neumann and his contributions to the development of computer technology. Discusses interactions with
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and
Los Alamos National Laboratory.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hurd, Cuthbert
1911 births
1996 deaths
American computer scientists
IBM employees
United States Coast Guard officers
People from Estherville, Iowa
People from Portola Valley, California
Military personnel from California
Military personnel from Iowa
Drake University alumni
Iowa State University alumni
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni