Less power than a laptop in
1200
square feet
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Everyone is familiar with those famous words uttered by Neil Armstrong as he first set foot on the moon. It was a crowning achievement for the nation, and a moment that would propel the space program to new levels.
There was a crowning achievement of sorts at Mississippi State 12 years before man first set foot on the moon in 1969. It wasn't something that would necessarily set the world on its ear like Armstrong's immortal leap, and it mostly went unnoticed at the time. But it was a giant leap nonetheless. In fact, looking back today, those involved believe that it might have been a quantum leap that put Mississippi State on the road to becoming an educational leader in the Southeast.
 From left, Chester McKee, Dero Ramsey, Bill Bobbitt, and Harry Simrall were part of a committee responsible for bringing the first computer to the Mississippi State campus 40 years ago. The emeriti faculty talked about that experience recently while visiting the university's present-day computing facilities. |
It was uncharted waters not only for Mississippi State, but for higher education in Mississippi as well. And as it is with many new technologies, there weren't many believers on the front end. To most, computers were gizmos that were a fad, were unnecessary, and would go away with time if you just pretended they didn't exist.
"There weren't a lot of people who thought we needed a computer, and no one thought they were here to stay, that's for sure," recalls Bill Bobbitt, professor emeritus of engineering mechanics.
But to Bobbitt and the others on a committee assembled by then-president Ben Hilbun, computers offered opportunity, and they were determined not to let that opportunity slip away.
It was 1956 when Hilbun, known simply as "Mr. Ben," agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to form a committee to search for a computer. He was one of those skeptics, not completely sold on the idea himself. But he had heard professors from engineering and from agriculture and from business talk of the impact this new technology could have on the university and he was willing to listen.
"All of us were interested enough to take on this task because we could see what was happening with computers and the direction things were moving," says Harry Simrall, who was head of the Electrical Engineering Department when he was asked to chair the first computer committee. "Engineering back then basically had no research. But that would soon change."
With no blueprint or history to guide such a venture, Simrall and members of his committee piled into his car and headed west to Oklahoma State-the closest land-grant institution at the time with a computer-to see their equipment and to see how they operated.
"We jumped on the computer bandwagon so to speak," notes committee member Chester McKee, professor emeritus of electrical engineering. McKee was one of the few on the committee with any past computer experience, having done his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin on analog computers actually built by the school.
McKee aside, you can't blame the rest of the committee if they weren't sure exactly what they were looking for. The university's first full-time computer person was still working in Florida then, and only a few campuses in the country even had computers in 1957.
But by the time the men returned from Oklahoma, they knew what they needed, they knew what they wanted. But there was still that resistance to making what seemed like such a bold move at the time.
"Mr. Ben never comprehended the importance of computers," remembers McKee. "Anything smacking of research outside of agriculture was a no-no and of no use to Mississippi State. The board and the Legislature didn't see the benefit of research to MSU either. And, just like everything else back then, there was no money in the budget for research or for a computer.
"Lewis Mallory Sr., who was the comptroller at the time, was the man who helped get the blessing of Mr. Ben," continues McKee. "Mallory saw the application for the financial side of the institution and that was the key in turning Mr. Ben around."
With the green light from Hilbun, Mississippi State purchased its first computer in 1957. Well, actually, because there was no budget to purchase the machine, the university "rented" its first computer. IBM at the time was providing its 650 model to universities at tremendous discounts.
Getting Hilbun's permission to rent the computer might have been one of the easiest obstacles the committee faced. The new 650 was one of IBM's top computers at the time, but it also was big-really big.
 Floor space and key punch operators were essential requirements of Mississippi State's first computer |
Being in charge, Simrall did what any good leader would have done. "It fell on me to find a place to put it, so I had no choice but to move some of my people out and put it on 2nd floor McCain."
The machine, including all the required peripheral equipment, eventually would take up some 1,200 square feet. Eventually.
"The central processing unit was so big we couldn't get it up the stairs," laughs Simrall. "We had to take the windows out and use a crane to hoist it up through the outside windows. And then we had to install 10 tons of air conditioning just to keep it cool enough so it would operate."
The IBM 650 operated mostly with diode vacuum tubes, similar to the tubes found in the back of old television sets, except much larger. There were some solid state pieces in the computer such as early transistors, but mostly it was tubes, and the vacuum tubes had to be kept cool to run properly.
The IBM 650 was as slow as it was big-slow in computing, and even slower in programming for computations.
"It wasn't even advanced enough to have tape," remembers committee member Dero Ramsey, professor emeritus of dairy production. "Input and output was by punch cards."
Getting data into the machine for computation, explains Ramsey, required key punch operators literally sitting at terminals eight hours a day keying in instructions for the computer onto what were known as key punch cards. Some computations took hundreds of cards to perform.
To get the machine to calculate the data meant manually loading the program onto its internal memory. In the case of the IBM 650, it was memory on a drum-a stainless steel, highly polished magnetic drum about four feet long and one foot in diameter, which rotated at 1,200 rpm.
"You could store 2,000, 10-decimal digits of memory on this drum, which wasn't much," remembers Fred Davis, professor emeritus of computer science. "It would do 100 computations per minute, which is how slow it was. But it was fast to us because everything was relative."
Programming the drum required setting a series of 10 switches with 10 numbers each. The first three switches would set the function to be performed, such as multiplication. The next four switches would set the address to get the information needed, and the final four would set the address for obtaining the next set of instructions.
Once the computer drum was programmed, the key punched cards were inserted into a card reader, which then fed the information to the central processing unit. Later-and usually a long time later-the computer would spit out more cards with the answer to the question that was being asked. These cards then were run through a printer that would print a hard copy of the results.
Every time another computation was needed, the new data would have to be reloaded on cards and the computer's memory reprogrammed, or reconfigured manually, on the drum.
"It took forever," laughs Simrall. "And you became accustomed to errors, just because of the way the system worked."
While Mississippi State's first computer was big, slow, time-consuming to program, and somewhat a mystery to most on campus, there was still an even bigger obstacle. Money.
The computer was rented, and IBM, like any landlord, wanted to be paid. None of the original committee members still living today remembers what the rent was in 1957, only that they were responsible for making the payments, with no university support.
"It was touch and go with the money at first," says Simrall. "But Hilbun had told us all along that if we got this thing it had to pay for itself."
To pay the rent, as well as the salary of Mississippi State alum Davis, who would be invited back from his job at Eglin AFB, Fla., in 1958 as the first director of the university's new computing center, the computer had to have customers.
"We knew we were going to have to get contract work to pay for it," says Ramsey. And contract work they got, first from the university's agricultural units, and later from off campus.
Examples of the early contract work were the "mixed problem" programs written to determine the optimum chicken feed mixtures for Mississippi's poultry industry. Poultry farmers needed to know the cheapest feed formulas that would provide proper nutrients for the chickens.
"Tom Tramel (agricultural researcher) wrote a program for optimum feed mix that would meet the criteria for the chicken, but at the lowest cost to the farmer by taking into account the stock market prices of corn, barley, and the many other possible constituents of feed.
"Tramel would run the programs almost daily and distribute the best mix to the farmers through the Extension Service. They would save money daily."
Programs also were run to determine the optimum area of the country to ship watermelons at a given time, as well as the proper mix for fertilizers.
The first off-campus use of the computer was to determine the volume of dirt that needed to be moved to level the airfield at Meridian Naval Air Station. A construction company used the computer for the same purpose to win the contract to build the runway at Thompson Field in Jackson. Southern Pipe in Meridian used the computer to run inventory.
"A lot of this work, especially the off-campus applications, went a long way toward proving the worth of computers to others on campus," says McKee.
As the campus community became familiar with the computer, it began to attract more and more users. This meant additional funding, which slowly developed into a modest computer budget.
"Electrical engineering began using it with some of their classes, as did sociology, and Lewis Mallory in the comptrollers office, and each devoted funding to the project," says McKee. "Over time, they just sort of put together a budget."
The budget eventually allowed Davis and his growing computing center staff to replace the big, slow 650 in 1963 with an IBM 1620, which was much smaller, faster, and had many more solid state devices, including transistors which eventually replaced the drum memory.
Mississippi State's first computer had less memory than today's laptop versions, and could perform fewer functions than a hand-held calculator. But it was a start-although not an exactly popular one at the time-that would pave the way for a modern Mississippi State.
One would be hard pressed today to find a spot on the campus that isn't somehow connected by computers. Students carry laptops to class, and work all hours of the night in modern computer labs across campus. If an employee has a desk, there's a good chance a computer is sitting on it. Electronic classrooms and laboratories sport the newest in computer technology. Computers play a major role in research grants to the university, which have totaled more than $430 million since 1990.
And at least some of the credit for this can be given to that original computer committee that in 1957 foresaw the future of computers and their benefit to the university and seized the opportunity.
"Computing was in its infancy, but expanding," recalls Davis, who retired in 1981 as director of the computing center. "Most of the people involved in getting this first machine were involved in numerical work and saw the time when a computer would become the necessity that it is today."
"That first IBM 650 opened opportunities for research that never existed before," says McKee, who became the university's first vice president for research in 1969 and who since his retirement in 1979 has been writing a history of research at Mississippi State. "And it didn't take the professors long before they began to see that computers were a good thing for students also."
"A lot of people at that time thought we were fools to even get a computer, but we stuck our necks out there and I guess we did okay," adds Bobbitt.
It's ironic that Harry Simrall was put in charge of a committee to bring Mississippi State into the computer age in 1957. At the time, he had never operated a computer. And today, at age 84, he still hasn't.
"Sometimes I feel fortunate I retired before computers became commonplace," says Simrall, who retired from Mississippi State in 1978 after spending the previous 21 years as dean of the College of Engineering. "I never did learn a thing about computers during the process. And I still don't know how to use one."
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THE REFLECTOR  State College, Mississippi, Tuesday, February 4, 1958 At open house 'Electric brain' to be unveiled
The special event is designed to acquaint the public with the facilities of the Mississippi State Computing Center, which is being opened here this month as Mississippi State continues to expand its plant and facilities to meet the needs of the growing industrial and agricultural economy. The IBM 650 Digital Computer, commonly referred to as an "electronic brain," is the key machine of the computing center, which also includes an analogue computer and other related equipment. Installation of the machine was approved by the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning and the International Business Machines Corporation. It will be used to train students in areas of computer applications, and for educational and industrial research. "Opening of our computer center will make possible the solution of many problems in industrial and governmental research heretofore impossible," President Hilbun said. "The flexibility and versatility of this machine, together with its high speed, permit quick solutions to a variety of problems which ordinarily would require the work of scores of people over long periods of time. We feel that the center will open new frontiers of opportunity to our people." Mr. Fred Davis, graduate of Mississippi State College and former head of the Air Force computing center at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, has returned home to head the new installation. Of his new work, Mr. Davis said, "I have unlimited faith in Mississippi's opportunities and believe that this installation will be a great contribution in our state's forward march." Services of the center, similar to those made at other comparable centers in other sections of the country, will be available to industry and public agencies on an hourly charge basis. |
This World Wide Web version of Alumnus was marked up by Chris Brown <brownc@ur.msstate.edu>
For information about Mississippi State University, contact msuinfo@ur.msstate.edu.
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Mississippi State will unveil the marvels of the "electronic brain" at an open house to be held for leaders in business, government, and agriculture within the next few weeks, President Ben Hilbun announced.