SEAC and the Start of Image Processing at the National Bureau of Standards

Evangelism

In the early days of electronic computation, a primary question, and one which posed considerable anxiety, was whether computers could be made to function flawlessly, sufficiently long, to do useful computation. The ENIAC provided some encouragement, and, by 1952, (3) sufficient experience had accumulated at NBS to bolster that encouragement with a measure of confidence. Consequently, NBS was able to encourage the use of computers in areas for which there was no previous experience with automation. As a scientific and engineering agency, within the government, of high reputation for integrity, NBS made proposals for innovative uses of the SEAC that were received with a more generous response by other agencies than would have been possible in a more competitive commercial environment. In fact, there was a widely held feeling that "nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do." (4)

There were special conditions associated with the operation of the SEAC which encouraged such evangelism. Everybody on the staff shared in the onerous task of nursemaiding the computer twenty four hours each day. There was a nominal maintenance crew which was led by P.D.Shupe and which included Russell Kirsch and was augmented by the rest of the staff. The maintenance crew had the power to take the machine away from the so-called "productive" users based entirely on their own judgment. The rationale was they needed to keep the computer in almost flawless operation to be able to use it as a self diagnostic tool.

Such a diagnostic tool would be of no use unless you could make the assumption that there was at most one fault in the machine at any one time. Consequently, any time that the crew suspected there was a fault, they would take the computer away from the users to track the symptoms down, for fear another fault might occur before the first was located. Typically, they would find a memory error and would use one half of the memory for the diagnostic program while they checked the other half. If there were two errors in the memory at the same time, they couldn't reliably load the diagnostic program and then the problem of finding the trouble would be very hard. So they were very scrupulous about keeping the computer fault-free.

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