COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 22

JOHNNIAC COMPUTER RAND Corp.,
TYPEWRITER TO COMPUTER, FIRST TIME
I remember being in the room one evening for what was said to be the first public demonstration of communication between a computer and a typewriter. This was at RAND, and the computer was the hand-built Johnniac computer, named after the famous mathematician, John Von Neumann. This was the first time the public had been invited to see such an operation. The funny thing was (at least funny after all these years), they used a typewriter with a two color — black and red — ribbon. They thought it was very important that everything the operator typed was in black, and the computer’s answers were printed in red.

While the Johnniac computer filled a room with large boxes on the first floor of the building, in the basement were racks and shelves filled with wires and gadgets, including a drum that was just rotating out in open space. You could have placed you hand on the surface. Above your head in the aisles between the racks of gadgets, there was a heavy string that when pulled in an emergency, would cut the power to the whole thing. They said the greatest danger was maybe getting your tie caught in the rotating drum!

How did the Johnniac get named, you ask. This was told to me by someone who claimed he was in the room at that time. Dr. Von Neumann came into the room where scientists and engineers were trying to design a computer for RAND. The blackboard was filled with “hen-scratches” that represented a mathematical problem they wanted to solve. Von Neumann said, “That’s easy, the answer is obviously … … … , why do you need a computer for that?” Someone answered, “Because we don’t have John Von Neumann.” And so the name.

The Johnniac went on the air at the RAND Corp. in 1953, and was decommissioned on February 11, 1966. It had been in service for 13 years and logged over 50,000 operational hours.