130 Dahlgren 



doing exterior ballistics computation. Dr. Bramble came, I think, during the 

 war on a part-time basis and later took a full-time job. He represented the 

 original push behind the computation center. I think they promised him a 

 computation center here in order to get him to come here. He didn't particu- 

 larly want to leave Annapolis, but the Bureau of Ordnance was doing a lot of 

 computation work by hand in Washington. They needed a computer facility at 

 some place like Dahlgren, and they persuaded Dr. Bramble to head up the 

 department. Dr. Cohen was here during the war, too, in the Navy. 



There's an interesting historical note that Bill Burke was involved in at 

 Harvard. They had trouble one night troubleshooting the one computer, so 

 they looked around and finally found there was a real bug in a relay. They took 

 the bug and pasted it on a piece of paper and said they "debugged" the 

 machine. The interesting thing is that everybody in the computer industry uses 

 that term now when they are checking out a computer program; they call it 

 "debugging" the computer program. Bill has still got the sheet of paper with the 

 bug on it. He's still got it down there in his office. 



Was there any resistance to establishing a major computation center here'? 



Yes, there was a lot of resistance. In fact, there was a major decision around 

 1949 between us and what used to be the Naval Ordance Laboratory at White 

 Oak. After we got the first two Harvard computers, there was a group at White 

 Oak who claimed that they had large requirements for computers to do hy- 

 drodynamic calculations, and so forth. Independently, they made an extensive 

 effort to try and get the big computer at White Oak. That was finally resolved in 

 sort of a verbal agreement with Dr. Bramble. 



During the war, Dahlgren constructed a building called the Spark Range, 

 which was a long, narrow building. It's not here anymore, but it looked some- 

 thing like a tube. There was a similar facility at White Oak. So when we got into 

 the argument about who was going to be the computer center, the Bureau of 

 Ordnance decided that they would close down the Spark Range here and let 

 White Oak have that responsibility. They put the computers here, and White 

 Oak wasn't to get the big computers. However, White Oak continually met with 

 commercial concerns to see what new things were coming along that would be 

 better than the computers we had here. When they discovered IBM was 

 considering electrostatic storage, they wrote a letter to the Bureau of Ordnance 

 saying they'd like to enter into a contract with IBM to build a computer with this 

 technology. So the Bureau, instead of agreeing to that, appointed a committee 

 made up of people from White Oak, Dr. Bramble, and several other people 

 who went around surveying industry, and that's what brought out the NORC 

 computer, which got delivered here in 1 955. There was a continuous tug of war 

 between White Oak and Dahlgren on whether or not they were going to get 

 computers. 



