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11950–1974: Science Information, Computing Facilities, Education, and Basic Research

W. Richards Adrion

As the National Research Council report Funding a Revolution states, “rather than a single, overarching framework of support, federal funding for research in computing has been managed by a set of agencies and offices that carry the legacies of the historical periods in which they were created.”¹ This chapter traces the parallel development of NSF programs in science information, computing facilities, computer-supported education, computational science, numerical computation, and the beginning of computing and information research programs. The NSF role in the federal support of computer science, computer engineering, and information science advanced within separate units and programs until they began to consolidate in the 1980s.

Prior to the Second World War, academic research funding for most disciplines came from universities’ internal resources, industry, foundations, and phil-anthropic sources.² The war years saw a large investment by the federal government. In 1941, President Roosevelt established an Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD),³ an arm of the Office of Emergency Management, with Vannevar Bush as director. OSRD remained in existence through 1945. During the 15 years following the Second World War, research in computing and communications was supported by mission agencies connected to the military, atomic power, and space.⁴

During and following the war, a number of efforts were underway to establish a “science foundation,”⁵ mainly led by Senator Harley Kilgore (D-WV), who chaired the Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization of the Military Affairs Committee (the “Kilgore Committee”). As the debate over the appropriate agency or structure for supporting scientific research continued, President Roosevelt asked OSRD Director Vannevar Bush to have a say. Bush delivered his report in 1945, entitled “Science—The Endless Frontier,”⁶ to Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman. Truman vetoed the National Science Foundation Act of 1947⁷ primarily because it did not give the president authority to name a single, politically appointed director of the agency.⁸ After three more years of debate, Congress passed and President Truman signed Public Law 81-507,⁹ creating the National Science Foundation; operations began in 1950.

While the Foundation had been interested in science information as early as 1951, following the Sputnik launch on October 4, 1957, the NSF role in science information increased and it was given a new emphasis on addressing the need for computing in both research and education. The NSF did not become a significant player in computing research, however, until the 1970s. Several threads of NSF support for science information, computing infrastructure, computers in education, and early computer science and information science research funding led to the NSF divisions, offices, and programs that later comprised the Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate starting in 1986.

1.1Science Information—1950s to 1980s

NSF’s Office of Scientific Information (OSI) was established in 1951 with Robert Tumbleson as head. OSI initially had four programs: Publication Support and Scientific Documentation, Foreign Science Information, U.S. Government Research Information, and Exhibits.¹⁰ Between 1952 and 1955, OSI supported the publication of scientific books and journals, Soviet-focused projects (translation, including machine translation, and symposia), studies of information processes and methods, abstracts and indexes of government, professional society and international science publications, and linguistics research related to machine translation.¹¹ The NSF Advisory Panel on Scientific Information—made up of scientists, publishers, a university president, and the assistant librarian of the Library of Congress—held its first meeting in 1953. As OSI expanded, Alberto Thompson succeeded Tumbleson as its head in 1955. Among the OSI program directors was Helen Brownson, “an outspoken advocate and significant figure in many pivotal events which formed what is now known as information science,”¹² who was responsible for guiding many of the research efforts funded by OSI and its successor, the Office of Science Information Services.

While OSI’s primary mission was managing and coordinating science information across federal agencies, NSF also began to support applied and basic research activities. In May 1956, NSF sponsored a meeting¹³ of representatives of the Department of Defense, National Bureau of Standards, and the Patent Office, as well as experts in linguistics, logic, information theory, operations research, computer design, and library science, to discuss fundamental research on the organization of information. On April 15–17 of the following year, Western Reserve University (WRU) hosted a Symposium on “Systems for Information Retrieval.”¹⁴

Following a period when Thomas Jones was acting head, Burton Adkinson became head of OSI.¹⁵ As Adkinson noted, “In 1957, two unrelated events made a big impact on NSF/OSI. The first was the untimely death of Alberto Thompson, who had barely started to develop a vigorous scientific information support program. Second, the launching of Sputnik surprised most Americans.”¹⁶

In 1958, the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) created the “Baker Panel.”¹⁷ Packed with luminaries and influential figures,¹⁸ this panel issued a report on “Scientific Judgments on Foreign Communications Intelligence” that called for improving the availability of U.S. scientific and technical information.¹⁹ PSAC endorsed the recommendations of the Baker Report; and the President’s Science Assistant, James Killian, Jr., urged presidential approval. A White House press release in December 1958 directed “the National Science Foundation [to] take leadership in bringing about effective coordination of various scientific information activities within the Federal Government.”²⁰

The post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act (NDEA) became law on September 2, 1958. It contained major provisions²¹ for loans to higher education students; fellowships for advanced study of mathematics and science; guidance counseling and testing to identify able students; improvement of K–12 science, mathematics, and foreign language programs; vocational programs; and research on effective uses of television and other media for educational purposes. In addition, the NDEA authorized the National Science Foundation to establish a Science Information Service: first to address indexing, abstracting, translating, and to provide other services leading to a more effective dissemination of scientific information; and next to undertake programs to develop new or improved methods for making scientific information available.²²

On December 11, 1958, NSF established the Office of Science Information Service (OSIS) with Adkinson as head. By the end of the decade, OSIS had made 146 grants totaling about $3.8 million under four major programs: Documentation Research (through which most of the research and development was funded), Foreign Science Information, Publications and Information Services, and Unpublished Research Information. Among these grants²³ were projects on linguistic transformation for information retrieval at the University of Pennsylvania and mechanical translation projects at Harvard Computation Laboratory, Georgetown University, the University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Cambridge Language Research Unit in England. OSIS also funded the National Bureau of Standards to establish a Research Information Center and Advisory Service on Information Processing in 1959.²⁴

In the late 1950s, it was unclear how to classify the various fields that encompass the basic sciences behind computing, computers, information, communications, and the fields that depend on them. Louis Fein, a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) consultant, was asked by Frederick Terman and Albert Bowker of Stanford University to design a computing curriculum. Fein began studying university programs “in the fields of computers, data processing, operations research, and other relatively new and apparently closely related fields.”²⁵ His goals were to identify not only computing-related organizations, curricula, research programs, and facilities, but also computing-related fields of study, and the role of the universities in these fields. As Fein noted in 1959,²⁶ “universities, as institutions, are having a hard time . . . learning how to effectively incorporate these new fields into the academic structure.” In recommending the creation of a Graduate School of Computer Sciences at Stanford, Fein defined two research-oriented departments.²⁷ “Information and Communication” encompassed instruction and research activities in information theory, switching theory, coding theory, automata theory, artificial intelligence, learning, language translation, and theory of simulation. “Systems” comprised instruction and research activities in management science, econometrics, systems theory, information classification, indexing and retrieval, model theory, self-organizing systems, and adaptive mechanisms. Today, the former might fall under a computer science (or engineering) department, while the latter might be divided among departments of information systems, information technology, and management information science. Fein saw a divide between the science of computing, communications, and information and the application and use of computing, communications, and information.

As we describe in Chapter 2, efforts to formally establish computer science as a discipline accelerated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the early 1960s, the fields and practitioners of information technology and information science were becoming better defined. Information technology—the more applied side— was staffed by information specialists, while information science—the research side—was staffed by information scientists. As we relate later, Altman and Brown²⁸ described the creation in the 1980s of the CISE Directorate as a move away from the library scientists and specialists supported under OSIS, to support for computer and information scientists.

Dorothy Crosland organized a series of conferences²⁹ at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for the first time making a distinction between information specialist and scientist. A specialist was someone who applied technology to the storage, indexing, and archiving of information, while a scientist was concerned with the nature of information and its representation. These conferences had a significant impact on the establishment of new information research programs at Georgia Tech, Lehigh University, and Drexel University.³⁰

The OSIS programs continued to expand. In 1967, OSIS made grants to Georgia Tech (Vladimir Slamecka) and Ohio State University (Marshall Yovits) to expand programs in information science. It also made grants to professional scientific societies to improve their literature services. The Georgia Tech center had two principal activities: mathematical models for information in the scientific disciplines and control of information for problem solving and decision making in an academic environment.³¹ By 1968, NSF awards to various professional societies to develop computerized information retrieval systems had grown to $17.7 million,³² up from $9 million in 1958. While the percentage of OSIS funds going to research projects was approximately 5.5% in 1958, eventually 50% of OSIS funding was spent on disciplinary information research centers.

In 1969, OSIS was moved organizationally from reporting directly to the NSF Director to reporting to the Assistant Director for National and International Programs, where OSIS staff were less able to make a case for funding directly to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). With declining interest in supporting OSIS within its new directorate, science information activities declined as its appropriations waned. OSIS also had to assume responsibility for the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (COSATI), which was transferred from the President’s Office of Science and Technology. This greatly increased the burden on OSIS staff³³ and its resources. These changes also resulted in a termination of operating grants for information services and unrestricted grants to university research centers for information science by 1972.³⁴ OMB further reduced the OSIS appropriations to $5 million in 1974 and asked NSF to phase out support to the university-centered information systems programs at Pittsburgh and Ohio State and to the New England Board of Higher Education science information network. These and similar organizations at the University of Georgia, UCLA, and Lehigh University continued at their own expense.³⁵

During the period from 1971 to 1973, OSIS also experienced a rapid change in staffing.³⁶ Adkinson retired and moved to the American Geographical Society in 1971. Melvin Day, who replaced him as head of OSIS, left NSF in 1973 to accept a position as Director of the National Library of Medicine. Lee C. Burchinal was named as Day’s replacement.³⁷ NSF meanwhile established priorities among the five OSIS programs: Research Support, National Information, User Support, Economics of Information, and Foreign Science (with the major emphasis remaining on the Research Support program).³⁸

NSF undertook a major reorganization in 1975, creating four new directorates: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences; Astronomical, Earth, and Ocean Sciences; Biological and Social Sciences; and Scientific, Technological, and International Affairs, which joined Science Education, Research Applications, and Administration.³⁹ OSIS was renamed the Division of Science Information (DSI) in 1976⁴⁰ within the reorganized Directorate for Scientific, Technological, and International Affairs. At this time, the Office of Computing Activities, which briefly had joined OSIS in the Directorate for National and International programs, became the Division of Computer Research (DCR) in Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences.

DSI became the Division of Information Science and Technology (DIST) in 1978 and responsibility for supporting the dissemination of scientific information was distributed among the research divisions within NSF, making it appear that NSF was shifting away from efforts to support the users of scientific information and would concentrate instead on funding the development of new information science technology and its applications.⁴¹ Altman and Brown⁴² called the 1978 reorganization “a major cleavage between past and future,” noting a shift from focus on publication, distribution, and dissemination of documents, and improving access to and indexing of documents, to a prioritization of “information science research.”

Following the creation of DIST, former DSI head, Lee Burchinal, transferred to another NSF office and Harvey Averich served as acting head of DIST with a staff of 12 and a budget of approximately $4.5 million. Program directors Edward Weiss, Harold Bamford, and Richard Lee all moved from DSI to DIST.⁴³ Altman and Brown noted that the DIST managers “shied away from defining ‘information,’ and consequently its science” largely because the term meant “different things in different disciplines.”

Howard Resnikoff, a mathematician who had been brought in as the founding DIST director in 1980, noted that the new program in information science “incorporates certain research responsibilities of previous Foundation programs which were primarily concerned with science information dissemination [but the] focus of effort [is] so different, that prior award and funding patterns are not comparable. . . . ”⁴⁴ Resnikoff attempted in his few years (1979–1981) at NSF to create a significant role for DIST, assembling a distinguished advisory group that included Gordon Bell, Seymour Cray, Ed David, John Gibbons, Ralph Gomory, George Heilmeier, Donald Knuth, and Joshua Lederberg. His goals were for DIST to support research on the structure of information, infometrics, behavioral aspects of information transfer, measures of fundamental quantities, and standards for assessing the predictions of theory and comparing the results of experiments. Resnikoff left NSF in 1981 to join Harvard University and later co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation. He also founded FutureWave, an intellectual property company.

Resnikoff left DIST when it moved to the Directorate for Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences (BBS). Edward Weiss became acting division director of DIST and its three programs: Information Science, Information Technology, and Information Impact. Information Science was concerned with the properties of information and the dynamics of information transfer, including biological and human information processes. Information Technology dealt with improving theory underlying the design of systems and problems with user-system interaction emphasizing human factors. Information Impact was interested in the economic and social consequences of information and information technologies.⁴⁵ Weiss argued that BBS as a research directorate was likely to provide a more favorable climate for the division.⁴⁶

Following the creation of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate in 1986, Harold Bamford and Charles Brownstein discussed the emergence of information science research as a more fundamental question being revealed by the unfolding structure of knowledge. They argued that the “evolution of units supporting information science research”⁴⁷ in CISE was a “recognition of the unity and coherence of the intellectual streams, which converge in computer and information science and engineering and in the great importance which [NSF] attaches to the confluence.”⁴⁸ Several unmet needs focused NSF’s attention as CISE evolved.

1.2Filling the Demand for Computing Infrastructure

In the years following the Second World War, a commercial computer industry came into being, including leading efforts at IBM and Remington (later Sperry) Rand and other companies such as Bendix, Burroughs, General Electric, Honeywell, Raytheon, and RCA. Federally funded projects constituted roughly three-quarters of the total computing infrastructure. Government facilities, government-funded research centers, and private federal contractors were typically pushing the technical cutting edge.⁴⁹

During these years, computing research was supported primarily by mission agencies of the federal government, especially defense and energy agencies (initially the Atomic Energy Commission), and later NASA. The Foundation was beginning, however, to recognize that the computer was an important tool for scientific research. The 1955 Annual Report noted that:

. . . a revolution has occurred in scientific work in that much of it now calls for exceedingly expensive structures and equipment . . . which already have outrun the financial capacity of private resources, and this will increasingly be the case. Only the Federal Government . . . will be able to meet the deficiency after all possible private resources have been utilized.⁵⁰

Scientists and engineers outside the military and atomic laboratories were having difficulty accessing computers due to heavy security constraints. The high cost of maintaining a modern computation laboratory and the challenge and pitfalls of charging usage fees, “a practice which affects the character of its scientific program,”⁵¹ limited access to academic computing centers.

The NSF entered into an agreement with the Applied Mathematics Laboratories of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) for “advice on the methods of numerical analysis and the choice of machines for specific computation involved in requests . . . ”⁵² That year (1955), NSF made computational grants (with advice from NBS) to the Ohio State University; the University of Texas; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Illinois.⁵³

In February 1955 the NSF appointed an ad hoc Advisory Panel on University Computing Facilities, led by John von Neumann.⁵⁴ The panel recommended “that the Foundation establish a limited program to provide computing equipment and partial support for appropriate staff in order to carry on research and training in high-speed computation.” The report also noted that research in the advanced design of computing machines should be recognized as being of basic importance: “it is desirable that the speed of computing machines be increased by a factor of at least 50 and that their capacity be substantially increased.”⁵⁵ At its October 1955 meeting the panel recommended that “$5 million be expended for the development of a fast, large computing machine of advanced design.”⁵⁶

Leading this panel was not the only instance where von Neumann played a role in developing NSF’s computing facilities program. He earlier had proposed the stored program concept in his “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,”⁵⁷ and he built such a machine at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton. Computer simulations were frequently used for both meteorology and nuclear weapons and von Neumann had realized that these two fields were closely connected scientifically. Both were centrally concerned with highly nonlinear fluid dynamics.⁵⁸ Von Neumann was the principal investigator on an NSF grant to organize the Conference on High-Speed Computing in Meteorology and Oceanography⁵⁹ held May 13–15, 1954, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Following this meeting, NSF funded the aforementioned advisory panel convened by von Neumann, then at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In May 1956, von Neumann outlined the needs for facilities, which were critical to the advancement of science yet beyond the financial means of universities and the National Science Board; it subsequently approved a computer facilities program.⁶⁰ Von Neumann died early the following year.

The career of John Pasta connected von Neumann, his IAS machine, the AEC, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and NSF. Pasta had a long and unusual career, beginning as a New York City police officer, then an Army Signal Corps officer, a physics PhD student, and eventually a staff member at Los Alamos. In 1953, Pasta, Stanislaw Ulam, and Enrico Fermi used the LANL MANIAC computer, based on von Neumann’s design for the IAS computer, to identify the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) problem,⁶¹ a fundamental advance in soliton theory. In 1956, von Neumann invited Pasta to head what became the AEC Division of Mathematics and Computer Research. In 1961, Pasta left the AEC to join the University of Illinois as chair of the computer science department and later became director of the NSF Office of Computing Activities, director of the NSF Division of Computer Research (DCR), and director of the NSF Division of Mathematical and Computing Sciences (DMCS).

NSF continued to make grants for university computing centers and research in numerical analysis through the 1950s, for example at Cal Tech, MIT, Oregon State, Washington, and Wisconsin in 1956. Research grants went to Cal Tech, Berkeley, Cornell, MIT, Oregon State, Penn, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford, Washington, and Wisconsin the following year.

In July 1960, an institutional grants program was created to assist institutions to strengthen their general research and training functions. NSF made 6 grants in 1961 totaling $1,685,000 for the acquisition or rental of high-speed computers and 20 grants totaling $796,000 for computing centers and procurement of small computers. Because NSF funding was limited, the Foundation limited computer center support to an amount equal to 5% of a proposing institution’s research grant income, capped at $50,000 (later reduced to $37,500). Using this formula, NSF made institutional grants for computing infrastructure totaling $1,496,604 to 248 institutions; more than half the awards amounted to $2,000 or less, while just 10 institutions received the maximum grant of $37,500.⁶²

In June 1962, NSF Director Alan Waterman requested that the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council undertake a study of “the status and likely growth of computer uses. . . . ” J. Barkley Rosser prepared the National Academy of Sciences report, “Digital Computer Needs in Universities and Colleges.” The Rosser Report⁶³ was completed in 1966 and made a strong case for universities having access to high-performance computers, but it said little about education. In 1963, the Foundation was able to provide only limited support for computing facilities due to the magnitude of the need. Institutions were required to provide as much as two-thirds of the purchase price from a non-federal source. Even though funding increased to $4,980,000 in fiscal year 1963,⁶⁴ only 13 grants were made.

Arthur Grad administered the computer facilities grants at NSF beginning in 1959 and he recalled that the Rosser Report:

. . . all started with Phil Morse at MIT. They needed a bigger computer. They estimated they would need about ten million dollars. And I told them, well, there wasn’t much I could do about it since my entire budget was only five (million). And I suggested to him that probably the best thing he could do was to have a National Academy study done pointing out the need for more money for computers. So, the Academy duly appointed the committee to make those studies. . . . But it all started from Phil Morse’s need for a big computer.⁶⁵

At the time Morse was seeking additional funding, MIT had received a 7094 computer from IBM on which MIT faculty began development of the CTSS operating system.⁶⁶ The CTSS operating system, a forerunner of Project MAC, Multics, and eventually Unix, was based on an idea of John McCarthy, then at MIT. In an influential memo titled “A Time-Sharing Operator Program for Our Projected IBM 709,” he proposed interactive time-shared debugging. Herb Teager and McCarthy gave a presentation entitled “Time-Shared Program Testing”⁶⁷ at the national ACM meeting in September 1959.⁶⁸ Much of the CTSS research was funded by NSF grants to the MIT Computation Center. This is clearly an example where fundamental advances occurred through NSF funding of infrastructure. McCarthy started working at BBN with JCR Licklider and others at around that time, and it is said that McCarthy influenced Licklider’s thinking about time-sharing. Licklider later went to ARPA, where he funded Project MAC at MIT, based on CTSS, and many other important initiatives.

NSF established the Office of Computing Activities (OCA) in July 1967 to provide federal leadership in the use of computers for research and education. Later, the directive was added as a statutory requirement to the NSF charter. Faced with ever-increasing demand for computing facilities from all sectors of academe, OCA established regional centers. In fiscal years 1968 and 1969, the Foundation explored various computer-based cooperative arrangements. Typically, each regional activity was centered on a major university, which provided computer services and technical assistance to help a cluster of nearby institutions introduce computing. Altogether, 15 regional centers were established, including 12 major universities, 116 participating colleges, 11 junior colleges, and 27 secondary schools located in 21 states. By the early 1970s, 30 regional computing networks were connecting approximately 300 institutions at all levels of education and including minority institutions.

As the number of college and university computing centers grew, NSF also began to recognize the need for programmers and technicians to staff these centers. In its 1957 Annual Report, it noted:

The rapid development of computing machines and their usefulness in a wide variety of research investigations have created a demand for persons trained in the use and operation of computers. Although such training may be considered a proper responsibility of colleges and universities, there is a severe shortage of teachers competent to give instruction. The Foundation has provided support for a program of training for experienced mathematicians on the faculties of colleges and universities to prepare them to develop courses of instruction in the use and operation of modern computing machines.

In 1954, Wayne University had held a Conference on Training Personnel for the Computing Machine Field⁶⁹ with a focus on educating mathematicians and on scientific rather than business applications of computing. Participants in the 1954 NSF-funded meeting identified a large but unspecified demand for people highly skilled in computation; however, the attendees were unsure whether the primary use of computers was for scientific calculations or business calculations. Educating the needed workforce led to the conclusion that there were “not enough mathematicians.”⁷⁰ Leon W. Cohen, the program director for Mathematical Sciences, made the first public announcement of NSF’s support for computing infrastructure at this meeting.⁷¹

By 1957, NSF was providing support for training experienced mathematicians on the faculties of colleges and universities to prepare them to develop courses of instruction in the use and operation of modern computing machines.⁷² This activity formed the basis for creating academic computer science programs. Training programs continued with the Office of Computing Activities created in 1967.

1.3Computers in Education

While the Rosser Report said very little about the use of computing for education, the issue did not go away. The President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) commissioned another study of computers in higher education in 1967, chaired by physicist John Pierce of Bell Labs. Following extensive hearings, the committee concluded that “an undergraduate college education without adequate computing was as deficient as an undergraduate education would be without an adequate library . . . [and that] there was value in using computers for precollege education.”⁷³ The Pierce Report’s focus on education supported NSF’s expanded involvement.

Andrew Molnar, a leader in the computing education field, asserted that:

The most significant event [related to computers in education] occurred when President Lyndon Johnson . . . directed the National Science Foundation to work with the U.S. Office of Education to establish an experimental program to develop the potential of computers in education. In response to the directive, NSF created the Office of Computing Activities (OCA) in July of 1967 to provide Federal leadership in the use of computers for research and education.⁷⁴

When OCA was created, Molnar moved over to the NSF from the Department of Education, first on detail and later as a program director, to work on the computers in education programs.

NSF has a long history of involvement in early efforts to use computers for education. It funded three pioneers⁷⁵ in educational technology projects: The Children’s Television Workshop,⁷⁶ the computer-based learning system PLATO, and the curriculum sharing network CONDUIT.

PLATO, the first large-scale, computer-based education system, was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of Donald Bitzer beginning in 1959. With NSF support, Bitzer showed that computers could serve thousands of students, at many different geographic locations, with hundreds of courses, at a reasonable cost. Most of the financial support for PLATO initially came from NSF. Control Data Corp. (CDC) was eventually licensed by the University of Illinois to produce and market the PLATO system.

One unique feature of the PLATO system was a plasma display that provided high quality, low-cost graphics. The PLATO authoring language helped educators create thousands of instructional programs. Bitzer eventually moved PLATO to a Control Data 6000-class machine that served several thousand student stations and provided hundreds of lessons simultaneously. When distributed by Control Data Corporation, PLATO primarily was used for in-service training in industry, but it continued in use in many universities and secondary schools through the 1980s.

James Johnson at Iowa, Gerald Weeg at Iowa, Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth, and Jim Parker at North Carolina Educational Computing Service, together with representatives from Texas and Oregon State, formed CONDUIT, a consortium of five regional networks involving approximately 100 colleges and universities for sharing computer-based curricula in seven fields of science.⁷⁷ In 1971, when CONDUIT was conceived, the major barrier to instructional computing was a lack of quality learning materials and computer software. CONDUIT faced significant challenges in validating shared curricula,⁷⁸ but the concept of regional networks would return as a critical part of the NSFNET project.

In addition to computer-aided instruction (CAI) systems such as PLATO and CONDUIT, NSF had an uneven but long history with some of the leaders in the cognitive and learning sciences. As Molnar stated,⁷⁹ “no other name is more closely connected to computer-assisted instruction (CAI) than that of Patrick Suppes.” As Director of the Stanford Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Suppes began a program of research and development in computer assisted instruction in 1963. He and Richard C. Atkinson, who later would become NSF Director, developed sophisticated mathematical models of student learning to help design instructional materials and strategies.⁸⁰ Suppes noted that John McCarthy of Stanford’s computer science department (having moved from MIT) played an important role in the design and operation of the institute’s computer facilities. Suppes wanted to demonstrate that computers could have an immediate impact on education, even using existing equipment. He and Atkinson began initially with 12 six-year-old children who came to their lab daily and spent 30 minutes at the computer. From 1966 to 1968, Suppes used an IBM 1500 and an audiotape device for CAI. Students responded to questions displayed on a CRT via light pen and keyboard. Suppes later developed a wide variety of CAI courses. The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York supported Suppes’s research projects.

In 1963 at Dartmouth, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz transformed the role of computers in education from primarily a research activity to an academic one. They did not like the idea that students had to stand in long lines with punch cards for batch processing. So they adopted the recently demonstrated concept of timesharing, which enabled many students to interact directly with the computer. The university developed its own time-shared system and expanded it into a regional computing center for colleges and schools. Kemeny, a mathematician who later became Dartmouth’s president, had applied for an NSF grant to bring a GE-225 computer to campus and to build the first fully functional general-purpose timesharing system.⁸¹ He received the funding despite reviewers’ serious doubts about his plan to employ undergraduates as his research team. Together, Kemeny, Kurtz, and their undergraduate students built a time-sharing system at Dartmouth. At the same time, they developed a new programming language, BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). It turned out to be ideal for introducing beginners to programming and nevertheless was powerful enough to be used for most applications. BASIC worked on any computer. It spread rapidly and was used for the creation of computer-based instructional materials for a wide variety of subjects at all levels of education.

In the early seventies, Seymour Papert at MIT set out to develop a new and different approach to computers in education. He developed a programming language, Logo, to encourage rigorous thinking about mathematics. He wanted it to be accessible to children and be easy to use to express procedures for simple, non-numerical tasks familiar to children. He used it for mathematics education by teaching it in a wide variety of interesting “micro world” environments such as music and physics. Papert insisted that one should not teach mathematics but instead should teach children to be mathematicians. Logo soon became the language of the elementary school computer literacy movement. After OCA was created, the Logo group wanted to do more testing in schools in collaboration with Wally Feurzeig at Bolt, Baranek and Newman (BBN).⁸² The joint project did receive NSF funding, but only following extensive arguments and considerable reservations. NSF was concerned with giving research funding to a private company such as BBN. At the time, NSF preferred a non-profit, research-oriented institute or university such as MIT. “BBN was a suspect as being a money-grabbing kind of place rather than pure as a drift of snow like universities. So, he [the head of OCA, Dr. Milton Rose] said: ‘Why should I fund you? You are not a university.’ ”⁸³ However, Feurzeig’s group at BBN was the only group then doing this type of research, and so the NSF obliged. Because of differing viewpoints between the Logo Group’s goal to revolutionize mathematics teaching and NSF’s focus on educational applications, NSF cut the project’s funding in 1977. “These cuts succeeded in allowing the NSF to better control Logo’s development as an educational tool rather than a revolution.”⁸⁴

In October 1972, OCA’s Computer Innovations in Education Section⁸⁵ was transferred to the Education Directorate where funds for research and education started to tighten. To bolster support for their programs, the group decided to support two demonstration projects: PLATO IV⁸⁶ and the Time-shared Interactive Computer Controlled Information Television system (TICCIT),⁸⁷ directed by John Volk of the MITRE Corporation. While PLATO was a large centralized system, TICCIT used a minicomputer and two-way television in a more distributed system.⁸⁸ The National Science Board, at first skeptical, was impressed with the demonstrations and the result slowed budget reductions temporarily.

President Ronald Reagan’s fiscal year 1982 budget for NSF included major reductions for education and social science funding. As a result, all funding in the Education Directorate, except for graduate fellowships, was slashed.⁸⁹ Molnar was left to close out all of the existing grants. However, he was able to find ways to fund computers in education researchers. He and Dorothy Deringer, an information scientist from Case Western Reserve serving as an NSF program officer, recruited vendors to donate equipment to NSF and this equipment was made available to researchers. The Education Directorate was eventually restored, and Molnar remained there. Attempts failed to move the computers in education programs into the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate when it was created in 1986. Molnar continued to interact with CISE staff and was involved in the MOSIS VLSI fabrication facility and worked with DARPA and CISE staff members John Lehmann and Bernard Chern to provide access to that system.⁹⁰

1.4Finding a Home for Computer Science Research

By the late 1950s, the Mathematical Sciences Section was making computer research grants, for example to Delaware, Harvard, Kansas, Michigan State, Michigan, Princeton, Syracuse, and Yale as well as for computing facilities at Northwestern.⁹¹ Grants were later awarded to Oregon State University, Columbia, Delaware, and Rice.⁹²

Under the leadership of Donald Laird, program director for Computer Sciences, and Milton Rose, program director and, later, section head for Mathematics, the NSF program in the mathematical sciences began in the early 1960s to include grants for theoretical symbolic logic, computer sciences, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition.⁹³ In 1965, 10% of the NSF fellowships in mathematics went to computer scientists; by 1974, the percentage grew to 20%.⁹⁴ The computing facilities and research activities and program managers were transferred from the Mathematical Sciences Section to the Office of Computing Activities when it was created in 1967, with Rose as its head.⁹⁵

The NSF leadership’s view lingered that computer science was primarily a form of scientific infrastructure, rather than a discipline in its own right, but OCA fulfilled the hopes of ACM activists by bringing computer science out from under the shadow of mathematics, where its status as a research field had always been in question.⁹⁶

The shift also kept computer science out of the Engineering Division, which had been lobbying since 1965 for control over computing activities. The placement of the Office of Computing Activities under the NSF Director, and its emphasis on education rather than engineering, was a disappointment to NSF’s engineers.

The Office of Computing Activities’ initial budget was $22 million, a 73% increase from the $12.7 million allocated for computer education and research in mathematics and other NSF offices in the previous year. OCA had three sections: the Institutional Computing Services Section (for funding universities to purchase computers as a tool for scientists), led by Kent Curtis; the Special Projects/ Computer Innovations in Education Section, led by Arthur Melmed; and the Computer Science Education, Research, and Training Section, led by Fredrick Weingarten. The initial OCA Advisory Committee included a number of leading figures in the developing discipline.⁹⁷

The primary initial role of OCA was to support computing facilities, computers in education, and training of computing professionals. In 1968, Donald Aufenkamp assumed management of the facilities programs and Curtis moved over to head the new Computer Science and Engineering Section with Tom Keenan, John Lehmann, and later Val Tareski as program managers. The concurrent growth in academic computer science programs and researchers led OCA’s computing research portfolio to grow. A discipline of computer science was emerging but was not yet sufficiently well-defined to provide an obvious blueprint for the new Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) Section. With leadership from Rose and input from the advisory committee, Curtis and his program team began to define a set of programs. As Keenan noted:

Well, computer science had achieved the title computer science without much science in it, early. And I think we—here I have to say that Kent Curtis was a prime person . . . I loved the man very much; he was a great guy—we decided that to be a science you had to have theory, and not just theory itself as a separate program, but everything had to have a theoretical basis. And so, whenever we had a proposal, we encouraged, as much as we could, some kind of a theoretical background for this proposal—not just software, and not just write a program, but there should be some basis for it.⁹⁸

The CS&E staff worked together to define a set of programs:

. . . we decided that there was a minimum of three—smallest integer greater than two—things that went to make up computing. The first was theory; the second was hardware; the third was software. So, John Lehmann became the hardware person. I became the software person. And in the beginning, I think Val Tareski was the theory person . . . each of these programs had probably something less than a million dollars to spend. I think the section had perhaps a $2 million budget in 1969 or 1970.⁹⁹

The CS&E portfolio of grants, taken together with support from engineering and information science programs, represented a growing investment in the emerging computing research field. Some of the early OCA research grants were awarded to Niklaus Wirth (Stanford), Michael Harrison (Berkeley), Sam Conte (Purdue), Patrick Fischer (Cornell), Juris Hartmanis (Cornell), and Martin Davis (NYU Courant). Computer science-related facilities awards went to Edward Feigenbaum (Stanford), John Pasta (UIUC), Conte, and Richard Conway (Cornell). The Engineering Section in Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering (MPE) funded Walter Karplus (UCLA), Melvin Breuer (USC), Edward Coffman (Princeton), and Steve Ungar (Columbia), while the Division of Information Sciences funded Vladimir Slamecka (Georgia Tech) and Naomi Sager (NYU).

When Pasta joined NSF in January 1970, he became extremely important in navigating NSF “politics.” Pasta was respected by the senior NSF staff and other division directors in MPE due to his intellect and background in mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. This was essential to the growth of computer science funding in competition with other disciplines for budget. His death in 1981 eventually led to the Computer Science Section (CSS) being split off from the Math Section in 1984,¹⁰⁰ as a separate division in Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS; by this time, Engineering had become a separate directorate). There was a feeling among many that no one, other than Pasta, had the breadth of background to oversee both mathematics and computer science. His Signal Corps background and his long connection with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and classified projects made it possible for him to play a key role in the conversation between NSF and NSA over cryptography research.

When NSF terminated the computer facilities program, Pasta reorganized OCA into three sections: Computer Science and Engineering, Computer Applications in Research, and Computer Innovations in Education.¹⁰¹ These three new sections reflected the changing nature of computer science and of OCA’s role within NSF.¹⁰² The Computer Science and Engineering Section continued to sponsor research in fundamental computer science, the Computer Innovations in Education Section helped bring the power of the computer to bear on the problems of education, and the Computer Applications in Research Section fostered the development of advanced computer techniques to increase science research capability.

In 1972, Pasta recruited Peter G. Lykos, an Illinois Institute of Technology computational chemist, to NSF with the explicit charge to lead a new initiative to address computer impacts on society.¹⁰³ Lykos was assigned to Aufenkamp’s section until he could get the program started. During his tenure at NSF, Lykos experienced turbulent times. OCA had ended its computing facilities program and the computers in education programs were transferred to the Education Directorate. Lykos recalled¹⁰⁴ frustration working with the OCA staff and for the loss of the facilities and later the computers in education programs. He left NSF around the time the Office of Computing Activities was reorganized and transferred to the Research Directorate in November 1973.¹⁰⁵

In 1974, OCA was restructured as the Division of Computer Research (DCR) with Pasta as Division Director. The division¹⁰⁶ supported research in all areas of computing with a major emphasis on fundamental aspects of computer science and engineering (in Curtis’s section), on research directed toward the development of techniques that increase the responsiveness of the computer to the requirements of scientific disciplines (in Aufenkamp’s section), and on privacy and computer system security, human-machine interface, and societal impacts of computing (in a newly formed section led by Fredrick Weingarten based on Lykos’s initiative).

1.5Summary and Conclusions

The first 24 years of NSF were marked by changing roles and outcomes for its computing and information programs. The Cold War had a strong influence on the science information and computing facilities programs. Interest in foreign intelligence increased the science information budgets. Defense and atomic energy agencies created a rapid growth in the number, capabilities, and providers of computers and computing facilities. Scientists who had limited or no access to Department of Defense (DoD) and AEC laboratories increased their demand on NSF to provide campus facilities. When NSF was given responsibility for applications in science information and computing facilities, the need to provide the underlying technology resulted in NSF investments that advanced fundamental and applied research. Program and office managers in mathematics, engineering, and the OCA began to make grants to the early pioneers in computing research that with DoD support helped establish early computer science programs. OSIS initiated a number of academic information science and systems programs.

By the mid-1970s, OSIS had been greatly weakened and was moved to a nonsupportive directorate. OCA lost its facilities and education programs and had yet to gain the respect of the NSF management. In the 1980s everything would change dramatically.

Much credit for protecting the NSF computing and information programs and building grant portfolios that advanced the underlying technologies is due to a few individuals. Burt Adkinson, the long-term head of OSI and OSIS (1957–1970), was a champion for science information and information science across the government and the discipline. Helen Brownson (1951–1966) was responsible for guiding many of the research efforts funded by OSI and OSIS. Milton Rose (1963–1969), Mathematics Division Director and first head of OCA, recruited to government service a veritable who’s who of computing and was a significant force in the rapid development of computing and computer science in academia. Milt was replaced by John Pasta (1969–1981), who led OCA, DCR, and DMCS through many changes and who with Kent Curtis (1967–1987) established the programs that led to the current strong position of NSF in computer science research.

Notes

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