1995 Bower Awards Honor Computer Science

This year, the Bower Award and Prize in Science -- the richest American science prize -- as well as the Bower Award for Business will honor the development of computer technology. The awards are presented annually by Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Science Museum. PIONEER: Frederick Brooks, Jr. was cited for his "major contribution to making the computer useful. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., who defined computer architecture in such a way that computer hardware and software developed independently, has been selected to receive the 1995 Bower Award and Prize in Science. The six-year-old award, which consists of a gold medal and a cash prize of $250,000, honors outstanding work in the life or physical sciences. David Packard, a cofounder of Hewlett-Packard Co., the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computer maker, will be presented with the Bower Award for Business Leadership for his contribution to innovative management practices. Packard will receive a gold medal but will not receive a cash prize. The awards will be given next May at the Franklin Institute. The presentation will coincide with the 50th anniversary of the invention of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, built in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia (N. Sankaran, The Scientist, Aug. 21, 1995, page 3). The event will be part of a citywide celebration of the "Second American Revolution," the birth of the Information Age. 'APPROPRIATE' Heinz Pfeiffer, who helped screen candidates, says it is timely to honor computers this year. According to the international, five-member selection committee, Brooks and Packard are being recognized for their work in the development of the computer. This year marks the first time the Bower Award has honored the field of computer science. "It's appropriate because this is the 50th anniversary of the first major computer in the U.S., although the impetus for the choice came from the Franklin Institute," notes Heinz Pfeiffer, a retired chemical physicist who taught at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Pfeiffer recently served as chairman of the Bower pre-selection committee, which is involved in screening candidates, but does not vote. Brooks, Kenan Professor and founder of the computer science department at the University of North Carolina (UNC), was chosen for his work in the early 1960s, designing IBM's family of 360 series mainframe computers. While manager in charge of engineering, marketing, programming, and architecture for the 360 series of computers at an IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Brooks -- along with colleague Dura Sweeney -- invented a system that permitted the introduction of the first interactive operating system, which allowed users to type on a keyboard and see the characters on the screen. Known as an interrupt system, this was really a sophisticated electronic switching system that established priorities for information fed into the computer. It appeared in the Stretch supercomputer designed for Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory and pioneered many notions of modern computer architecture. The System/360 project proved revolutionary, involving seven computers -- small to large -- that could process the same instructions in exactly the same way so that all supporting software could be standardized. Today, the 64-year-old computer scientist remembers those years with genteel modesty. "I was just in the right place at the right time and on some very able teams," he says. "At the time we started this work, the computer world was just switching from vacuum tubes to transistors. The 360 was the first time a company set out to develop a line of computers that would all run the same programs." Pfeiffer notes that Brooks was selected because of the vast scope of his research in the computer sciences. "There was the broadness of his contribution, both to the actual computers -- the hardware -- and to the development of computer software. He made a major contribution to making the computer useful. The international committee found him to be very seminal in the further development of the computer." Brooks also achieved renown for his book, The Mythical Man- Month: Essays in Software Engineering (Reading, Mass., Wesley), which appeared in 1974 and decried the growing corporate practice of adding more people to a software- development project in the hopes of speeding up its completion. As the Bower committee noted, Brooks's lasting influence has extended even into the lexicon of computer sciences, and beyond. His classic line, explaining that there is a natural time scale for a project, became a management mantra: "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned to the task." Today, Brooks adds that "accountants are used to figuring the cost of development by counting the number of people working. But you can't trade people for months." In addition, Brooks is known for coining the term "computer architecture." A professor at UNC's Chapel Hill campus since 1964, Brooks says he expects to donate much of the prize money to selected charities that he and his wife favor, which he declines to name. The honor took him by surprise, he says with a laugh: "This is kind of like lightning striking." The 83-year-old Packard, who took Hewlett-Packard from a tiny oscillator company founded in a Silicon Valley garage to an international computer powerhouse, couldn't be reached for comment. Like Brooks, he is credited with helping to transform the computer sciences, particularly with his managerial style. INNOVATIVE MANAGEMENT: David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard Co., will get the Bower business award. Legendary for running his company the "HP Way," Packard developed innovative techniques, from management by objective- a motivational method in which employees are told what they need to achieve, not what they must do -- to an open-door policy with his employees that became commonplace throughout corporate America. Packard's partnership with William Hewlett began after the two met at Stanford University in the early 1930s. Packard studied electrical engineering, while Hewlett studied science. In 1938, they were living in the same Palo Alto address and, egged on by a former professor, started an electronics business in the garage with $538. The sound engineer for Walt Disney became one of their first customers when he bought eight resistance-capacitance audio oscillators for $71.50 each. This represented the first practical, low-cost way for generating high-quality audio frequencies needed in communications, geophysics, medicine, and defense work. A year later, they'd moved into a rented small building and garnered $1,563 in profits. The business blossomed during the electronics boom of the postwar period. Packard later served as deputy United States defense secretary from 1969 to 1971 under President Richard Nixon. An active philanthropist, Packard is closely identified with the $49 million Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Bower awards were established in 1989 as part of the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial Awards. They were made possible by a $7.5 million bequest from Henry Bower, a Philadelphia chemical manufacturer who died in 1988. Edward R. Silverman is a freelance writer based in Millburn, N.J.

1995 Bower Awards Honor Computer Science

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