by Harlan E. Anderson
I had been taking a lot of mathematics courses at the University of Illinois. One of my courses concerned Boolean algebra, logic, truth tables, and something called computer programming. At the time, I didn’t see the bigger picture, but this period saw the birth of the computer revolution and a lot of it was happening at the University of Illinois College of Engineering.
The College of Engineering had a contract with the U.S. Army to develop one of the first general purpose electronic computers. It had a specific use which was to speed up the calculations for trajectories of artillery firings for field commanders. The name of the comupter was ORDVAC which stood for Ordinance Vacuum Tube Computer. As far as I know, it never became fully operational during my years at the university. I also never saw it probably because of military security. Under Army contract terms, Illinios was allowed to build a second computer which (as far as I know) was identical to the ORDVAC and was to be known as the ILLIAC.
Two key professors involved with this pioneering computer development were also teaching several computer programming courses at the undergraduate and graduate level – all of which I took. I certainly had no grand career plan that was based on computers at the time. But, computers were going to change my life in ways that I never could have imagined at the time. They were also going to change the world in ways that no one could have ever forseen.
