GEORGE STIBITZ

'George Robert Stibitz' (April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as a father of the modern digital computer. He was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, he received his bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.

Contents

Computer

Awards

Computer art

See also

External links

Patents

Other

References

Computer

In November of 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based computer he dubbed the "Model K" (for "'k'itchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs subsequently authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Calculator, completed January 8, 1940, was able to calculate complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940, Stibitz used a teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line.
Stibitz held 38 patents, in addition to those he earned at Bell Labs. He became a member of the faculty at Dartmouth College in 1964 to build bridges between the fields of computing and medicine, and retired from research in 1983. Replicas of the "Model K" reside in both the Smithsonian Institution and the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University.

Awards

★ ''Harry H. Goode Memorial Award'' in 1965 (together with Konrad Zuse)

Computer art

In his later years, George "turned to non-verbal uses of the computer". Specifically, he used an Amiga to create computer art.
In a 1990 letter written to the department chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science department of Denison University he said:

I have turned to non-verbal uses of the computer, and have made a display of computer "art". The quotes are obligatory, for the result of my efforts is not to create important art but to show that this activity is fun, much as the creation of computers was fifty years ago.

The Mathematics and Computer Science department at Denison University has enlarged and displayed some of his artwork.

See also

★ John Vincent Atanasoff

★ Charles Babbage Institute

External links

Patents

★ "Complex Computer" filed April 1941, issued February 1954 (102 pages)

Other

★ Obituary by Kip Crosby of the Computing History Association of California

★ George R. Stibitz website at Denison University

★ Biography of Stibitz on the ''Pioneers'' website – By Kerry Redshaw, Brisbane, Australia

References

★ Melina Hill, Valley News Correspondent, ''A Tinkerer Gets a Place in History'', Valley News West Lebanon NH, Thursday March 31, 1983, page 13.

★ Andrew Hodges (1983), ''Alan Turing: The Enigma'', Simon and Schuster, New York, ISBN 0-671-49207-1. Stibitz is mentioned briefly on pages 299 and 326. Hodges refers to Stibitz's machine as one of two "big relay calculators" (Aiken's being the other one, p.326).
::"The second American project [Aiken's being the first] was underway at Bell Laboratories. Here the engineer G. Stibiz had first only thought of designing relay machines to perform decimal arithmetic with complex numbers, but after the outbreak of war had incorporated the facility to carry out a fixed sequence of aithmetical operations. His 'Model III' [sic] was under way in the New York building at the time of