Department History
As the department celebrates its fortieth birthday, it is interesting to look back at its early history. The roots of the Computer Science Department go back far more than the forty years that it has existed as a formal department at ISU. The seeds that would sprout to form the Computer Science Department came from early work by a mathematician, a statistician, a physicist, and a Vice President of the United States.
In 1923 Henry A. Wallace, who later became Vice President (1941-45, in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration), used an IBM calculating machine to teach a machine calculation course. The following year, Wallace and the state agricultural statistician, Charles Searle, brought 20 members of the ISU faculty together to study statistical methods using the calculating machine. By 1933, this collaboration had evolved to create the first statistical center based on calculating machines. The center was headed by George Snedecor from mathematics.
Another seed had begun to sprout in 1937 when an ISU physicist, John Vincent Atanasoff, had the ideas that resulted in the ABC computer. Atanasoff recognized the versatility and speed of electronic devices, but was concerned that the analog devices in use at the time were likely to have accuracy issues. In 1938 this concern led him to start work on what would become the world's first digital computer. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry made rapid progress in the late 1930's and early 1940's. By the time that they both left ISU in 1942 to do research at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, they had laid the foundation of today's digital computers. Although recognition for this achievement was rather slow to evolve, their work was officially recognized in a landmark court case during the 1970's.
These successful projects placed ISU in a leadership position in both the development of computing machines and the use of such machines in research. The 1940's saw the development of two additional special purpose machines at ISU. In the 1950's this experience led ISU to embark on the creation of a high capacity general purpose computer. Robert Stewart was the chief engineer of the project that designed and built what became known as the Cyclone computer. The Cyclone computer served as the workhorse of the university's computational efforts over the next seven years. In addition, research on the Cyclone computer introduced computer science to ISU as 50 PhD and MS theses were based on work related to its development. The notion of graduate education in computer science was formalized in 1964 when a graduate program in computer science was introduced under the direction of Clair Maple.
The undergraduate program in computer science was initiated in 1967 when 75 students were enrolled in 17 courses. The Computer Science Department was formally established in 1968 with Robert Stewart as its first chairman.
