Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016. William Aspray

CISE History Archive (CHA) is described in Part III of this book.

4.We use the ambiguous term “computing” to denote computer science and closely related disciplines, but not all uses of computing by other fields; however, especially in the early days, the distinction was not yet clear.

5.One motivation for this collection effort was the physical move of NSF headquarters in September 2017 from Arlington to Alexandria, Virginia, and the knowledge that valuable documents might be discarded. Another motivation was that early NSF employees are starting to pass on—and their memories and their documentation with them. Two interviewees passed away during the project and several potential interviewees were incapacitated.

6.These included documents from Gordon Bell, Mel Ciment, Mike Foster, John King, Irene Lombardo, Jack Minker, Rick Adrion, and Peter Freeman. Archival collections consulted included those of Ed Feigenbaum and John McCarthy at the Stanford archives.

7.The oral history record is strong but not complete. Many of the principal people involved with CISE and its predecessors have been interviewed, but a few are deceased, a few we could not reach or they did not agree to be interviewed, and due to oversight or lack of time, no doubt a few were missed. While there were perhaps 10 or 20 oral histories concerning the NSF computing story existing at the time we began this project (mostly at the Charles Babbage Institute Archives, the IEEE History Center, and the Computer History Museum), the new interviews we have added represent a major increase in coverage of this topic.

8.The AD is the head of the directorate; “Assistant” indicates they also have NSF-wide responsibilities, reporting to the NSF Director.

9.A “rotator” at NSF is a person on leave from their home institution to work at NSF under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) or as temporary employees.

10.This is true of early work on science information and information science. Highperformance computing and cyberinfrastructure have sometimes been housed within CISE, but at other times either in the Office of the Director or in their own freestanding office reporting to the Director. At times, computing activities have existed in other NSF directorates: especially Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Biology, and Education and Human Resources.

11.See the list of acronyms and abbreviations that appears in Appendix E of this book.

       IPART

       CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY

      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,”