Today in 1948, IBM announced the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) and demonstrated it to the public.
“The most important aspect of the SSEC,” according to Brian Randell in the Origins of Digital Computers, “was that it could perform arithmetic on, and then execute, stored instructions – it was almost certainly the first operational machine with these capabilities.”
As Kevin Maney explains in The Maverick and his Machine, IBM’s CEO, Thomas Watson Sr., “didn’t know much about how to build an electronic computer,” but in 1947, he “was the only person on earth who knew how to sell” one. Maney:
The engineers finished testing the SSEC in late 1947 when Watson made a decision that forever altered the public perception of computers and linked IBM to the new generation of information machines. He told the engineers to disassemble the SSEC and set it up in the ground floor lobby of IBM’s 590 Madison Avenue headquarters. The lobby was open to the public and its large windows allowed a view of the SSEC for the multitudes cramming the sidewalks on Madison and 57th street. … The spectacle of the SSEC defined the public’s image of a computer for decades. Kept dust-free behind glass panels, reels of electronic tape ticked like clocks, punches stamped out cards and whizzed them into hoppers, and thousands of tiny lights flashed on and off in no discernable pattern… Pedestrians stopped to gawk and gave the SSEC the nickname “Poppy.” … Watson took the computer out of the lab and sold it to the public.
The SSEC ran at 590 Madison Ave. until July 1952 when it was replaced by a new IBM computer, the first to be mass-produced. According to Columbia University’s website for the SSEC, it “inspired a generation of cartoonists to portray the computer as a series of wall-sized panels covered with lights, meters, dials, switches, and spinning rolls of tape.”
As IBM was one of a handful of computer pioneers establishing a new industry, Watson’s key selling point to the general public was not the challenging of the alleged thought control of a dominant competitor as Steve Jobs will do more than three decades later (with the “1984” commercial), but extolling computer-aided thought expansion: “…to explore the consequences of man’s thought to the outermost reaches of time, space, and physical conditions.” Watson was probably the first executive to promote “AI” not as “artificial intelligence” but as standing for human “augmented intelligence.”
Like his better-known successor more than three decades later, Thomas Watson Sr. was a perfectionist. When he reviewed the SSEC “exhibition” prior to the public unveiling, he remarked that "The sweep of this room is hindered by those large black columns down the center. Have them removed before the ceremony." But since they supported the building, the columns stayed. Instead, the photo in the brochure handed out at the ceremony was carefully retouched to remove all traces of the offending columns.
The SSEC had 12,5000 vacuum tubes and its various components would fill half a football field. But Moore’s Law was already evident to observers of the very young industry and Popular Mechanics offered this prediction to its readers in March 1949: “Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.”