Today in 1940, MIT’s Norbert Wiener sent a memo to Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), proposing five ideas for computer design.
Wiener’s biographers, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, in Dark Hero of the Information Age, call it “one of the first systematic descriptions—and perhaps the first set of technical specifications—for a fully functioning computer in the modern sense.” Bush turned down Wiener’s proposal to build an all-electronic digital computer, believing that scientists and engineers contributing to the war effort should “be employed as far as possible on matters of more immediate promise.”
Conway and Siegelman write: “At the time, neither man knew that before the war’s end every idea in Wiener’s prescient memo would be operational, or actively in development, in one all-inclusive machine.”
Pesi Masani, “Norbert Wiener and the Computer”:
What Wiener proposed was a high-speed electronic special-purpose computer, modern in all respects except for a stored program. Bush, however, sensing no quick defense payoff in the Wiener proposal, decided to set it aside for the duration of the war. Wiener then turned his intellectual energies to the antiaircraft fire-control problem.
But Wiener’s interests in the computer did not dwindle. Under the influence of his neurophysiological friend, Arturo Rosenblueth, they merely shifted to the brain, the cellular computer, which he had written about at age 16, and continued to do so till his death in 1964. The circle around Wiener in the 1940s also included Walter Pitts, and later Warren McCulloch. It was the proximity of the ideas expressed in their important paper on nervous nets (1943) with those in C. Shannon’s earlier paper on switching systems (1938) that convinced Wiener that the operating principles of the brain and the electronic computer are fundamentally the same.
To Wiener, the electronic computer was a prosthetic aid to enable the human mind to transcend its limitations and better perform its duties.