Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

McCarthy, John 297programming difficult, tedious, and error-prone. Mauchlywanted a way that variables could be represented symbolically:for example, Total rather than a register number suchas 101. Under Mauchly’s supervision William Schmitt wrotewhat became known as Brief Code. It allowed two-lettercombinations to stand for both variables and operationssuch as multiplication or exponentiation. A special programread these instructions and converted them to thenecessary register and machine operation commands (seeinterpreter). While primitive compared to later languages(see assembler and programming languages), Brief Coderepresented an important leap forward in making computersmore usable.Mauchly stayed with Remington Rand and its successorSperry Rand until 1959, but then left over a dispute aboutthe marketing of the Univac. He continued his career as aconsultant and lecturer. Mauchly and Eckert also becameembroiled in a patent dispute arising from their originalwork with ENIAC. Accused of infringing Sperry Rand’sENIAC patents, Honeywell claimed that the ENIAC patentwas invalid, with another computer pioneer, John Atanasoff,claiming that Mauchly and Eckert had obtained crucialideas after visiting his laboratory in 1940 (see Atanasoff,John Vincent).In 1973, Judge Earl Richard Larson ruled in favor ofAtanasoff and Honeywell. However, many historians ofthe field give Mauchly and Eckert the lion’s share of thecredit because it was they who had built full-scale, practicalmachines.Mauchly played a key role in founding the Associationfor Computing Machinery (ACM), one of the field’s premierprofessional organizations. He served as its first vice presidentand second president. He received many tokens of recognitionfrom his peers, including the Howard Potts Medalof the Franklin Institute. In turn, the ACM established anEckert-Mauchly award for excellence in computer design.John Mauchly died on January 8, 1980.Further Reading“John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer:An Exhibition in the Department of Special Collections, VanPelt Library, University of Pennsylvania.” Available online.URL: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwmintro.html. Accessed August 14, 2007.McCartney, Scott. ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’sFirst Computer. New York: Berkeley Books, 1999.Stern, N. “John William Mauchly: 1907–1980,” Annals of the Historyof Computing (April 1980): 100–103.McCarthy, John(1927– )AmericanComputer Scientist, AI PioneerStarting in the 1950s, John McCarthy played a key role inthe development of artificial intelligence as a discipline, aswell as developing LISP, the most popular language in AIresearch.John McCarthy was born on September 4, 1927, in Boston,Massachusetts. He completed his B.S. in mathematicsat the California Institute of Technology, then earned hisPh.D. at Princeton University in 1951. During the 1950s, heheld teaching posts at Stanford University, Dartmouth College,and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Although he seemed destined for a prominent careerin pure mathematics, he encountered computers whileworking during the summer of 1955 at an IBM laboratory.He was intrigued with the potential of the machines forhigher-level reasoning and intelligent behavior (see artificialintelligence). The following year he put togethera conference that brought together people who wouldbecome key AI researchers, including Marvin Minsky (seeMinsky, Marvin). He proposed that “the study is to proceedon the basis of the conjecture that every aspect oflearning or any other feature of intelligence can in principlebe so precisely described that a machine can be madeto simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how tomake machines use language, form abstractions and concepts,solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans,and improve themselves.”Mathematics had well-developed symbolic systemsfor expressing its ideas. McCarthy decided that ifAI researchers were to meet their ambitious goals, theywould need a programming language that was equallycapable of expressing and manipulating symbols. Startingin 1958, he developed LISP, a language based on liststhat could flexibly represent data of many kinds and evenallowed programs to be fed as data to other programs(see lisp). LISP would be used in the coming decades tocode most AI research projects, and McCarthy continuedto play an important role in refining the language, whilemoving to Stanford in 1962, where he would spend therest of his career.McCarthy also contributed to the development ofAlgol, a language that would in turn greatly influencemodern procedural languages such as C. He also helpeddevelop new ways for people to use computers. Consultingwith Bolt, Beranek and Newman (the companythat would later build the beginnings of the Internet),he helped design time-sharing, a system that allowedmany users to share the same computer, bringing downthe cost of computing and making it accessible to morepeople. He also sought to make computers more interactive,designing a system called THOR, which used videodisplay terminals. Indeed, he pointed the way to the personalcomputer in a 1972 paper on “The Home InformationTerminal.”In 1971, McCarthy received the prestigious A. M. Turingaward from the Association for Computing Machinery. Inthe 1970s and 1980s, he taught at Stanford and remained aprominent spokesperson for AI, arguing against critics suchas philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (see Dreyfus, Hubert),who claimed that machines could never achieve true intelligence.In 2000 McCarthy retired from Stanford, where heremains a Professor Emeritus. In 2003 McCarthy receivedthe Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and CognitiveScience.