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: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :  PIONEERS By Jack Bender The Darien News-Review Thursday, April 9, 1998 Copyright © 1998 The Hour Newspapers Reprinted by Permission A few years ago, not many people were aware of Rowayton’s association with the creation of the business computer.  Some Rowayton old timers remembered that Jim Rand’s
company had bought the big Farrell mansion after the war and he’d brought in that big yacht of his and parked
it in the Five Mile River. And hadn’t he hired those famous generals — Groves and MacArthur — to head up
things at the Rand company?
The Barn (as the former Farrell stables came to be known) was full of engineers designing office machines. Or so people thought. In point of fact, back in 1947-1951 more than two dozen technicians were working in the converted facilities The Barn had been remodeled to contain. They were putting in 12-hour shifts, in two competing teams to develop the first electronic computer designed for the business market. The competing team device was a favorite of Darien’s Gen. Leslie Groves; he had used the same strategy when he was in charge of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Among those original engineers working on the prototype of a business computer known as the 409 were John Carmichael, Jim Marin, Jake Randmer, Gordon Chamberlain, Les Henchcliffe and Bill Wenning. Unfamiliar names perhaps, but not if you had attended last Sunday’s Rowayton Historical Society meeting at which these six pioneers were honored when they assembled to commemorate the establishment of their research 50 years ago at The Barn, now the Rowayton Library on one side and the Community Center on the other.  Speaking to the more than 80 people who showed up to meet these original members of the Rand engineering teams, Erik Rambusch, former president of the Rowayton Historical Society, told how he had discovered there was little or no written history of Rowayton’s association with the creation of the first computer specifically designed for business application.
In the past few years, he has been tracking down original engineers involved in the project and getting their memories incorporated into tangible, readable communicable form. Bill Wenning, who worked on all three computers — the 409, the Univac 60/120 and the 1004 — said there had been, indeed, very few Rand records predating 1955, and that they are trying, through meetings such as these, to get the records straight. “We’re writing history,” he pointed out, “and you are participating in that.” In response to Ted Hubbell’s question about the actual size of the 409, Wenning’s reply brought down the house: “Like a small freight car, actually.” It was, he stated seriously, very large. Its rough dimensions were about 8 feet long, 2 feet thick and 5 1/2 feet tall. It delivered 8,000 watts, which could heat almost this whole facility. Huge copper cables supplied the current. It was a monster but in its time a very successful product. Univac 60/120 was an upgraded version, for customers with slightly different needs than we had forecast at the beginning of development.” Pictures of the original 60/120 will eventually be framed and put in the Rowayton Library.  Asked how the power of today’s laptops compare to what these engineers built 50 years ago, Ron Smith, director System Tools Development of Unisys, referred to the size and limitations of radios in the old days to present-day transistor radios. “Today’s personal computers are about a million times faster and a thousand times cheaper …”
When Bill Wenning pointed out: “The important significance is that computers didn’t exist in those days,” it drew the audience’s supportive and generous applause. “And the stuff that was on the radio was worth listening to!” one audience member added aloud. Asked about clients, Gordon Chamberlain remembered significantly that “The IRS was one of our first — our very first client. We took the 409 computer down to Baltimore in a moving van, down the New Jersey Turnpike that wasn’t officially opened yet. We had a police escort all the way. We had this monster and when we got it there, it wouldn’t fit in the building! They had to take a wall out of the building to get it in …”  One member of the audience asked if any of them in their wildest dreams had envisioned “where you were going and where you would come to since then?”
Jake Randmer responded that when they started using transistors in the 50s, top planners in the industry did not quite anticipate that the miniaturization of the solid state circuitry would go so far. “Now people who do the further planning and prediction are saying that even the present computers are too large, that we’ll really get to almost using single atoms instead of talking about maybe fractions of a millimeter or that just a couple of atoms will do just the storage. So in 50 years of computers, begun and still being discussed in Rowayton, bigger has become smaller and smaller even more so. But it’s history, thanks to men like these, can only grow larger. |