Oldest Computer On Campus (But Not The First)

The first computer on campus was the chemistry department’s 1955 IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine, acquired using specific research grant funds secured by Al Matsen. The 650 was in Welch, the chemistry building, and was the first real computer on campus. It was a very early mass-produced computer, and Matsen and colleagues used it to compute the Quantum Chemistry Integrals and Tables, which provided the computational foundation for molecular orbital calculations across the field. Although the machine was purchased for his own work, Matsen established a precedent of shared usage at the university by allowing faculty members and researchers from other academic disciplines to utilize the computer. In one legendary exchange, the university president complained to Matsen that the "computer center" did not have long enough open hours and help was not always available. Matsen informed the president that UT actually had no official computer center and was merely using his grant-funded machine, but emphasized that the university desperately needed to build a centralized facility.

The oldest computer arrived second, in 1958, when Humble Oil in Houston (now Exxon) donated an IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator to the university. Matsen was a consultant for Exxon Houston and New Jersey for over thirty-five years. In his Reminiscences he relates a story “Amusingly, I had been lecturing at an unnamed university on the unitary group formulation of the many-body theory. I apparently went way over the listeners' heads since the only question I got was, What possible use could you be to Exxon?” The CPC was a landmark gift and a direct result of Matsen’s extensive ties. To bypass bureaucratic paperwork, Matsen, his graduate students, and other faculty physically carried the heavy machine components into Welch and installed it themselves.

Exxon acquired that CPC in 1952, at the same time that Dantzig was implementing Simplex on a CPC at Rand in Santa Monica. The Exxon CPC was used to implement ground-breaking subsurface reservoir simulations and the beginnings of the ADI Alternating Direction Implicit techniques for Finite Difference Methods and Finite Element Methods. This work by Rachford, Peaceman, and Douglas put Exxon, Rice University, and Houston in the lead position for subsurface modeling and computational engineering and science. [1]

The 1952 IBM CPC at Humble / Exxon Production Research in Houston must be the one donated to Al Matsen in 1958 and carried into Welch by his grad students. 

Components of the IBM CPC. The iceboxes each contained sixteen ten-digit numbers in electromechanical counter wheels, like the odometer on a car. One could open the top and actually read out the numbers during debugging.

[1] A Personal Retrospection of Reservoir Simulation, Donald Peaceman

[2] An interesting comparison of ADI with contemporary Soviet methods, including a discussion of the CDC 6600 versus the BESM-6. https://vixra.org/pdf/2601.0025v1.pdf 

[3] The photo at the top of the post shows Henry Rachford using the Humble/Exxon CPC. From 1951 onwards, Rachford, Peaceman, and Jim Douglas, became the founders of reservoir modeling. They very soon became deeply associated with Rice University, a few miles from the Exxon offices, and this was the beginning of a long tradition connecting Exxon, Rice, and UT Austin.

[4] The iceboxes were designed to be fixed-point integer. Rachford and Peaceman rewired the machine for floating-point. Two floating-point operations per card.

Laser Ranging From The Chihuahuan Desert

Laser ranging played a core role in the birth of modern space geodesy, and during the seventies the McDonald Observatory in West Texas established a virtual hegemony over these types of observations, beginning with the transformation of the moon into a high-precision geodetic reference target. In space geodesy, the Earth is understood as a highly dynamic system rather than a rigid sphere. Calculating the highly precise round-trip travel time of a laser pulse to the moon or an artificial satellite requires an extraordinarily accurate mathematical model. To isolate the distance measurement, researchers must account for a vast array of Earth's rotational dynamics, including its overall rotation rate, precession, nutation, and polar motion. With the placement of the first laser retro-reflector arrays on the lunar surface, particularly during the Apollo program, researchers were able to revolutionize lunar distance measurement. The Apollo era retro-reflectors enabled centimeter-level measurements from McDonald, replacing radar uncertainties of 0.7 miles during the sixties, and early laser experiments from 1965 that achieved only 180 meter accuracy.

The moon was a difficult target for laser ranging because of both its distance and the relative speeds involved. The phenomenon of velocity aberration dictated that smaller retro-reflector cubes would provide higher intensity for a single ground-based receiver, so that arrays of smaller cubes were preferable. These physical constraints necessitated a permanent tracking station capable of capturing the few photons available after the enormous losses compared to retro-reflectors on near-Earth satellites. The small signal called for a large telescope, and this was one of the key motivations for NASA to fund construction of the new 107 inch telescope at McDonald in support of the Apollo program. The 107 inch telescope served as the world’s only routine lunar ranging facility for over fifteen years, achieving its first successful returns on August 19, 1969. 

During the seventies, satellite laser ranging at the McDonald Observatory developed in parallel with the lunar laser ranging program. While the 107 inch telescope is most famous for its post-Apollo lunar tracking, its observing time was also shared with artificial-satellite ranging. UT Austin's Center for Space Research utilized the SLR data collected to make pioneering advances in precision orbit determination and geophysical measurement. Key satellite missions and SLR milestones included the GEOS-3 Geodynamics Experimental Ocean Satellite which was used to study precision orbit determination and to develop regional gravity models. With LAGEOS in 1976, a high-density passive reflector in medium Earth orbit, CSR researchers were among the first to demonstrate that SLR could be used to measure tectonic plate motion. SLR tracking of LAGEOS also allowed CSR to provide definitive results for Earth's polar motion, calculate the value of Earth's mass, and make the first measurements of climate-induced time-variable gravity. And with the early Earth-observing satellite SeaSat in 1978, CSR led the precision orbit determination team, using tracking data to support radar altimetry processing for accurate ocean surface topography and gravity measurements. 

As the demand for artificial satellite tracking grew, the engineering and operational footprint at McDonald Observatory expanded. In the late seventies, UT Austin developed and tested the first Transportable Laser Ranging System at the McDonald site, validating coordinate determination algorithms and demonstrating the viability of mobile laser tracking. This effort evolved into the dedicated McDonald Laser Ranging Station, sited near the 107 inch. Furthermore, starting in 1979, various NASA-supplied Earth satellite ranging stations began operating continuously at the observatory.

The connection between the Transit satellite system and McDonald Observatory as a geodetic station was made in the computational modeling at UT’s CSR and ARL. These models combined Transit's radio-frequency Doppler tracking with the optical SLR networks anchored at McDonald Observatory, creating an early end-to-end tie between the celestial frame, terrestrial frame, and the Earth’s position and rotation. In some sense CSR was tying together McDonald and McMurdo via UT's TRANET Station 019. The Transit satellites continuously broadcasted two coherent carrier frequencies at 150 MHz and 400 MHz to allow ground receivers to eliminate first-order ionospheric refraction. The global tracking network supporting these geodetic investigations, TRANET, consisted of stations equipped with ultrastable rubidium or cesium frequency standards. UT Austin served as a vital institutional node linking this Doppler-based satellite network with high-precision laser ranging. ARL developed specialized mathematical packages to compute ionospheric and tropospheric refraction corrections for the TRANET network. To standardize geodetic data archiving and coordinate exchange, ARL developed the FICA Floating Integer Character ASCII format, which served as the standard for geodetic GPS and Transit data before the universal adoption of RINEX.

The direct operational connection between the Transit system and McDonald Observatory was forged through modeling and orbital synthesis at CSR. Precision orbit determination for major oceanographic altimetry missions required integrating data from the 48 station TRANET network with optical tracking data. CSR researchers merged the TRANET Doppler measurements with SLR data collected by McDonald and similar observatories. To resolve scale discrepancies, CSR executed precise coordinate ties between the TRANET receivers and the SLR network. This synthesis successfully tied Doppler-determined geocentric coordinates to the highly accurate SLR reference system, defined by targets such as LAGEOS, reducing radial orbit errors to approximately 20 cm. ARL and CSR also evaluated prototype GPS geodetic receivers by comparing GPS pseudorange and phase observations against legacy Transit integrated Doppler phase accumulations. These field tests demonstrated sub-meter baseline measurements, validating the transition from Transit-based datums to the modern WGS 84 World Geodetic System and the ITRF International Terrestrial Reference Frame, a framework to which McDonald Observatory continuously contributed.

As McDonald developed into a key geodetic reference site across the seventies, the nature of its West Texas geology was crucial. For one thing, it is onboard one of the major cratons that have played major roles across geologic deep time, though near a margin or boundary zone, rather than in an ultra-stable core region. In other words, it is in a fairly stable and ancient continental plate region. Likewise, it's sitting on deeply stable rock, at the opposite end of the spectrum from a site on top of subsurface reservoirs which can expand and contract. The Davis Mountains represent the largest contiguous volcanic remnant of the mid-Tertiary Trans-Pecos Magmatic Province, a massive alkalic volcanic field formed over forty million years of tectonic reorganization. Between 39 and 35 million years ago, a violent series of caldera collapses and explosive eruptions buried the region in vast sheets of ash-flow tuffs and flood rhyolites. The resulting stratigraphic architecture produced a landscape characterized by low-viscosity, high-temperature silicic magmas that cooled into exceptionally dense, structurally rigid igneous rocks. These precise geomechanical properties served as the foundational bedrock for the world-class optical and geodetic instrumentation at the McDonald Observatory.

The volcanic rocks supporting Mount Locke and Mount Fowlkes are highly fractured. Rainwater rapidly seeps deep into these fractures, accumulating as "rock moisture" within the unsaturated zone. During heavy monsoon seasons, the increased water mass within the fractured trachyte and tuff increases the local gravitational pull. This localized subsurface water storage mimics the gravimetric signature of actual tectonic crustal subsidence. The deep infiltration of water into the observatory's bedrock plays a critical role in the broader regional hydrogeology of Far West Texas. The precipitation that falls on the Davis Mountains percolates underground, migrating through highly porous volcanic pathways and underlying Cretaceous limestone layers to recharge artesian desert spring systems, most notably the San Solomon Springs in Balmorhea. While the continuous baseflow of these springs originates distally from the Salt Basin Bolsons to the west, the system is augmented multifold by local stormflow recharge moving through the subsurface from the Davis Mountains. The fractured volcanic layers, particularly the basal conglomerate of the Huelster Formation and associated vesicular lavas, act as rapid transport conduits, though some volcanic layers may also retain water and release it slowly over months, sustaining the springs long after precipitation events.

While the interior of the Davis Mountains is relatively stable, the region is bounded by major active fault zones associated with the Rio Grande Rift and the Texas Lineament, a major crustal boundary separating the stable North American craton from the active Chihuahuan borderlands. The persistent seismic risk of the subsurface was demonstrated by the 1931 Valentine Earthquake, the largest in Texas history, centered just 25 miles west-southwest of the observatory. Although the dense, consolidated volcanic sequences of Mount Locke and Mount Fowlkes act as a rigid, dampening block that mitigates catastrophic ground failure, the continuous, low-frequency seismic stress of the basin-and-range faults must be continuously accounted for in the observatory's geodetic and astronomical measurements. McDonald Observatory’s enduring scientific legacy is inextricably linked to its geology and subsurface environment. In recognition of this intrinsic connection, its mission has evolved to include geological, hydrological, and ecological research across its 650 acres of Chihuahuan Desert terrain. [1]

The telescope site’s geomechanical stability was paramount. High-precision astronomical instrumentation requires structural foundations entirely decoupled from wind shear, thermal expansion, and human-induced vibrations. The Mount Locke Formation, restricted to a 93 meter thick flow of coarse, highly porphyritic metaluminous trachyte, provided an exceptionally dense and unyielding bedrock. By anchoring the 107 inch telescope’s massive 160 ton structure directly into this rigid volcanic substrate, engineers achieved the absolute dimensional stability necessary to isolate the optical path from environmental noise. The rigid bedrock of the Mount Locke Formation provided the exceptional load-bearing strength necessary for the telescope's foundations and allowed for the site’s calibration to the International Terrestrial Reference Frame and the International Celestial Reference Frame with zero margin for error. The seventies data boom allowed for the first empirical measurements of Earth Orientation Parameters and the determination that the North American Plate drifts southwestward across the mantle.

The data boom resulting from the network of lunar reflectors and the unyielding trachyte foundation of Mount Locke allowed McDonald’s LLR measurements to serve as a highly stable anchor for the ITRF, ICRF, and IERS. Through continuous tracking, researchers successfully utilized the LLR data to empirically measure Earth Orientation Parameters, including polar motion, nutation, and variations in the length of day. By definitively linking terrestrial coordinates to the Earth's center of mass, the observatory tracked the continuous drift of the North American Plate across the mantle, validating the mechanics of plate tectonics and cementing the site's legacy in the geosciences. McDonald Observatory and the Center for Space Research were the first laser ranging group to provide operational observations of these Earth Orientation Parameters, notably polar motion and length of day. Through the accumulation of SLR and LLR data, researchers have been able to isolate variations in the Earth's principal figure axis and key geopotential coefficients across timescales ranging from sub-daily to decadal.

Along with SLR, researchers tracked the precise distances between different global ground stations. Over time, these inter-station baseline rates reveal the slow, continuous drift of the Earth's tectonic plates with a precision of better than one centimeter. McDonald Observatory played a critical role in this endeavor and accumulated a continuous legacy of providing reference positions that accurately tracked the motion of the North American Plate from the seventies onwards. These measurements are a cornerstone of the ITRF for tracking the dynamic movement of the Earth's crust.

Understanding continental motion is an absolute prerequisite for accurately measuring global sea levels. CSR led the Precision Orbit Determination efforts for satellites monitoring variations in sea surface height using radar altimeters such as the TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason series missions. These altimeters measured the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface. To determine the actual height of the sea, CSR tracked the satellite's exact altitude and position in space relative to the center of the Earth. This required tracking the satellite from ground stations. Because these ground stations are constantly moving due to tectonic drift, their exact coordinates must be continuously updated using the ITRF. If continental motion were not accounted for, the changing position of the ground stations would introduce significant errors into the satellite's orbit calculations, which would in turn corrupt the sea level measurements. While altimeter missions track the total height and volume of the continental and ocean surfaces, CSR has also led efforts to directly track subsurface and oceanic mass variations.

Observations from McDonald Observatory and the global geodetic network reveal that Earth's rotation is altered by three primary mechanisms: external gravitational torques, internal mass redistribution, and the transfer of angular momentum between the solid Earth and its fluid layers. The gravitational attraction of the Sun and Moon generate oceanic and solid-body tides, and the friction from these tides causes the Earth's rotation rate to slowly decrease. To conserve the total angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, this deceleration forces the Moon to spiral away from the Earth at a rate of approximately 3.8 centimeters per year.

As the Earth displaces its mass, its moment of inertia changes, subsequently altering its spin rate and the position of its poles. Variations in the Earth's length of day on decadal scales are heavily influenced by the internal structure of the planet. Gravitational and hydrodynamic coupling between the fluid outer core, the solid inner core, and the mantle exerts torques at the boundaries of these layers, leading to persistent oscillations in Earth's rotation rate. The precision of LLR is so extraordinary that even biospheric cycles are detectable. As tree sap rises or falls seasonally in the heavily forested Northern Hemisphere, the corresponding change in Earth's moment of inertia minutely alters the planet's rotation rate, a signature captured in the ranging data. A certain young astronomy undergrad was in the audience when Pete Shelus described this research in 1987 during one of Harlan Smith's weekly astronomy seminars. Tying tree sap to continental plates, subsurface reservoirs, satellites, the moon, and the stars was an extremely effective lecture, needless to say.

[1] Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center in Fort Davis.

McMurdo Sound Antarctica And Austin

UT Austin operated the Transit satellite system TRANET Station 019 at McMurdo Sound Antarctica for much of the seventies. This was the critical polar node for the Transit system, the predecessor to modern GPS. Because Transit satellites were in polar orbits, high-latitude tracking data from McMurdo was essential for accurately determining the satellites' inclination, nodal progression, and overall global orbital models. A hallmark of the McMurdo station was that it was staffed and operated by two-person teams consisting of a grad student and an undergrad, usually from electrical engineering. These students lived in extreme cold, maintained complex Doppler receivers, managed HF radio communication links, and ensured continuous data collection. [1] 

Gear inside TRANET Station 019 operated by UT Austin at McMurdo for much of the 1970s.

The Transit system was driven by the US Navy’s need for high-precision navigational updates for its submarine fleet. To ensure the accuracy of inertial guidance systems onboard submarines, the Transit satellite system was deployed, utilizing Doppler frequency measurements to provide all-weather positioning. The first Transit satellite was launched into orbit on 13 April 1960. Among other information, it provided confirmation of the Earth's asymmetrical shape and highlighted the inadequacies of contemporary knowledge of the Earth's gravitational field for the prediction of satellite orbits and other important near-Earth ballistic trajectories. Such prediction was essential for Transit's navigational role, in which receivers would determine their own position by monitoring the Doppler shift from a satellite of known orbit.

Already in May 1961 it was noted that “Meeting the ultimate program goals for Transit thus requires considerable improvement in the present knowledge of these factors (roughly the shape and mass distribution of the earth). This is the primary remaining development challenge of the Transit program.” Navigators have always relied on the stars for the purposes of terrestrial positioning. Artificial satellites revolutionized this paradigm by providing radio signals, available day and night and regardless of weather conditions. However, this shift introduced a significant challenge. Unlike the natural stars, these artificial stars are moving rapidly and are subject to complex orbital perturbations. 

A satellite is essentially a body in free fall influenced by forces such as gravity anomalies, atmospheric drag, and solar radiation pressure. Variations in the Earth’s gravitational field mean that the satellite’s trajectory is a direct reflection of the planet's irregular mass distribution. The concept of using satellites as test particles for probing the Earth’s gravitational field quickly developed and the Center for Space Research at UT Austin was on the frontier of this research. The convergence of astrodynamics and geophysics established a computational grand challenge, where the requirements of gravity modeling and subsurface modeling drove a new scale of computing problems. Through the lens of computational geodesy, the satellite serves as a remote sensor for the Earth's interior, linking orbital mechanics to subsurface exploration and the management of global resources.

Transit system accuracy. UT Austin played important roles in these results. Note that the time span fits exactly with our 1958 to 1982 focus.

[1] Tracking operations at McMurdo (initially designated as Station 019) began on February 5, 1965, within a National Science Foundation building, and were originally managed by New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory (PSL). After PSL withdrew in December 1966 due to administrative issues, the University of Texas at Austin's Applied Research Laboratories (ARL:UT) officially reopened the station on October 10, 1968. ARL:UT maintained continuous management of the site for a quarter-century.

Welch Hall 1958, Benedict Hall 1960

Two threads in the story of early computing at UT Austin are of special interest because of their links with the subsurface and outer space. There’s Exxon Houston’s 1958 donation of an IBM CPC to the chemistry department in Welch Hall, representing the pragmatism of the oil industry and its ties with Al Matsen. And there’s the 1960 purchase of a CDC 1604 for the math department in Benedict Hall on the South Mall, representing the systems thinking of the aerospace industry and its ties with David Young. Both Matsen and Young are variously described as founders and first directors of the UT Computation Center from 1958 up through roughly 1970, and it seems likely that they collaborated in UTCC’s early days and blended together the influences of their respective industries and technical fields. A curious fact is that when the CDC 6600 arrived in its underground home in 1966, it was located roughly midway between Welch Hall to the north and Benedict Hall to the south. The 1966 Computation Center sub-terrace building and million dollar 6600 were a landmark for the end of the early days, symbolizing the onset of computing maturity, and how computers and software had grown larger than particular industries and departments.

One of the interesting aspects of this very early period is the clear differentiation between IBM and CDC hardware. There’s no question that at the time Exxon and the oil industry in Houston were using IBM hardware and that this heavily influenced the chemistry department at UT, which also ended up having two IBM machines. Meanwhile, David Young was associated with TRW Los Angeles, which was a UNIVAC shop. CDC was a spinoff from UNIVAC, and when Young arrived at UT, CDC hardware followed soon after. There was clearly an important contrast between the oil and aerospace industries at work here, and between the nature of IBM and CDC and their customers.

The chemistry department acquired an IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in 1955 using specific research grant funds secured by Al Matsen [1]. The 650 was almost certainly in Welch (always and for all time The Chemistry Building) and the first real computer on campus. Though note that there's evidence of IBM hardware up at DRL/ARL [4]. The 650 was a very early mass-produced computer, and at least somewhat comparable to the LGP-30 of The Story of Mel fame [2]. Matsen and colleagues used the 650 to compute the seminal Quantum Chemistry Integrals and Tables, which provided the computational foundation for molecular orbital calculations across the field. Although the machine was purchased for his own work, Matsen established a precedent of shared usage at the university by allowing faculty members and researchers from other academic disciplines to utilize the computer. In one legendary exchange, the university president complained to Matsen that the "computer center" did not have long enough open hours and help was not always available. Matsen informed the president that UT actually had no official computer center and was merely using his grant-funded machine, but emphasized that the university desperately needed to build a centralized facility.

A second transformative event occurred in 1958 when Humble Oil in Houston (now Exxon) donated an IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator to the university. Matsen was a consultant for Exxon Houston and New Jersey for over thirty-five years. In his Reminiscences he relates a story “Amusingly, I had been lecturing at an unnamed university on the unitary group formulation of the many-body theory. I apparently went way over the listeners' heads since the only question I got was, What possible use could you be to Exxon?” The CPC was a landmark gift and a direct result of Matsen’s extensive ties. To bypass bureaucratic paperwork, Matsen, his graduate students, and other faculty physically carried the heavy machine components into Welch and installed it themselves.

The IBM CPC was not a computer in the modern sense, and in fact was a major step backwards from the IBM 650, but it was useful in the Welch Hall of 1958. The CPC will always be legendary as the machine that George Dantzig implemented the Simplex method on at RAND in 1952. It was a hybrid electro-mechanical system. It consisted of an IBM 402 or 417 Accounting Machine (the printer/controller) connected to an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch (the arithmetic unit) and an electromechanical storage unit. It functioned as a decentralized network of specialized units rather than a unified stored-program architecture and was fundamentally incapable of holding both the data and the instructions required for Simplex. Consequently, the program existed not as a digital state within the machine, but as a physical sequence of punched cards. This required the operator to function as a manual control unit, physically re-entering card decks to execute the iterative loops essential for finding an optimal solution within a linear system. 

IBM CPC Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator 1949 

In 1958 David Young moved to UT from TRW and the Los Angeles aerospace environment. He was tasked with founding the Computation Center and serving as its first director. When Young arrived, the Computation Center was "almost non-existent," consisting of Young, his colleague Robert Gregory, and a secretary sharing a single office next to the IBM 650. Within 18 months, Young leveraged his formidable reputation to secure a $400,000 NSF grant for the CDC 1604, and in 1966, he secured the first $1,000,000 NSF grant towards the purchase of the CDC 6600 supercomputer. Emphasizing that this was a personal triumph for Young rather than a political favor, Gregory stated: "I could not have done this, you could not have done this, but David Young did it." [3]

I joined David at UT six months after he arrived there in Fall 1958. At that time the Computation Center was almost non-existent. They had acquired an IBM 650 and David, I, and a secretary shared a single office next to the computer room. Within 18 months David, on the basis of his reputation alone, got the first $400,000 grant from NSF towards the purchase of a CDC 1604, the first transistorized computer. It beat the IBM 7090 into production by one month. Thus, UT went from nothing to a first class Computation Center in one big jump. Then in 1966, after acquiring a building to house the CDC 1604, and after it became saturated with users, David (again on his reputation alone) got the first $1,000,000 grant from NSF towards the purchase of a CDC 6600. This, again, put UT at the front of the line as far as University Computing Centers go. UT was the first university to have a 6600 and this put them ahead of Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and all the rest.

Benedict Hall, the old home of the math department and probably of the Numerical Computation Center and the CDC 1604 in 1960. Pearce Hall (the old Law building, replaced by GSB around 1975) was to its east, which may help explain why it had a remote job entry point in the early seventies. 

A nice view of Welch for those of us who spent years working in ESB and saw the same daily.

[1] https://utphysicshistory.net/FrederickAMatsen.html 

[2] The Royal McBee Librascope LGP-30 and the IBM 650 represent two contrasting architectural philosophies in early 1950s computing, both leveraging magnetic-drum memory but targeting distinct operational paradigms. The IBM 650 emerged as the world’s first mass-produced mainframe, utilizing a power-intensive architecture of roughly 2,000 vacuum tubes and employing a unique "one-plus-one" addressing scheme to optimize instruction timing on a high-speed drum. In stark contrast, the LGP-30 pioneered the concept of the desk-sized minicomputer by prioritizing hardware minimalism; it utilized only 113 vacuum tubes, required no specialized cooling, and relied on low-cost paper tape input. While the IBM 650 dominated high-throughput corporate and institutional markets through punched-card workflows and faster drum rotation speeds, the LGP-30 democratized decentralized scientific computing by offering an affordable, single-user system that could operate seamlessly within a standard office environment. The IBM 650 was the world's first mass-produced computer and a massive financial success, renting or selling for upwards of $100,000+. The LGP-30 was aimed at a cheaper, scientific market segment, retailing around $40,000.

[3] Robert Todd Gregory, testimonial letter, August 24, 1982, quoted in David R. Kincaid, Legacy of a Giant: The Career of David M. Young (Austin: Archives of American Mathematics, Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin).

[4] After the end of hostilities, the name was changed to Military Physics Research Laboratory and the group moved to the site of the Wartime Magnesium Plant. later to be named the Off-Campus Research Center, a little later the Balcones Research Center (a name suggested by Jim Han. the first Chancellor of UT), and more recently the J. J. Pickle Research Campus. MPRL continued to work with the Texas Tester and exterior ballistics for some years. It was the first group in Austin to use large mainframe IBM computers. ln time, the program decreased in size and in 1964, at their request, they merged with DRL. https://utphysicshistory.net/ARLOriginsMcKinney.html 

Linguistics Research Center, HRC DEC-10, ARPA

The explanation for this post will hopefully become apparent along the way. Winfred Lehmann founded the Linguistics Research Center at UT Austin in 1961 and led the Department of Germanic Studies in Schoch Hall for many years. ARPA's Bob Taylor studied experimental psychology and psychoacoustics at UT until 1959, focusing on the mechanisms of hearing and neural processing. UT was designated as an ARPANET site from 1977 and the ARPANET Directory from 1978 lists the Linguistics Research Center and Computation Center. Taylor moved to Xerox PARC, and the LRC later utilized Xerox PARC laser printer technology to produce complex, multi-character linguistic publications, such as Lehmann's A Gothic Etymological Dictionary, which required rendering over 500 special characters. [1]

Thanks to more fantastic discussion from Clive Dawson, we know a little about the LRC and this is the perfect place to share some of that. For context, Clive and Rich were discussing the lab and offices in the Harry Ransom Center where the KI DEC-10 was located from 1975 to 1982. The LRC clearly had offices adjacent to the DEC-10. Probably the DEC-10 offices were officially Computation Center, but it's even possible that UTCC and LRC were to some extent overlapping and unified? Here's a note from Clive.

Rich, the person you are thinking about across the hall at the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) was Dr. Helen Jo Hewitt, aka “HJ”.  She was a BIG fan of TECO, and was one of my “power” users.  She was one of the early “font hackers”, and I had developed a bunch of TECO macros for her.  She would come across the hall and pose an interesting problem, and a few minutes, or hours, or days(!) later, I would present her with another TECO macro for her growing collection. These tools would enable her, for example, to use a meta-language of her own creation to insert diacritics into a document, and then apply the appropriate macro to convert the meta-language into actual escape-sequence commands for the robotic typewriter to backspace, make micro-adjustments to the carriage, and type the appropriate symbol(s) to produce the desired diacritic at j-u-s-t the right position. Later on, as her daisy-wheel collection of different type-fonts grew, a macro would be used to type a partially-filled page of text, then command the typewriter to roll the page back to the beginning and pause. She could then switch in, say, the Greek daisy-wheel, after which the job would continue with the typewriter skipping directly to each blank spot where a Greek character needed to be typed.

All of this returned because of rereading the excellent ARPANET history [2], especially the section discussing the 1967 meeting where the IMPs were in some sense first thought of [3]. IMPs first became operational in 1969 and arrived at UT in 1977. A fun note from [2], "How could anyone program the TX-2, for instance, to talk to the Sigma-7 at UCLA or the computer at SRI?" This Sigma-7 at UCLA is the machine that Mike Mayfield wrote the first BASIC Trek game on [4].

View of HRC many of us are familiar with, approaching the entrance. 

[1] The university held high-value contracts for computational linguistics and translation directed by Winfred Lehmann, as well as sonar range modeling directed by Chester McKinney. The research was largely funded through traditional military service branches, such as the Air Force, Army, and Navy. The Ann Arbor meeting was uniquely focused on solving the physical and logical challenges of networking computer hardware together.

[2] Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996

[3] UT Austin was not represented at the 1967 ARPA Principal Investigators meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This spring gathering involved thirteen Principal Investigators who held active contracts with ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. The attendees, such as MIT, UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Michigan, were already deeply involved in time-sharing, computer graphics, and networking research.

[4] The SDS Sigma-7, located at UCLA's Boelter Hall, was the first computer node on the ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. On October 29, 1969, student programmer Charley Kline used the Sigma-7 to send the first message to Stanford Research Institute, establishing a crucial, albeit initially buggy, connection. At 10:30 p.m., the first message intended to be "LOGIN" was sent, but the system crashed after "LO", making "LO" the very first message. UCLA served as the Network Measurement Center, with the Sigma-7, under Leonard Kleinrock, analyzing network behavior. This event is recognized as the first footsteps of the internet.

The First Internet Computers In Texas

Thanks to Clive Dawson's excellent discussion, it's now known that the first Internet computers in Texas were on campus at UT Austin from 1977. There was an initial PDP-11, followed soon after by UTEXAS-20 a PDP-10 based DEC-20 and UTEXAS-11 a second PDP-11. And actually of course, what really came first was an ARPANET IMP, the essential portal into the ARPANET. In UT's case, there was an initial IMP located with the first PDP-11, followed soon after by a second IMP in the old Computation Center machine room. Like modern network routers, an IMP's only purpose was to interact with the network. Unlink modern routers, IMPs came in heavy steel cabinets and were centrally managed from the BBN network control center in Boston. While it's true that UT was already at the center of an important regional network [1], the first ARPANET machines on campus were historic [2].

Thanks to the work of Lars Brinkhoff the IMPs have returned to life and it's possible to reconstruct core parts of the original UT Austin environment, in other words, the dawn of the Internet in Texas. The question then becomes, is it also possible to reconstruct the original PDP-11s and DEC-20? There things become complicated. The short answer is that it may be possible for the DEC-20 because it was in some sense a regular, normal ARPANET machine with full support from DEC, in particular the TOPS-20AN operating system and AN20 interface hardware. These were regular commercial products with fairly good records and archival material still available today.

Before diving into the topic of the DEC-20, what about the PDP-11s? The key question seems to be the NCP Network Control Program software. This is essentially software driving the networking hardware connecting a machine to an IMP, and the issue here is that the PDP-11s were running adhoc custom UNIX operating systems (from the University of Illinois?) and it seems very unlikely that the software can be reconstructed now. In a nutshell, the PDP-11s were custom oddities and there's not much hope of restoring them. What's possible is that at some point in the future Lars and others will come up with realistic-enough placeholder software to run on PDP-11s. Old bits, as Lars says, but realistic-enough rather than what it was really like originally.

For UTEXAS-20, there's hope of approaching quite closely to what things were really like originally. A DEC-20 running the special ARPANET ready TOPS-20AN, with the AN20 networking hardware connected to a UT IMP emulator, probably the IMP in the old CC. The first trick will be to reconstruct the TOPS-20AN software, hopefully as an install tape that others can use for their own DEC-20 reconstructions. Then the hardware emulation within Rich Cornwell's PDP-10 code can be tackled. With software and hardware reconstructed for UTEXAS-20, eventually packets could again flow to a UT IMP. Ideally both UTEXAS-20 and the IMP will live side-by-side, each in its own independent Docker Container, easily deployed to the cloud, along with a third Container for the HRC DEC-10 running DECWAR. And the reconstructed 1982 UT environment will live on into an unlimited future.

[1] In 1969 the Southwest Region Educational Computer Network was created around the UTCC infrastructure, particularly the CDC 6600, with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation. By 1972 the network consisted of eleven four-year colleges and universities and three secondary schools across Texas. UTCC staff and the computer science faculty provided the core resources for the network. The establishment of the network was a pioneering step in regional academic collaboration that cemented UT Austin’s status as the regional hub for computing and served as a precursor to modern distributed computing networks and the Internet. Of the fourteen institutions in the network, only UT Austin, Rice and Trinity universities had sizable computing facilities and well-established computing programs on campus. Note that both Austin High and McCallum High were network members.

[2] The first IMP was installed at UT Austin in 1977, with a second arriving within the next few years. By the March 1977 ARPANET map, Texas is clearly visible as a node, and the ARPANET Directory from 1978 lists the University of Texas at Austin (specifically the Linguistics Research Center and Computation Center) as a fully operational host. In the transition to the modern Internet in the eighties, UT Austin was assigned significant network resources. Notably, the Class A network 39.0.0.0 was assigned to the UT Austin BRC (Balcones Research Center) in later IP registries.

DEC's description of the ARPANET ready TOPS-20AN.

ARPANET IMP

ARPANET NCC network control center at BBN in Boston