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.