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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| 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
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