Pioneer Of Early Days Of The Arcane Computer And Allied Industries

The Age

Saturday July 12, 2008

John Markoff

Hewitt David Crane

Early Computer Engineer

1927 - 17-6-2008

HEWITT Crane, who was instrumental in the design and construction of the first commercial computer to automate checking accounts, has died of complications from Alzheimer's disease at his home in Portola Valley, California. He was 81.

Crane, an electrical engineer, had a career that traced the arc of the early computing industry, starting in 1949 with a job at IBM's headquarters, where he was involved in the maintenance of the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early IBM computer composed of 13,000 vacuum tubes and 25,000 relays.

In 1952, he went to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he participated in a modification of the von Neumann computer, or JOHNNIAC, named for its inventor, the mathematician John von Neumann. (Crane is pictured, second from right, with von Neumann, right.) Crane's first task in the team was to redesign the input-output system to accommodate more modern IBM punch-card technology.

In 1955, he moved briefly to the David Sarnoff Research Laboratory, where he worked on the design of magnetic-core memories, which were then a promising data-storage technology. Next, his expertise was required to help the Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI International), which was building a machine for the Bank of America to automate its chequeing operations. In the postwar economic boom, the traditional human cheque-processing system was groaning as the bank added 23,000 accounts each month.

After successfully completing the system, ERMA, for electronic recording machine, accounting, Crane became interested in magnetic computing, a promising solid-state electronics technology that would eventually be displaced by the emergence of silicon-based semiconductor microelectronics.

By 1956, however, magnetic-core memories had become popular among computer designers, and Crane pursued the idea of an all-magnetic computer. The technology was later licensed to the Ampex Corporation and used primarily by New York's subway system and in other railway-switching operations.

In the late 1950s, a young computer engineer, Douglas Engelbart, joined Crane's research team, and Crane helped back his ideas in research on augmenting human intelligence. Engelbart went on to invent the computer mouse and some of the other technologies that underlie the modern personal computer and the internet.

Crane went on at SRI to pursue ideas such as eye-tracking and optical character recognition, which led to the spin-off of the Communication Intelligence Corporation in 1981. A research group he ran in the field of voice

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