What did you do in the war, Daddy? has hitherto been an unproductive question when addressed to Stephen Dunwell, architect of IBM Corp’s Stretch computer, forerunner of System/360, and now, a sprightly 78, running his Data Center Computer Services company in Poughkeepsie, New York, which is co-operating with scientists around the world including members of the former Soviet Academy of Science, to develop a universal computer language that can be used across disparate computer networks: now, under the 50-year rule, his gag has been removed, and it seems that his name belongs up there with Alan Turing and his Enigma bombe machines; Dunwell was a product planner at IBM’s Endicott lab when he was recruited by the Army Signal Corps, predecessor of the National Security Agency to join the US end of the Anglo-American effort to crack German and Japanese codes; his team adapted commercial IBM punch card machines with relay calculators and using data processing techniques, managed to obtain from machines running at 150 cards a minute the equivalent of over 1m comparisons a second; among the gems they gleaned was that in the fag-end of the war in the Pacific, Japanese leaders approached Stalin with a peace plan that would safeguard the emperor and members of the royal family – Stalin said nyet; by 1946, Dunwell’s punch card work went back into the IBM Future Demands Department, and adapted for IBM’s first calculator, the experimental 603.
