[COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, RAND CORP, WILLIS WARE ]

WARE, Willis (Author)

'DIGITAL MACHINES IN TOMORROW'S BUSINESS WORLD'  [P-434] (21 September 1953 - Presented before the Purchasing Agents Association of Los Angeles 10 September 1953 )

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'THE DIGITAL COMPUTER - WHERE DOES IT GO FROM HERE ?' [P-608] (5 October 1954 - Presented before the Los Angeles Section of The Institute of Radio Engineers)

On offer are TWO RARE, ORIGINAL OFFPRINTS FROM PRESENTATIONS GIVEN BY COMPUTER SCIENCE ICON & PIONEER, WILLIS WARE ONE OF WHICH HAS HIS RAND CORPORATION BUSINESS CARD ATTACHED.

The two mimeographed papers dated in 1953 and 1954 are 20 and 17 pp respectively. The two papers represent Ware's insight into the earliest development and future of the promise of computer technology just as its capabilities were becoming apparent.

These papers are quite scarce in commerce and are among the earliest copies of an original mimeographed Willis Ware presentation after he was employed by Rand. Original Rand / Ware material is rare, but computer related material by him this early is quite scarce.

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Willis H. Ware (1920 – 2013),  (Ph.D., Princeton University, 1951) was a senior computer scientist emeritus with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. An electrical engineer, he devoted his career to all aspects of computer technology – hardware, software, architectures, software development, networks, federal agency and military applications, management of computer-intensive projects, public policy and legislation. In 1952 he joined Rand to help build the Johnniac computer, a machine weighing 2.5 tons and comprising 5,000 vacuum tubes. That same year, Ware also taught one of the first University computing courses at UCLA. 

He chaired a Department of Defense committee in the late 1960s that created the first definitive discussion of information system security and treated it as both a technical matter and a policy issue. Later, in the early 1970s he chaired the cabinet-level HEW Committee, whose report was the foundation for the United States Federal Privacy Act of 1974.

Ware was an electrical engineer who in the late 1940s helped build a machine that would become a blueprint for computer design in the 20th century, and who later played an important role in defining the importance of personal privacy in the information age.

Mr. Ware’s participation in a classified World War II project to identify friendly aircraft led the mathematician John von Neumann to recruit him to help develop a computer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in 1946.

That machine was not the first digital computer, but it was based on a set of design ideas described by Dr. von Neumann that were broadly influential — first on the design of computers built by scientists around the world, and then on an early IBM computer known as the 701. Many of these concepts are still visible in the structure of modern computers and smartphones.

Mr. Ware, part of a small group of engineers working on that machine, was the first to try to engineer many of the components that would become vital to modern computers. His experience in designing high-speed electronic circuits during the war was essential to his work on the computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, said George Dyson, a historian of the project.

Mr. Ware, who worked at the RAND Corporation for more than 55 years, was one of the first people to gain a prescient view of the effect computers were having on society, in their impact on automation and the threats they posed to privacy.                                                    

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