Department History

History of Computer Science at BYU

The Computer Science Department at Brigham Young University was formed in May 1969 (BYU Banyan, 1971, 213).

In 1963, Dr. Gary Carlson became head of the Computer Research Center, which was reorganized in 1969 into Computer Services (headed by Dr. Carlson) and the Computer Science Department--for academic training of students leading to degrees in the science--headed by C. Edwin Dean. The first department faculty members, besides Dean and Carlson, were Willard Gardner, Parley Robinson, and Norman Wright. Willard was Associate Director of computer services. Parley Robinson and Norman Wright were programmers in computer services. BYU was one of the very early B.S. programs in computer science in the nation. Almost all of the early university computer science programs, including the University of Utah, began as graduate programs and later, during the 1970s, added a B.S. degree program to their offerings. BYU started out with a B.S. degree program and later added the MS and PhD programs.

https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/BYUPhotos/id/594/

https://www.cpms.byu.edu/project/wwii-vet-one-of-the-first-computer-science-faculty-shares-story/

Dr. Theodore A. (Tad) Norman joined the BYU Computer Science faculty in January of 1970, and Dr. Bill R. Hays came to the CS department in the Fall of 1970. Dr. Hays had a PhD in Computer Science from Northwestern University and had been employed at Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico before coming to BYU. Dr. Norman had a PhD in Computer Science from Washington State and had worked for IBM previous to his graduate work at WSU. From 1971 to 1974 the department added 3 PhDs in Computer Science from the University of Utah, Alan C. Ashton, Duane B. Call, Robert P. Burton, and a CS PhD from Case Western University, Dr. H. Lynn Beus. A department with 6 PhD faculty in Computer Science was very unusual in the 1970s. Most of the early computer science faculty around the country came from physics and mathematics departments to staff newly formed computer science departments. Computer Science departments were sprouting up all around the country during the 1970s.

In 1972, the College of Physical and Engineering Sciences at BYU was split into two colleges, The College of Engineering Sciences and Technology, and The College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. The College of Computer Science was dissolved, and Computer Science joined Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Chemistry, and Geology as a department in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Jae R. Ballif of the Physics Department was appointed Dean of the new college. Late in that same year, the CS department moved into the newly finished Talmage Building which also housed the central campus computer facility.

A little aside about Gordon E. Stokes who joined the Computer Science Faculty in 1973. Stokes came to BYU in 1969 as an assistant dean working with Dean Armin J. Hill in the College of Physical and Engineering Sciences to help solve some administrative problems with the college’s newly acquired military surplus Librascope computers that were being used by the physics and chemistry departments and by the engineering departments. Stokes had a Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Idaho and had spent 8 years at the National Reactor Testing Station in Eastern Idaho. His work as an instrumentation physicist in a nuclear physics research group had him heavily involved with computers, especially small computers, as data acquisition and data analysis systems all during the 1960s. At BYU, Stokes moved from the Dean’s office to a position as an associate director of BYU computer services in 1971 when all computing on campus was put under the direction of the campus computer services organization. Stokes was invited to join the computer science faculty in 1973 because mini-computers were becoming widely available and the CS department needed someone familiar with small computers. Stokes was also active nationally in the primary computing professional society, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and was appointed chair of the national ACM accreditation committee in 1972.

It is impossible to talk about the computer science academic program without also talking about what was happening in the evolution of computing systems and their associated software. In the late 1950s, computer hardware was transitioning from vacuum tubes as the primary logic circuits to transistors which were much faster and more reliable than vacuum tubes. By the early 1960s, computers were in wide use in businesses and universities across the country but by today’s standards they would have been called primitive. The machines had limited magnetic core memory, usually specified in the kilo-words (the byte as part of memory organization had not been designated yet) and external storage was mostly magnetic tape. Assembly languages were the normal programming mode, although COBOL and FORTRAN compilers were available on some machines. Operating systems that took the burden of managing the computer system resources available were unknown. There were two large computer systems developed in the late 1950s and delivered in 1961 to meet the needs of the Livermore Atomic Energy laboratory and the Los Alamos Atomic Energy laboratory. A computer called the LARC was put together by Remington Rand’s Univac division for the Lawrence Livermore group, and a Computer system called STRETCH was built by IBM for the Los Alamos lab. The STRETCH is significant in this history because BYU would acquire a surplus STRETCH machine (by then called the IBM 7030) in 1972. There were only 7 IBM 7030s built, and BYU acquired two of the surplus machines to make up one working computer. The IBM 7030 featured a look-ahead memory that decoded several instructions ahead of the instructions being executed and an interleaved memory. The machine was so complex (for that time period) that it was difficult to build a software system that could take advantage of all of its hardware features although a rudimentary multi-programming system was developed for the machine. If you looked across the concurrent existing computer offerings, you would find that each computer product line had their own unique control program, or operating system, as they were later called. An IBM 7030 sold for around $3,000,000 dollars in 1961.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch

In 1964, IBM introduced the IBM 360 product line that featured an operating system that ran on several different sized computers in the IBM 360 line, an assembly language that was common over several different sized computers in the product line, and a memory organization that was built around a character sized unit (an 8 bit byte) that could be strung together to form machines of different word lengths (8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit, and 32 bit). This product line revolutionized business computing by making available machines from inexpensive (relatively) to very expensive that could execute the same compiled code through the whole product line. You could upgrade your computer and not have to rewrite all of your application programs. This approach to computing along with the development of a computer organization by Control Data Corporation (the CDC 6600) that utilized peripheral processors (small computers) to control and exercise and connect to memory all devices externally operating with the computer really served to establish the whole area of computer organization, computer architecture, operating systems, and compiler systems in the curriculum of computer science programs. In 1968, the ACM curriculum committee chaired by William Atchison of the University of Maryland produced a model computer science program in a report titled Curriculum ’68. The report included topic areas and course titles for the infant academic computer science programs across the country and textbooks began to be written to support the recommended courses in Curriculum ’68.

The University of Utah was active in the developing field of computer science from a very early time. Dr. David C. Evans came to the University of Utah in 1965 from the University of California at Berkeley. Evans did a lot of early work on software for timesharing and interactive computer graphics. Evans was dedicated to developing computer systems for inter-active personal problem-solving. When he came to the University of Utah, he brought and shared his passion for graphics and for systems that catered to the individual with his graduate students there. The years from 1967 to 1975 under Dr. Evans' leadership were extraordinary years for computer graphics at the University of Utah. The U of U dominated national university-level graphics developments during those years. The University of Utah was also active in the national efforts to build a network to share scarce high performance computing facilities across the country and in 1968 the U of U joined with UCLA, the Stanford research Institute, and The University of California Santa Barbara to become the first 4 nodes on the ARPANET which later developed into today’s Internet. It was from this dynamic, creative environment that the BYU CS department was able to acquire three outstanding faculty members.

With a highly qualified and highly motivated faculty, guidelines from the ACM Curriculum ’68 report, and a multitude of students flowing into the CS program, BYU developed an academically demanding and professionally stimulating computer science curriculum. When the department was formed the view of academic access to the computer was centered around students coming to the central computer and submitting their homework assignments to be run in a batch environment on the large computer. In 1968 BYU was running an IBM 360-65 computer with 382 K Bytes of memory. Cards were punched to contain the programs that students wrote, they were turned in at a centrally located “window”, and students retrieved their executed code reports the next day. The Talmage building at BYU was built to support this type of activity. The Computer Science Department and the campus central computer facility were located in the same building to make the computer more accessible to the students. In the early 1970s the computing scene began to change. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had developed the 12 bit word, 4 K word memory Programmed Data Processors (PDP) PDP-5 and PDP-8 that sold for under $20,000 in the late 1960s. In 1970 DEC introduced the PDP-11, a 16 bit word machine with a vastly improved machine architecture that sold for about the same price. Universities could afford individual machines in their computing laboratories and students were no longer dependent upon the central computer. BYU’s first computer science department mini-computer laboratories were made up of DEC PDP-8’s and machines from a spinoff group from DEC called Data General. The Data General lab ran the DG NOVA which was a 16 bit word machine that by 1972 could be acquired for under $10,000. We also had a couple of DEC PDP-11s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11

The BYU CS Department worked for several years during the mid and late 1970s to populate their laboratories with mini-computers and to develop laboratory practices to keep the machines running. The DEC PDP-8’s were used primarily for the computer organization course, so our students began their computer education using the DEC PDP 8 assembly language with its 12 bit word limitations. It was a good language to begin learning about computers because the language was simple and the student had to program in everything including indirect jumps between 256 word pages in the memory. The early input medium for student programs was punched paper tape that gradually changed to punched mylar tape by the mid 1970’s. The CS department laboratory computers did have magnetic disk storage for the operating system and key software packages such as compilers. Student programs were stored on the magnetic disk after being read into the system and many professors kept their class grades on the disks of the laboratory machines. One thing that we could count on was a disk head crash near to or during the last week of the semester. That always caused a few anxious hours for faculty and students as faculty tried to recover lost data hoping that no deep grooves had been cut into the disk by the bouncing head.

In the meantime, progress continued to be made in hardware and software developments. In 1971, an operating system called UNIX was developed by two programmers at the Bell Systems Laboratories. It was put together on a DEC PDP-11. By 1975 UNIX was running on several models of minicomputers from different manufacturers, and Bell Labs decided to make UNIX available to universities for $750 for a site license. Bell Labs also let universities have the source code for the UNIX operating system. UNIX soon became the operating system taught in almost all Computer Science programs across the country. New systems were added to the ARPANET and BYU was able to become a node on the University of Utah Arpanet site. A super computer called the ILLIAC IV had been developed at the University of Illinois. Burroughs contracted to put together an ILLIAC IV computer that was made available on the ARPANET at the government-sponsored Ames Laboratory site in California.

At Bell Labs an engineer, Dr. Evan L. Ivie, was working on software systems during the development of the UNIX operating system and the development of the C programming language. Dr. Ivie had put together a system called “the programmer’s workbench” that enabled programs to be written on a UNIX system computer and then export the generated code to other computers of a different type than the computer it was developed on. It rapidly became a significant tool for software developers. Dr. Ivie had become one of the world’s experts in using the UNIX operating system while working on this project. In 1992-93 he was a Fulbright Lecturer at Kiev Polytechnic Institute in the Ukraine. In 1997 he created the Pioneer Ancestral Past system for the Church and the Utah Sesquicentennial. In 2000-01 he was the Europe area welfare agent for the Europe Central area supervising humanitarian aid to some forty countries. From 2002 to 2006 he was the director of the BYU--Nauvoo Program. In 2007 he founded GeneSys, a non-profit family history foundation. https://rsc-legacy.byu.edu/authors/ivie-evan-l

At Ames Laboratory a lead engineer on the ILLIAC IV installation, Dr. Robert Linebarger, was heavily involved in making that machine available as an ARPANET resource. Dr. Linebarger was a nationally-recognized leader in networking. In the 1978-1979 time frame, Dr. Evan Ivie and Dr. Robert Linebarger joined the BYU Computer Science Department Faculty.

The BYU CS department had a Master’s degree (MS) in Computer Science approved in 1974 and two of the early graduates from the Master’s program were Dan Olsen and Scott Woodfield. Dan went on for a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and Scott went to Purdue for his PhD. The enrollment in the Computer Science program was growing rapidly. I estimate that the CS department had 1,200 majors in 1982. The Master’s degree program also grew to 40 or more students very quickly. Dr. Aurel Cornell, a European computer scientist from Romania, joined the faculty in 1980. Dr. David W. Embley, a faculty member from the University of Nebraska, joined us in 1982. Dr. Larry E. Christensen with an EdD in instructional design came to the CS faculty in 1983 to help us with some computer-based instruction projects. Gordon Stokes acquired a Doctorate degree, an EdD from BYU in instruction and curriculum design in 1981. We were able to recruit Dr. Dan Olsen and Dr. Scott Woodfield from the Arizona State CS faculty and they joined us in 1985.

As an early adopter of the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, BYU developed a curriculum that far surpassed national and international standards. By integrating the newly published ACM Curriculum ’68 guidelines and leveraging a robust faculty of PhD specialists, the department established a program with a uniquely rigorous computer science focus. BS degree graduates from the BYU program during the 70s had taken courses that were not covered until the master’s degree coursework in most universities across the country. When the ACM curriculum committee began work in 1975 on what would become Curriculum ’78, Stokes, a member of the committee, introduced BYU’s curriculum into the meetings and it was used as a model for a lot of what could be taught at the undergraduate level in computer science. Many of the course syllabi from the BYU curriculum became the basis for syllabi in the Curriculum ’78 report. When the curriculum ’78 report was published BYU’s program looked very good when compared to many other undergraduate programs in the country. Drs Hayes, Norman, Ashton, Burton, Call, and Beus did an excellent job of putting together a comprehensive and relevant curriculum. The computer languages used in the introductory computer science courses at BYU in the 1970s were FORTRAN and COBOL. In the early 80s the department switched to structured programming approach in the introductory courses, using the PASCAL programming language.

In the late 1970s, Tad Norman was appointed department chair. Then, in the early 1980s, Bill Hays became department chair. In 1987, Dr. Tony R. Martinez, a UCLA PhD graduate, and Dr. William E. Barrett, with a PhD in Medical Informatics from the U of U, joined the CS faculty, In about that same time frame, the BYU CS department was granted permission to offer a PhD in Computer Science and the BYU undergraduate BS program was granted national accreditation by the Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSAB), a new organization in its second year of operation. CSAB was founded by ACM and the IEEE Computer Society in 1986. Dr. Dennis Ng, a PHD from Kansas State came to the faculty in 1991 followed in 1992 by Parris Egbert, a PhD graduate of the University of Illinois CS program, and Kelley Flanagan, a PhD Electrical Engineer from the BYU engineering program. The first PhD from the BYU CS program was granted to J. J. Ekstrom in 1992. Dr. Phillip Windley, from the University of Idaho, and Dr. Thomas Sederburg, from the BYU College of Engineering, Dr. Mark Clement, PhD from Oregon State, and Dr. Bryan Morse, PhD from North Carolina, came to the CS Faculty in the mid 1990s. Dr. Quin Snell, a PhD graduate from Iowa State, joined the faculty in 1997. Dan Olsen and William Barrett were the department chairs during the 1990s.

Dan Olsen, Bill Hays’ longtime friend and associate, said, “He had the vision that the department could be an excellent researching department. Before Bill, basically all faculty did was teach classes; nobody ever published a paper. When he was chair, he said, ‘This is going to change; we’re going to be a real department.’” Under his leadership, new faculty members with special emphasis in research were hired, and the west wing of the Talmage building, which now houses the Computer Science Department, was completed. As computer science’s popularity increased, Bill worked tirelessly to strengthen faculty, and was successful in getting the PhD program approved.