Communications - April 2011

last byte

DOI: 10.1145/1924421.1924447
Q&a
the Chief Computer
Kelly Gotlieb recalls the early days of computer science in Canada.

BoRn In 1921 in Toronto, Calvin “Kelly” Gotlieb is known as the “Father of Computing” in Canada. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Toronto in 1947, Gotlieb co-founded the university’s Computation Center the following year and worked on the first team in Canada to build computers. In 1950, he created the first university course on computer science in Canada and the first graduate course the following year. Currently Professor Emeritus in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Gotlieb is also known for his work on computers and society.

You used to be editor-in-chief of this
magazine.

I was editor-in-chief first of Communications and then, later on, of the Journal. When Alan Perlis started Communications [in 1957], he asked me to be the editor of the business section. Then Perlis was elected president of ACM, and the editorial board asked me if I would be editor-in-chief. I think I was editor-in-chief for two years because the editor-in-chief of the Journal, Franz Alt, retired, and they asked me to switch over.

You’re still involved with the Acm,
most notably as co-chair of the Awards
committee.

I’ve been a continuous member of ACM since 1949. I was also in IFIP [In-ternational Federation for Information Processing] for many years. When IFIP was formed, I went to Paris as the Canadian representative. Isaac Auerbach asked if I would be president, but I didn’t want to be. I’ve always said ad-

Kelly Gotlieb in a conference room at aCm’s headquarters earlier this year.

ministration is an occupation where the urgent preempts the important.

Let’s talk about your career. You com-
pleted your Ph.d. in physics at the uni-
versity of Toronto.

I got my Ph.D. in 1947. My Ph.D. is classified because it was on secret war work. It’s never been declassified, but it’s really not a secret anymore. We put radios in shells.

Soon, though, you became involved
with early efforts in computers.

Yes, they had formed a computing team in the university and there was an IBM installation with punched cards. Eventually, the university set up something called the Computation Center. I

Leah Hoffmann

was too young to be the director, so they gave me the title of chief computer.

chief computer?

They didn’t ask me, they just deposited this title on me.

In the 1950s, the computation center
purchased a computer made by ferran-
ti in England, a copy of the manchester
mark I.

We got the Ferut in 1951. It was the second computer ever sold in the world. UNIVAC was the first.

Ferut was in a room about three times the size of this conference room [which measures 16’ x 16’]. It had about 10,000 vacuum tubes, and three or four would burn out every day. So, the engineers would take over at night and change the burned-out tubes, and we would run it.

The machine was quite unreliable at first. For example, if you multiplied two numbers, you were advised to do it twice, and if you got the same answer, ok. If not, you did it a third time and took the best two out of three to get the product.

I remember all these articles in the paper called it a “giant brain.” Well, it was giant all right, but it was about one-hundredth as powerful as your laptop, maybe one thousandth.

Eventually, we got the Ferut working pretty well. I had a graduate student who was the chess champion of Canada, so I decided we should see if the computer could play chess. But Ferut didn’t have enough storage to play a whole game, so we only played endgames—king and pawn endgames, which are very