In The Name Of Architecture

When Caxton Foster of the University of Massachusetts published his book Computer Architecture in 1970, this term was only just being recognized, reluctantly, by the computing community. This despite an influential paper published in 1964 by a group of IBM engineers on the “Architecture of the IBM System/360.” For instance, ACM’s “Curriculum 68” made no mention of the term in its elaborate description of the entire scope of computing as an academic discipline. Rather, in the late 1960s and well into the ’70s terms such as computer organization, computer structures, logical organization, computer systems organization, or, most blandly, computer design were preferred to describe computers in an abstract sort of way, independent of the physical (hardware) details. Thus a widely referenced paper by Michael Flynn of Stanford University, published in 1974, was titled “Trends and Problems in Computer Organization.” And Maurice Wilkes, even in the third edition of his Time-Sharing Computer Systems (1975) declined to use the term computer architecture. Yet, computer architecture as both an abstract way of looking at, understanding, and designing computers, and as a field of computer science emerged in the first years of the ’70s. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) founded a Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) in 1970 to join the ranks of other specialist IEEE TCs. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) followed suit in 1971 by establishing, alongside other special-interest groups, the Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH). And in 1974, the first of what came to be the annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) was held in Gainesville, Florida. By the end of the decade a series of significant textbooks and articles bearing the term computer architecture(s) had appeared. The reason for naming an aspect of the computer its “architecture” and the reason for naming an academic and research discipline “computer architecture” can be traced back to the mid-1940s and the paradigm-shaping unpublished reports by John von Neumann of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and his collaborators, Arthur Burks and Herman Goldstine.