Timeline

Pre-1965: Mathematics Professor George Forsythe, Provost Fred Terman, and Associate Provost Albert Bowker conceived of a scientific “escalation” of computing at Stanford from the Computer Center function to an academic teaching and research function. George, together with mathematics professor Jack Herriot (deceased 2003), founded the Division of Computer Science within the Mathematics Department in 1961. George also served as Director of the Computer Center. According to an article in CACM by Donald Knuth, “[by 1964, George’s] Division of Computer Science contained two faculty members besides himself (John Herriot and John McCarthy), plus two young ‘visiting assistant professors’ for whom regular appointments were being arranged (Gene Golub - deceased 2008 - and Niklaus Wirth), and an instructor (Harold Van Zoeren).

1965: The Department of Computer Science is created in January within the School of Humanities and Sciences with George Forsythe as chair. (All of the computer science people in Mathematics move to the new department.) Department offices and facilities are located in Polya and Pine Halls in the Jordan Quad. The department is authorized to grant PhD and MS degrees. Edward Feigenbaum (now emeritus) joins the department in January and later that year takes over as Director of the Computer Center from Forsythe. The DENDRAL project for computing molecular structure from mass-spectrogram data is begun by Ed Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg (Professor of Genetics). Bruce Buchanan (Research Associate) joins the project in 1966.

1966: Gio Wiederhold joins the department as Lecturer and participates in the development of ACME, a real-time data-acquisition and processing system for medicine. John McCarthy and Les Earnest form the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in a partially constructed, abandoned building (off Arastradero Road, near Felt Lake) obtained from G. T. E. SAIL’s first computer, a DEC PDP-6, is installed in June. [For more about the history of SAIL, including the development of a pre-cursor to “windows” and the early installation of terminals in everyone’s offices, see the document “SAIL Away” by Les Earnest. Les Earnest and John McCarthy initiate the development of a robot vehicle using the Stanford Cart, which PhD student Rodney Schmidt managed to make do simple visual navigation by 1971.

1967: The Dendral Program is demonstrated. Forsythe proposes that the department hire Donald Knuth. Knuth suggests that it also hire Robert Floyd. Edward McCluskey (EE/CSL, now emeritus), and Joyce Friedman (1967-1970) join the faculty. Chowning develops his ideas on computer synthesis of music at SAIL, leading to a patented synthesizer that was licensed to Yamaha. PhD student Bill Wichman (with the assistance of research programmers Karl Pingle and Jeff Singer at SAIL) succeeds in visually recognizing colored blocks on a table top and operating a mechanical arm to pick them up and stack them.