Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016. William Aspray
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up from $9 million in 1958. While the percentage of OSIS funds going to research projects was approximately 5.5% in 1958, eventually 50% of OSIS funding was spent on disciplinary information research centers.
In 1969, OSIS was moved organizationally from reporting directly to the NSF Director to reporting to the Assistant Director for National and International Programs, where OSIS staff were less able to make a case for funding directly to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). With declining interest in supporting OSIS within its new directorate, science information activities declined as its appropriations waned. OSIS also had to assume responsibility for the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (COSATI), which was transferred from the President’s Office of Science and Technology. This greatly increased the burden on OSIS staff33 and its resources. These changes also resulted in a termination of operating grants for information services and unrestricted grants to university research centers for information science by 1972.34 OMB further reduced the OSIS appropriations to $5 million in 1974 and asked NSF to phase out support to the university-centered information systems programs at Pittsburgh and Ohio State and to the New England Board of Higher Education science information network. These and similar organizations at the University of Georgia, UCLA, and Lehigh University continued at their own expense.35
During the period from 1971 to 1973, OSIS also experienced a rapid change in staffing.36 Adkinson retired and moved to the American Geographical Society in 1971. Melvin Day, who replaced him as head of OSIS, left NSF in 1973 to accept a position as Director of the National Library of Medicine. Lee C. Burchinal was named as Day’s replacement.37 NSF meanwhile established priorities among the five OSIS programs: Research Support, National Information, User Support, Economics of Information, and Foreign Science (with the major emphasis remaining on the Research Support program).38
NSF undertook a major reorganization in 1975, creating four new directorates: Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences; Astronomical, Earth, and Ocean Sciences; Biological and Social Sciences; and Scientific, Technological, and International Affairs, which joined Science Education, Research Applications, and Administration.39 OSIS was renamed the Division of Science Information (DSI) in 197640 within the reorganized Directorate for Scientific, Technological, and International Affairs. At this time, the Office of Computing Activities, which briefly had joined OSIS in the Directorate for National and International programs, became the Division of Computer Research (DCR) in Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences.
DSI became the Division of Information Science and Technology (DIST) in 1978 and responsibility for supporting the dissemination of scientific information was distributed among the research divisions within NSF, making it appear that NSF was shifting away from efforts to support the users of scientific information and would concentrate instead on funding the development of new information science technology and its applications.41 Altman and Brown42 called the 1978 reorganization “a major cleavage between past and future,” noting a shift from focus on publication, distribution, and dissemination of documents, and improving access to and indexing of documents, to a prioritization of “information science research.”
Following the creation of DIST, former DSI head, Lee Burchinal, transferred to another NSF office and Harvey Averich served as acting head of DIST with a staff of 12 and a budget of approximately $4.5 million. Program directors Edward Weiss, Harold Bamford, and Richard Lee all moved from DSI to DIST.43 Altman and Brown noted that the DIST managers “shied away from defining ‘information,’ and consequently its science” largely because the term meant “different things in different disciplines.”
Howard Resnikoff, a mathematician who had been brought in as the founding DIST director in 1980, noted that the new program in information science “incorporates certain research responsibilities of previous Foundation programs which were primarily concerned with science information dissemination [but the] focus of effort [is] so different, that prior award and funding patterns are not comparable. . . . ”44 Resnikoff attempted in his few years (1979–1981) at NSF to create a significant role for DIST, assembling a distinguished advisory group that included Gordon Bell, Seymour Cray, Ed David, John Gibbons, Ralph Gomory, George Heilmeier, Donald Knuth, and Joshua Lederberg. His goals were for DIST to support research on the structure of information, infometrics, behavioral aspects of information transfer, measures of fundamental quantities, and standards for assessing the predictions of theory and comparing the results of experiments. Resnikoff left NSF in 1981 to join Harvard University and later co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation. He also founded FutureWave, an intellectual property company.
Resnikoff left DIST when it moved to the Directorate for Biological, Behavioral, and Social Sciences (BBS). Edward Weiss became acting division director of DIST and its three programs: Information Science, Information Technology, and Information Impact. Information Science was concerned with the properties of information and the dynamics of information transfer, including biological and human information processes. Information Technology dealt with improving theory underlying the design of systems and problems with user-system interaction emphasizing human factors. Information Impact was interested in the economic and social consequences of information and information technologies.45 Weiss argued that BBS as a research directorate was likely to provide a more favorable climate for the division.46
Following the creation of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate in 1986, Harold Bamford and Charles Brownstein discussed the emergence of information science research as a more fundamental question being revealed by the unfolding structure of knowledge. They argued that the “evolution of units supporting information science research”47 in CISE was a “recognition of the unity and coherence of the intellectual streams, which converge in computer and information science and engineering and in the great importance which [NSF] attaches to the confluence.”48 Several unmet needs focused NSF’s attention as CISE evolved.
1.2Filling the Demand for Computing Infrastructure
In the years following the Second World War, a commercial computer industry came into being, including leading efforts at IBM and Remington (later Sperry) Rand and other companies such as Bendix, Burroughs, General Electric, Honeywell, Raytheon, and RCA. Federally funded projects constituted roughly three-quarters of the total computing infrastructure. Government facilities, government-funded research centers, and private federal contractors were typically pushing the technical cutting edge.49
During these years, computing research was supported primarily by mission agencies of the federal government, especially defense and energy agencies (initially the Atomic Energy Commission), and later NASA. The Foundation was beginning, however, to recognize that the computer was an important tool for scientific research. The 1955 Annual Report noted that:
. . . a revolution