Edmund Berkeley

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Edmund Callis Berkeley (1909–1988) was an American computer scientist who helped start the field. He co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1947 and, in 1949, his book Giant Brains popularized early ideas about computers and how they think.

Berkeley grew up in New England, studied at St. Bernard's School and Phillips Exeter Academy, and earned a BA in Mathematics and Logic from Harvard in 1930. He worked as an actuary at Prudential from 1934 to 1948, with service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was inspired by the Bell Labs calculator his friend George Stibitz showed him in 1939 and by the Harvard Mark I in 1942.

In 1946 he drafted plans for “Sequence Controlled Calculators for the Prudential,” which helped him secure a contract in 1947 with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to build one of the first UNIVAC computers. Giant Brains made him famous by explaining basic computing ideas and surveying the leading machines of the time.

Berkeley also described a device called Simon, considered by some as the first personal computer. Plans for Simon appeared in Radio Electronics in 1950–1951; a working model was built at Columbia University and cost about $600. He created the Geniac and Brainiac toy computers as well.

He founded and edited Computers and Automation, the first computer magazine, sometimes writing under the pen name Neil D. MacDonald.

Berkeley’s postwar work turned toward preventing nuclear war. He believed nuclear proliferation was the greatest threat to humanity. After Prudential dropped a related project and barred anti-nuclear work, he left in 1948 to start his own actuarial and computing consultancy and to pursue peace activism.

After the war, Berkeley remained a lifelong peace activist and joined the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1958, remaining active in the Boston chapter.

In 1963, he helped spark the field of computer art. Computers and Automation published an image by Efraim Arazi that inspired him to start the first computer-art contest that year, which continued annually until 1973. Through these efforts, Edmund Berkeley became a pioneer in both computing and computer art.