Hurd was born April 5, 1911, in
Estherville, Iowa. He received his
B.A. in
mathematics from
Drake University in 1932, his
M.S. in mathematics from
Iowa State College in 1934, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the
University of Illinois in 1936. Waldemar Joseph Trjitzinsky was his advisor, and dissertation was
Asymptotic theory of linear differential equations singular in the variable of differentiation and in a parameter. He did post-doctorate work at
Columbia University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was assistant professor at
Michigan State University from 1936 to 1942. During
World War II Hurd taught at the
US Coast Guard Academy with the rank of
Lieutenant Commander, and co-authored the textbook for teaching Mathematics to mariners. From 1945 to 1947 he was dean of
Allegheny College. In 1947 he moved to
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he worked for
Union Carbide as mathematician at the
United States Atomic Energy Commission facility
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He taught and later served as a technical research head under
Alston Scott Householder. At Oak Ridge he supervised the installation of an
IBM 602 calculating
punched card machine to automate the tracking of material in the facility, and saw the potential for automating the massive amounts of computation needed for
nuclear Physics research. In February 1948 he was invited to the dedication of the
IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), a custom-built machine in
New York City. He asked if the SSEC could be used for calculations being done at Oak Ridge for the
NEPA project to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor, but the demands for the SSEC produced a backlog. In the meanwhile, he requested that the first
IBM 604 calculating card punch be delivered to Oak Ridge. It was, but the calculations remained slow with the limited electronics in the 604.
IBM From 1949 to 1962, he worked at
IBM, where he founded the Applied Science Department and pushed reluctant management into the world of computing. At the time, IBM calculators were programmed by plugging and unplugging wires manually into large panels. The concept of storing the program as well as data in computer memory was generally called the
Von Neumann architecture (although others developed the concept about the same time). IBM had built the experimental stored-program SSEC, but company president
Thomas J. Watson favored basing commercial products on punched card technology with manual programming. Hurd hired a team who would be the first professional
computer software writers, such as
John Backus and
Fred Brooks. The first step was to offer a calculator that could be programmed on punch cards in addition to a manual plugboard. This was the
Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator, announced in May 1949. It was essentially a commercialized version of experiments done by
Wallace John Eckert and customers at
Northrop Corporation, but became a very popular product, shipping several thousand units in various models. Based on this demand, Hurd advised new company president
Tom Watson, Jr. to build the first IBM commercial stored program computer, first called the Defense Calculator. It was marketed as the
IBM 701 in 1952. There were 18 model 701 machines built (in addition to the Engineering development machine). In 1953 Hurd convinced IBM management to develop what became the
IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine. Although the
UNIVAC I (and
Ferranti Mark 1 in England) had been introduced earlier than any IBM computer, its high price (while IBM offered monthly leases) limited sales. The lower expense of the 650 meant it could be purchased in much larger quantities. Almost 2000 were produced between 1953 and 1962, to commercial customers as well as academics. On January 19, 1955, Hurd became director of the IBM Electronic Data Processing Machines Division when
T. Vincent Learson was promoted to Vice President of Sales. In 1955, Hurd made a proposal to
Edward Teller for a computer to be used at the
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. This would evolve into the
IBM "Stretch" project. The ambitious promises made for the performance of the machine were not met when it was finally delivered in 1961 as the model 7030, although techniques developed and lessons learned in its design were used on other IBM products.
California After 1962, he served as chairman of the
Computer Usage Company, the first independent computer software company, and president from 1970 through 1974. He then consulted for various firms in
Silicon Valley, and served as an expert witness in the IBM
antitrust cases. From 1978 to 1986, Hurd served as chairman for Picodyne Corporation, which he co-founded with
H. Dean Brown. Hurd was a founder of Quintus Computer Systems in 1983 with William Kornfeld, Lawrence Byrd, Fernando Pereira and
David H. D. Warren to commercialize a
Prolog compiler. Hurd was president and chairman until Quintus was sold to
Intergraph Corporation in October 1989. In 1967.
Drake University awarded Hurd an honorary
LLD degree. In 1986 he received the
IEEE Computer Pioneer award by the
IEEE Computer Society for his contributions to early computing. In his later life he lived in
Portola Valley, California, became an avid gardener and studied native California plants. A variety of
Arctostaphylos manzanita is named Dr. Hurd for him. He died there May 22, 1996. He endowed scholarships in Mathematics and Computer Science at
Stanford University. == Publications ==