1919–2001, Computer architect at IBM
Nathaniel Rochester was an American computer scientist and one of the four authors of the 1955 Dartmouth proposal. At IBM he was the chief architect of the IBM 701, IBM's first commercial scientific computer, delivered in 1953, and wrote its first symbolic assembler. He was an attendee of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and the senior IBM figure who secured the company's sponsorship.
Rochester collaborated with John McCarthy and others on early neural-network simulations on IBM 701 and 704 machines and, with Herbert Gelernter, on the Geometry Theorem Prover (1959), one of the earliest AI programs and the first to prove non-trivial geometric theorems. Rochester remained at IBM throughout his career, where he led the team that designed the IBM 7030 Stretch supercomputer in the early 1960s.
Related people: John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, Herbert Gelernter
Works cited in this book:
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (1955) (with John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Claude E. Shannon)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 1: What Is AI?, A Brief History of AI