Julian Bigelow (1913–2003) was a pioneering American computer engineer.
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Bigelow was born in 1913 and obtained a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering and mathematics. During World War II, he assisted Norbert Wiener's research on automated fire control for anti-aircraft guns. Bigelow coauthored (with Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth) one of the founding papers on cybernetics and modern teleology, titled "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology." This paper mulled over the way mechanical, biological, and electronic systems could communicate and interact. This paper instigated the formation of the Teleological Society and later the Macy conferences. Bigelow was an active member of both organizations.
When John von Neumann sought to build one of the very first digital computers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he hired Bigelow in 1946 as his "engineer," on Wiener's recommendation. Dyson (1997) argues that the computer Bigelow built following von Neumann's design, called the IAS machine, and not the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania or the Colossus computer designed as part of the code-cracking project at Bletchley Park in England, was the first true stored-program computer. Because von Neumann did not patent the IAS and wrote about it freely, 15 clones of the IAS were soon built. Nearly all general-purpose computers subsequently built are recognizable as influenced by the IAS machine's design.
Bigelow died on February 21, 2003 in Princeton, New Jersey.[1]