America's First Computer Science Undergraduate Degree (1966) — Melbourne, Florida

By Florida Tech's own account, yes. In a 2021 Secret History article for Florida Tech News, historian Gordon Patterson writes that in September 1966, one month after Brevard Engineering College officially changed its name to Florida Institute of Technology, the Melbourne college launched the nation's first undergraduate computer science program. The degree grew out of a small school that had opened in 1958 to teach engineers working at Cape Canaveral, and its first computer courses were taught in Melbourne by men borrowed from RCA and Radiation Inc.

The claim carries a caveat that Patterson spells out himself. Edward Robin, the IBM engineer who designed the major, described it in correspondence as the first computer science major. Jerome P. Keuper, the founder, later described the Melbourne program as one of the first. Patterson's footnote concludes that it is probably safest to say the major was one of the earliest and one of the best. What the record does fix is the sequence: a December 1965 announcement from Brevard Engineering College, a curriculum built by IBM staff from the Cape, and classes that began in Melbourne in September 1966.

It started with a course on paper. According to Patterson, the Melbourne Daily Times reported on Jan. 5, 1959 that Brevard Engineering College instructor David C. Howard, a design engineer at Radiation Inc., would teach a graduate course on the logical design of digital computers beginning in February. The college had no machine of its own, so the first computing class in Melbourne was taught without one.

Seven months later, in August 1959, Keuper and co-founder Howard Dibble arranged with the Royal-McBee Corporation to lease a Librascope General Purpose computer, the LGP-30. Patterson describes a $60,000-plus desk-sized machine with 113 tubes and a 4,096-word drum memory, one of the earliest off-the-shelf computers. William McKune, who had taught computing at Georgia Tech before joining RCA at the Cape, organized the Melbourne students' first hands-on sessions.

The students were mostly working adults. Hundreds of missilemen from Cape Canaveral signed up in the summer of 1959, and Dibble told the Eau Gallie Kiwanis Club that he anticipated 500 to 600 students in the college's new home, the old First Methodist Church off Strawbridge Avenue in Downtown Melbourne. Florida Tech's About page calls the early school a night school for the early missilemen of the U.S. space program. RCA and Radiation Inc. supplied most of the faculty, and the pace of work at the Missile Test Project meant instructors often could not keep teaching.

In April 1961 Keuper named Marybelle Modell director of the Brevard Engineering College computer center, the first full-time post devoted to the LGP-30. Patterson traces her path: a mathematics student identified in 1944 as one of 918 mathematically advanced women, she joined the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes, an engineering training program the National Air and Space Museum profiles, and finished a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas. She then worked for Grumman, for Sperry on the SPEEDAC computer, as one of NACA's East Computers at Langley, and for RCA alongside Keuper before he recruited her to Melbourne.

Modell ran the Melbourne center as both a teaching lab and a small business, selling machine time to industry clients whose fees helped a college on a shoestring budget. When an Orlando Sentinel letter writer complained in 1961 that East Central Florida lacked an engineering school, she answered in print on Oct. 30, 1961 that the Brevard Engineering school in Melbourne offered one of the few computing centers in that part of the state. In 1962 she left to open Modell Computing Service on Strawbridge Avenue; the firm did not prosper, and in 1963 she moved to Ohio.

The driving figure was Edward Robin, a young IBM engineer from Huntsville who had come to the Cape as IBM's launch site programming manager. IBM's involvement with the Melbourne college began in 1965, when the company sponsored an Introduction to Computer Science course taught by Robin's IBM colleague James Merkel. In December 1965 Brevard Engineering College announced plans to offer the first undergraduate degree program in computer science in the U.S., and by the end of February 1966 Robin had persuaded three IBM colleagues to join the faculty team.

The national context explains the timing. Patterson notes that Purdue University had begun the first American graduate degree in computer science three years earlier, and Purdue dates its Department of Computer Sciences, the first in the United States, to October 1962. Robin told IBM News that the Melbourne program would integrate a cross-section of disciplines and prepare graduates as system engineers, programmers and logic designers.

The major arrived with a broader overhaul. The Secret History of Launching Florida Tech records that in 1966 Florida's Secretary of State approved the college's request to change its name to Florida Institute of Technology. Keuper had also recruited physicist John Miller, who left an endowed chair at Clemson University and became the architect of the college's academic programs, backing Robin's undergraduate effort while building a doctoral program in electrical engineering.

Demand outran the old LGP-30 quickly. In January 1967 Keuper announced a new Florida Tech computer center built around an IBM 1130 leased with Robin's help, calling it the only computing service available in that part of Florida. By May 1967 the Melbourne campus listed 14 computer science courses, and the machine was so busy that eight of them met on Saturdays. About 800 students began classes at Florida Tech in September 1967.

Robin accepted an IBM promotion that took him away from Melbourne in September 1967 and left a collection of computer science books to the college library. David Clutterham, who had led the regional chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, stepped in as part-time head and a year later became chair of a new Department of Mathematical Sciences that merged the computer science and mathematics faculties; he held that post until 1989. Florida Tech records cited by Patterson show the first bachelor's degrees in computer science were awarded in 1969.

The program still runs on the same Melbourne campus. Patterson counted 243 computer science majors among about 3,500 full-time undergraduates in 2021, 32 of them women. Florida Tech's Facts and Figures page describes a university founded in 1958 as Brevard Engineering College by Keuper, a physicist who worked at Cape Canaveral, and now set on 130 subtropical acres about 2 miles from downtown Melbourne.