In the first half of the 20th century, a steady stream of technical innovation transformed people's lives -- the automobile, the airplane, farm machinery, the washing machine. Drudgery and limitations were fast giving way to freedom and possibilities. In many ways, new technologies were no longer a surprise. Then came a new machine - the computer - which astonished the world and promised to remove other forms of drudgery from life, such as tedious calculations or assembly line tasks. The computer would soon evolve from an elaborate calculator to a complex system of enormous capability. The computer's impact would prove to be immense, a fact recognized by the magazine Time in 1982, when it dubbed the computer "Man of the Year." Before the century was over, the computer had become an integral part of every major industry, and had begun to open new worlds through the Internet.
The history of the computer has been one of dazzling feats. Early groundwork included Blaise Pascal's adding machines (1600s); Marie Jacquard's weaving looms (1801); Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (1840s); and Herman Hollerith's punch-card program (1880s). In 1943, the British logic calculator, Colossus, cracked complex Nazi codes in hours, and turned the tide in favor of the Allies. In 1946, America's ENIAC performed 5000 additions and subtractions per second. In the 1980s supercomputers performed 10 trillion calculations per second - what would take 10 million years on a handheld calculator.
Among the more dazzling feats were those that enabled these machines to store information and read programs. The first hurdle in this transformation was accepting the concept of a universal machine, as outlined in a 1945 paper by Alan Turing. He laid out the principles for a machine that could store programs as well as data, and quickly switch to perform tasks as diverse as arithmetic, data processing, and chess playing. Independently, building on the work of ENIAC engineers John Eckert and John Mauchly, John von Neumann's EDVAC report came to the same conclusion.
The idea of one machine that could be applied to many tasks was foreign to the scientific world of 1945. Even in 1956, Howard Aiken of Harvard University wrote "If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered." Indeed, this "coincidence" came to pass, and it has been amazing.
The earliest digital machines, beginning with ENIAC and continuing into the late 1950s, were based on vacuum tubes. They were unreliable and difficult to program, used lots of power, required very large rooms, and were constantly in need of maintenance. Storing information was difficult, and the machines could only solve one problem at a time.
Two key engineering developments in the late 1940s would have a dramatic impact on what future generations of computers -- the development of the transistor, by John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley in 1947, and the invention of ferrite core memories by An Wang. The transistor would eventually replace the vacuum tube, and become the de facto technology for building computers. MIT's Whirlwind project expanded on Wang's basic patent and developed random access memory (RAM), which would make information retrieval quick and easy.
By the late 1950s, many believed the first generation of computers had come to an end. The next phase would require the development of a whole range of components used in computers today: a central processing unit (CPU); memory; input/output devices (printers, terminals, scanners); bulk storage; communication channels; operating systems; programming languages; and applications software.
In 1952, Admiral Grace Hopper introduced the concept of reusable code, and laid out the general concepts of language translation and compilers. This led to the creation of computer languages and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of computer users and applications. Building on Admiral Hopper's work, John Backus of IBM proposed FORTRAN in 1954, a programming language that allowed people to express their problems in the terms of mathematical formulas. Other early languages included COBOL and BASIC. In 1979, Dan Bricklin's introduction of VISICALC defined the modern software industry as we know it today.
In 1958, Jack S. Kilby and Robert N. Noyce independently developed the
monolithic integrated circuit, which would forever change the way
systems were built. The integrated circuit is responsible for many
modern conveniences we now take for granted. Even more fundamentally,
integrated circuits have made the information age a reality, creating a
revolution in all major industries from banking to transportation to
communications.
Initially, the most dramatic effects of integrated circuits were on central processors and memory devices. The 1970s and 1980s saw the concepts of increased integration - placing more transistors on single integrated circuits - and the numbers grew from hundreds of thousands to millions, and then to hundreds of millions. The microprocessor, unveiled by Intel in 1971, led to a proliferation of computers in various forms.
In the 1950s and 1960s, only a handful of companies developed computer hardware and software, and the environment was very proprietary. It was rare for one vendor's product to work with another vendor's, and most applications were written in-house. As systems evolved, each new generation of hardware involved a new operating system, which usually rendered the user's current (and expensive) software useless. In 1964, IBM introduced the System 360 "family" of computers, and changed these practices. The 360's operating system was designed with a compiler that would not change from model to model, so that old software would run on any computer in the family.
These early systems used batch processing to accomplish work. There was no graphical user interface, no mouse, no e-mail -- just a large proprietary system that ran jobs submitted to it by trained operators. Commercially viable time-sharing was introduced by IBM in 1961 under the control of a system known as CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System). Time sharing would be the forerunner of technologies that would allow higher degrees of interaction between the system and the end user.
The first of these technologies was introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1965. DEC's PDP-8 was the first true "minicomputer" and presented exciting possibilities. It gave engineers the ability to have their "own" machine - one they could program and use for various purposes. Followed by the PDP-11, these machines changed the way engineers worked, and would eventually lead to computers that operators of all levels could use.
Making operating systems compatible was another dramatic development. Efforts to develop software that would operate on any hardware platform took the concept of IBM's family of computers to another level. Pioneers of early systems included Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, who developed UNIX, a system that would soon be ubiquitous, with many vendors developing their own proprietary versions.
In 1981 IBM introduced the PC, a key event in the development of the consumer computer industry. It was based on an Intel microprocessor and the operating system DOS, licensed from Microsoft. In 1983 Apple Computers introduced the Macintosh and started a revolution in making computers easy to use.
From these beginnings, the computer has forever changed how we live and work. Graphically driven software makes computers easy to use and has begun to open new worlds through the Internet. People now have access to unprecedented amounts of knowledge, and can communicate freely in a world forum. In this respect, the real computer revolution is not one of numbers and bytes, but one in which people, regardless of geography and politics, can share information and learn from each other.
