Machine to handle
information.
"high
tech" industry
– heavy costs for scientific & engineering research; characterized by
rapid technical change.
Science, "if
steel & oil have been two of the key ingredients of modern industrial
society up to now, in the remainder of this century it will be the state of a
nation's electronics & computer industries which signify its
development."
Human
"computers"
- 1880s Harvard observatory.
1890 Census Bureau
–
Herman Hollerith, punch
card system.
WWI military, 1930s
Social
Security system.
Hollerith company -
later
International Business Machines.
1925 MIT Vannevar
Bush first
analog computer - to analyze electric power system design.
Iowa State College
physicist John Atanasoff, with grad student Clifford Berry, 1939-1942 –
want to solve simultaneous linear equations.
Atanasoff-Berry Computer
(ABC) - 300 vacuum tubes.
WWII intelligence
efforts –
Germans
"Enigma"
coding machine; Allies electromechanical information-processing
"bombes".
Britain, Bletchley
Park.
After seeing ABC, John
Mauchly & J. Prespert Eckert, electrical engineers at Univ. of Penn.
Working
for US Army Ordnance Dept. ENIAC "Electronic Numerical Integrator &
Calculator."
Artillery trajectory
tables.
ENIAC operation late
1945.
"ENIAC
girls"
calculations for
hydrogen bomb.
1950 Princeton
mathematician John von Neumann - first stored-program computer in US.
EDVAC "Electronic
Discrete Variable Automatic Computer."
Los Alamos
"Mathematical
Analyzer, Numerical Integrator & Computer"
MIT
"Whirlwind" computer, new magnetic core memory.
SAGE system
"Semi-Automatic Ground Environment" - electronic defense
network. 23 SAGE stations across US. SAGE
computer 250 tons, 55,000 vacuum tubes.
first wide-area computer
network,
"modulator-demodulat
or";
computer monitors; magnetic core memory.
"There will never
be enough work for more than one or two of these computers."
1. big and
expensive.
2. vacuum tubes
unreliable,
3. no use outside
science or military;
4. focus on
number-crunching;
5. need advanced math
for programming.
1948, Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corporation;
Rand UNIVAC
"Universal
Automatic Computer” - first US commercial computer, first designed for
business use.
1952 CBS election
coverage.
1957, 46
UNIVACs.
80 companies entered
business
- defense companies, electric companies (GE), business-equipment makers
(Remington
Rand).
IBM late start in
computers - existing punch-card business;
Thomas Watson Jr. head
of IBM, 1951.
1953 Model 650 - first
mass-produced - Model T of computers. banks, insurance companies, dept stores,
airlines.
rented to
universities.
WWII work on
semiconductors.
Bell Labs - John
Bardeen, William Shockley & Walter Brattain - transistor 1947 (Nobel
Prize 1956).
germanium - silicon.
IBM System 360,
Late 1950s, IBM 75%
computer market.
programming problem:
creation of computer
"languages."
FORTRAN, "formula
translation," 1954.
1958 COBOL "Common
Business-Oriented Language."
payroll &
billing.
1958, ERMA
"Electronic Record Method Accounting" - sort 750 checks per
minute, Bank
of America.
1958, Jack Kilby of
Texas Instruments & Robert Noyce of Fairchild - integrated circuits -
microchip.
"Silicon
Valley"
- Stanford dean Frederick Terman, electrical engineering.
1970 200 electronics
firms in 30 miles
military & aerospace
subcontractor – missiles;
"Better killing
through electronics".
Apollo
11.
First ICs 1960 $1000, 10
transistors;
1971,
"microprocessor"
- Intel 4004 - 60,000 instructions per second.
pocket calculator.
1973 Xerox's Palo Alto
RH Center (PARC) - the Alto – editing, e-mail, music, art –
mouse control;
Altair. 1975 Popular Electronics -
kit $400.
4000 orders in three
months.
San Francisco Homebrew
Computer Club.
Steve Jobs & Steve
Wozniak, Apple.
1975 IBM - 5-inch screen, $9000.
1981 IBM PC - $1365,
sold
35,000 first year.
1984, Apple
Mackintosh.
1982 Time -
computer
as "man of the year."
late 1980s, 8 million
personal computers.
Technology never created
in vacuum
1968 film "2001: A
Space Odyssey"
web, "info
superhighway".
Post-September
11th.