computers

History of Computers

Critical thinking issues:

differentiate between facts and values
consider what something means to different people
notice how what a technology does changes

Computers are a technology that has not been predictable but rather has gone through several radical changes of direction. Theme--what has shaped the evolution of computer technology in these different directions (first military, then business, then usability=computers can be useful to everyone)

What I want you to see first is that computers started as something very different from what we have now. Can you imagine what a computer would be if the internet didn't exist and if there weren't any applications, you had to write your own programs?

The Digital computer is an example of the military-industrial-academic complex--it was invented out of wartime needs:

need for ballistics calculations led to the building of the Harvard Mark I and II using telephone technology.
Meanwhile in England Alan M. Turing , author of a famous paper in 1936 entitled "Can a Machine Think" was building a specialized vacuum tube machine called the Colossus for code-breaking, became operational in 1943. The program was built into the machine.

Colossus

ENIAC :

Meanwhile John Brainard at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering had been doing ballistic calculations with an analog computer, and each table took 30 days of machine time. Brainard proposed to build a multipurpose electronic digital computer to compute ballistic tables, and he got a contract from the Army Ordinance Dept. (not OSRD) in 1943
the army correctly judged that this technology was so experimental that it was not likely to be completed in time to be useful in the war.
with the help of ideas from John Mauchly and engineering by J. P. Eckert, Brainard built his machine and named it the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC for short
some of the original ideas had been developed by John Atanasoff, a physicist at Iowa State College. Maunchly visited in 1941 and asked permission to use some of the features. Atanosoff asked for time to file a patent application, but didn't get around to it because his wartime assignment to work on analog computers took precedence. In 1973 the courts did overthrow Maunchly's patent on the basis of Atanosoff's precedence.

ENIAC U.S. Army Photo

When it was completed in late 1945, ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, was 100 feet long, 10 feet high, and 3 feet deep and it consumed 140 kilowatts of electricity in operation. At first it spend 50% of the time under repair, but they got to a more acceptable one tube failure every two days by leaving it on all the time (failures had been happening mostly when during warm-up and cool-down). It had been budgeted at $150,000 but ended up costing nearly $500,000.

Programming ENIAC (US Army Photo)

ENIAC was 1000 times faster than the electromechanical machines but it had only 20 words of storage and it had to be programmed with wires (plugboards) and switches.
The first real problem programmed on ENIAC was a mathematical model of a hydrogen bomb from the Los Alamos atomic weapons lab--thousands of steps and data on 1 million punched cards. The results showed several problems with the proposed H-bomb design.
Grace Hopper was hired from Harvard to lead the development of programming. Most of the programming was done by the women who had supervised the human calculators for two reasons: programming the machine was not that different from parceling out a complex series of calculations among a group of people each of whom did one simple task, and the engineers were slow to realize that programming was interesting and challenging.

The wartime projects led to a series of vacuum tube computers.

In 1948 the first stored-program computer was built in Manchester, England, confusingly called the Mark 1 .
the next one at Penn was the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) built between 1947 and 1950, also with the ability to store programs electronically. A copy in Cambridge, England, actually operated first, and was described as the first stored-program electronic computer with any serious computational ability.
Eckert and Mauchley also built a commercial computer for the Census Bureau --the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC)--eventually 48 Univac 1 computers were sold. In November 1952 a UNIVAC computer was used to correctly predict presidential election results, generating much publicity. In England at about the same time Ferranti built a commercial computer that became operational a few months before UNIVAC and sold eight.

John Von Neumann

John von Neumann, a Hungarian immigrant working at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, began to collaborate with the Penn group in 1944, in particular formulating the stored program concept. He then developed a major research program at Princeton.
Whirlwind was built in 1944 and 1945 by Jay Forrester at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for the Air Force to simulate flight. Forrester in 1949 introduced magnetic core storage for Whirlwind.
In 1955 IBM began producing computers designed for business data-processing, building on existing technology using punched cards.

Vacuum tubes could take you only so far

but in research between 1945 and 1948, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley of Bell Labs had invented the point-contact transistor.
In the 1950s IBM, Univac and others used this new technology to produce medium to large-scale systems--mainframe computers. IBM introduced the first disk storage system in 1957. By 1960 they had an effective business system; they produced 12,000 of the transistor based IBM 1401 computers, most rented but the equivalent purchase price would have been $150,000 each. They were popular partly because they came with the best printer on the market. IBM beat out its competitors by a decision in 1962 to go to a completely new product line, the system 360. They spend $500,000 on research and ten times as much on development, including retooling factories and retraining staff
these mainframe computers cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, required special housing and air conditioning, and users submitted jobs on paper tape or punched cards for batch processing. Remote job entry (feed the cards into a card reader away from the mainframe itself) was introduced in the 1960s.

punching cards

Programming languages (chart of the history) :

the earliest computers were programmed in machine language--instructions and data input in binary form. This was so awkward that it was fairly quickly replaced by assembly language, which gave the computer its actual instructions but allowed decimal numbers and relative addressing
In 1954 John Backus of IBM published the first version of Fortran (Formula Translator)--the first higher-level language. By the mid-1960s 90% of all scientific and engineering programs were written in Fortran.
In 1959 COBOL was developed under the urging of DoD as a standardized higher-level language for business use.
these languages were essential to the wider use of mainframe computers because they made programming easier, but everything was still custom programmed.
In 1961 MIT demonstrated a model time-sharing system, and by the mid-1960s this had become a commercial service. Terminals were Teletypes--already mass produced and inexpensive for message communication, so you got your output on paper, not on a screen.

a teletype with typewriter keyboard and roll of
paper

teletype ASR33 used in timesharing

PDP-8

an early microcomputer--8 books take up
about half the top

Integrated circuits and programming languages for non-scientists

mini-computers introduced by Digital Equipment in 1963 taking advantage of integrated circuits. The first one marketed, the PDP-5 sold for $27,000 and two years later the PDP-8 was more powerful and smaller and sold for $18,000. The PDP-8 was the first mass-produced computer. By the 1970s minicomputers like the VAX were popular.
BASIC, introduced in 1964, was designed for time-sharing on minicomputers. Designed to be an easy-to-learn language, compared to the technical knowledge presumed by Fortran.
Pascal was released in 1971 as a language for teaching programming and became a rival to BASIC
mini-computers and BASIC meant that computers could for the first time be used by people who were not professional computer programmers. The first applications were developed for mini-computers.

Computer Generations

	technology	languages & applications	how computers were used
1	vacuum tubes	wires, assembly language	military research, census, weather forecasting
2	transistor	higher level languages--Fortran , Cobol	scientific research, mathematical problems , recordkeeping by big businesses and government
3	integrated circuit	BASIC, first word processors for offices (on special purpose minicomputers)	timesharing, text based games , still mostly programs to make calculations, wide use in universities
4	microprocessor	applications become the usual way of using computers, instead of programming	games (but videogame machines are cheaper), small businesses, education

Integrated circuit:

Texas Instruments 2500 (1972)

first patent to J.S. Kilby in 1959. Introduced by Texas Instruments and Westinghouse in the early 1960s, came into real commercial use in 1964 with Fairchild Semiconductors 702 linear IC.
The first desktop electronic calculators were introduced about 1963. In 1965 Texas Instruments began work on a four-function pocket calculator based on a single IC; they patented that design. They had trouble getting their invention into production--it came out in 1972 at $150 (the Japanese got copies on the market as early as 1970).
these had a more predictable market and got more initial interest from big companies than the personal computer. They also had a tremendously steep price curve--by 1975 you could buy a 4-function calculator for under $20.
Integrated circuits were also used for special-purpose word processors by Wang (1971) and IBM (the Displaywriter)

the key step for the computer was the introduction of the microprocessor:

Intel 4004

the idea of creating an entire simple computer from integrated circuits began with amateurs
The first microprocessor was the Intel 4004 in Nov. 1971 and the 2 MHz 8080 in 1972. The 8080 was an 8 bit microprocessor that could access 64 k of memory.
Atari ships Pong, the first commercial video game, in 1972 (History of Home Videogames)
Scelbi Computer Consulting offered a kit in 1973 for $565 with Intel's first microprocessor, the 8080, and 1 kilobyte of memory
In April 1975 Altair starts selling a kit (called the Altair 8800) with a 8080 microprocessor and 1 kilobyte of memory for $375--users entered data in binary form with 16 toggle switches and read the results in binary form on an array of 16 pairs of panel lamps. Users had to develop their own applications using machine language

Altair 8800 front of Altain--just lights and
switches

Gary Kildall was already at work writing the CP/M operating system
in 1975 a BASIC interpreter was demonstrated on the Altair, and IBM introduces a 55 lb. luggable computer with BASIC, 16 KB of RAM, and tape storage for the price of $9000
In June 1976 Southwest Technical Products Company offered a machine with an editor and assembler, and shortly afterwards with a BASIC interpreter. This expanded the potential market, though it was still hobbyists, and all sorts of small companies leapt into the business.

In 1977 the home computer began to move past the electronics hobbyist:

Apple II

Apple II and Commodore PET came to the market in 1977--both included keyboard, game paddles, BASIC in ROM, and storage of data via audiocassette recorder. The Apple II cost $1300 and had 4 KB RAM--175 kits were sold in the first 10 months. The first model didn't include a monitor--you hooked it to a TV set for display. Only in Jan 1977 did Apple Computer move from Steve Jobs's garage to an office.
In Aug. Radio Shack announced the TRS-80 microcomputer with 4 KB RAM, keyboard, video display, and tape cassette for $600--10,000 are sold in the first month.
around the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen sign a partnership agreement to form Microsoft.
these early microcomputers were mostly used for games until the floppy disk became available as a low cost data storage medium in the late 1970s--allowing the rapid storage of 100 Kb of data.
the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 had a speed of 4.77 MHz, 16 bit processing, and could access 1 MB of memory
The first application was VisiCalc in 1979--the first spreadsheet--creating a business market. Applewriter and Wordstar were released in the same year--they had been preceded by Electric Pencil in 1977.
In the 1979 fiscal year Apple sold 35,000 Apple II computers, 78,000 in 1980

Osborne Portable

In 1981 the Osborne I was the first complete portable microcomputer, with 64 K, two floppy discs, the CP/M operating system, and BASIC for $1795.
IBM got in the business (after much internal resistance) and announced the IBM PC in 1981. The first IBM PC cost $3000 and had the 8080 16 bit processor with a speed of 4.77 MHz, 64 K of RAM, a floppy drive, monochrome graphics, and the new DOS operating system, licensed from a small company called Microsoft. Despite the fact that better microprocessors were available IBM quickly came to dominate the market.
the most popular computer of the time was the Commodore 64, introduced in 1982, which sold an estimated 22 million units. It had color graphics and 64 K of RAM and cost only $400 (it hooked to a TV set for display) and was used primarily for games.
Lotus 1-2-3 introduced in 1982 was the killer business application--the microcomputer became more than a toy. dBase was the first data base program. WordPerfect was introduced in 1984 and came to dominate the business word processing market.
Apple tried to compete with the IBM PC with the Macintosh, introduced in 1984 at a price of $2495. A revolutionary new way of using a computer, with a graphical user interface, a mouse, and What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing.
The IBM AT in 1985 went in a different direction, with a speed of 6 MHz, 512 KB of RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive for about $5000
Commodore released the Amiga in 1985 with much improved graphics and sound, but people didn't see any use for it except for games.
Windows was first released in 1985 but did not earn a following until Windows 3 in 1990. Apple sued Microsoft for copying the Macintosh user interface, but lost. Windows represented a major change in the way people used PCs.

Windows 286 (Windows 2) For more details on the history of microcomputers I recommend The History of Computers During My Lifetime

Computers have become something completely different since the internet became popular. Some people see the internet as leading us in a very new direction: the internet as a self-organizing system, as the last frontier

anything can be put on the internet, so you have to evaluate the information for yourself
you don't have to publish, be recorded--anyone can share their ideas and music
is there some information that shouldn't be available?
if music, etc. is freely distributed, how will artists make money?
what kinds of communities does the internet create?
can/should the internet be regulated?
is the purpose of the internet the sharing of ideas or is the purpose selling stuff?
how does it change knowledge, social interaction, commerce?

Good pages on this topic: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History , Hobbes Internet Timeline

The very first beginning of the internet was a system called ARPANET:

in the late 1960s the development of packet-switching networks make it much easier to send data between computers by telephone line
developed in a number of countries; in the US particularly for for the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Dept of Defense in 1969. By 1971 this system had 15 nodes, by 1972 37 nodes
It was intended originally for remote computing, but e-mail quickly caught on among those with access, not only because of its speed but also because of its informality.
ARPANET was very important in the development of the Net.
- In its time it was the largest, fastest, and most populated part of the Net.
- Its initial structure was influenced by the fact that it was intended to form part of the central command and control structure for the US armed forces during the height of the Cold War . As such, it was designed to be able to survive a nuclear attack.
- This in turn influenced the decentralized and peer-to-peer structure of the Net. ( Hardy, History of the Net ).
- it was designed specifically to avoid central control, so any part that survived could continue to function

The Internet:

in 1972 a conference drew up standards for connecting networks such as ARPANET, the beginning idea of the internet
in 1977 TheoryNet linked 100 computer science researchers, leading to plans for to create a system that could link all computer scientists. When NSF was brought in for funding the decision was made to make the system available without charge and gateway it to ARPANET, it opened in 1979
in 1979 USENET began--a system where many computers served as hosts storing a series of documents.
- In 1986 this had grown so popular that there was great controversy over a more organized naming system ("The Great Renaming")
- Originally there was a centralized backbone system, but when that backbone refused to carry a new group called rec.sex alternate routes were devised called alt. The backbone administrators gave up and ever since Usenet has been proud of its anarchy.
- as of 1994 there were over 10,000 groups
- you can read Usenet via Google Groups, though if you get serious about it you should get a newsreader
two years after USENET was created BITNET was established to provide e-mail discussion lists.
- These had a more conservative culture and generally banned flaming, which was seen as an art form on USENET and in fact served as the main form of regulation.
- This kind of forum moved onto the internet with the development of Listserv software; as of 1997 there were more than 70,000 different mailing lists.
in 1983 MillNet was separated from ARPANET and military control was relaxed on the ARPANET part. But it didn't have central control
in 1984 the installation of a name server meant that you no longer had to specify the path to another user
in 1986 NSF Net encourages connection among universities and reduced the attempts at central control that had been exercised by ARPANET (which was abolished in 1989). Provided a faster backbone.

number of internet hosts (source Hobbes Internet Timeline ):

1982	1984	1986	1988	1990	1992	1994	1996	1998	2000	2002	2004
235	1,024	5,089	56,000	313,000	1,136,000	3,864,000	16,729,000	36,739,000	93,047,785	162,128,493	285,139,107

in 1989 Compuserv was linked to the internet, the first link by a commercial mail carrier
in 1991 Gopher was created by the Univ. of Michigan to provide access to mass information--an interesting example of an innovation that failed
in 1995 dial-up services began routinely providing connection to the internet
how long can you keep growing at a doubling time of less about 18 months?

The World Wide Web (sources: About the World Wide Web , Hobbes Internet Timeline ) :

the idea of hypertext --of documents with live links--dates back to the 1960s, first on mainframes. Enthusiasts got very interested in how knowledge might be communicated more effectively with interlinked documents.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee and other researchers at CERN--a central European particle physics laboratory--developed an internet hypertext system in the early 1980s
in 1993 Mosaic is introduced--an easy to install browser which allows color images, and the WWW launches immediately into explosive growth
by 1994 the WWW was the second most-popular service on the internet (after FTP) , by 1995 the most popular
Internet communities developed for all sorts of special interests
information just wants to be free

number of web sites:

1992	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004
50	623	10,022	23,500	603,367	1,681,868	3,689,227	9,560,866	25,675,581	36,276,252	35,543,105	45,980,112	56,923,737

source: Hobbes Internet Timeline

Internet commerce:

is the internet a way of showing off pictures of your children, a way for people with common interests to talk to teach other, or a revolutionary new way of doing business?
the pornography industry pioneered selling things over the internet
Amazon.com started selling books over the internet in July 1995 and was the first internet-based business to get noticed
by 1998 most mail order catalogs had web sites where people could order products and most big businesses had informational sites
internet users have been very resistant to paying to use web sites, ending net neutrality may give businesses a way around this
can you make money by offering content for free and carrying advertising?
a lot of people were betting on it and so the stock prices of internet firms went high, though few internet businesses were making money. This led to a crash .
would you buy groceries over the internet? Why and where E-business was succeeding and failing.
Will the internet give the little guy a chance? The web as a place for people to express themselves is coming back again with weblogs .
are we loosing our privacy ?

the internet creates new kinds of community

Usenet was the first of these and still active--it can be reached via Google Groups. The interesting difference with Usenet is that there is no way to kick someone out of a group. It has mostly been replaced by Reddit
Six Degrees in 1997 is considered the first social media site--you could upload a profile and friend other users
Bitnet was the first system of email groups
Blogging started in 1999
Discussion boards on the web have partially replaced email groups, and now many groups are available in either form--see for example Yahoo groups
MySpace and Linked in grew in the very early 2000s
Facebook was launched in 2004 initially only for people at Harvard then at colleges and universities. It became available to all in 2006, which is when Twitter was founded
Instagram and Pinterest were founded in 2010, Google+ in 2011

Three visions of what the internet would be:

a place to do business
knowledge is power and now is available to everyone
a community

This page written and copyright Pamela E. Mack

HIST 1220
last updated 12/2/2019