1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Selected History
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A VERY SELECTED HISTORY OF
COMPUTIG
– The Social Impact Of Computers. R. Rosenberg. Academic Press. (S-LEN 500.4
N22)
– The Dream Machine - exploring the computer age.
J. Plafreman & D. Swade. BBC Books 1991. S-LEN 500.4 N11.
– Before the Altair: The History of Personal Computing.
L. Press. Communications of the ACM, Sept 1993, Vol 36, No. 9, pp27-33.
– Accidental Empires. R. Cringely. Penguin, London 1993. S-LEN 608 N21.
– The Emperor’s %ew Mind. R. Penrose. Oxford University Press, 1989. S-LEN
500.15 M997
– The History of Computing Web Site at Virginia Tech.
» http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/
» http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/BriefTimeline.htm
– Good timelines
» http://www.computerhistory.org
» http://www.thocp.net/timeline/timeline.htm/
– Simthsonian
» http://photo2.si.edu/infoage/infoage.html
» http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/
Manchester Mark I
www.man.ac.uk/Science_Engineering/CHSTM/nahc.htm
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Pre-computing
– The Abacus - B.C.
This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of
communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. A memo at
Western Union, 1878 (or 1876).
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.
– Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.
'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers' Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943
“We have a computer here at Cambridge; there is one in Manchester and there ought to be one in Scotland as well but that is
about all.” - Douglas Hartree 1947 quoted in The Dream Machine p 8.
'While a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 10000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have
only 1000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.' Popular mechanics, 1949
'I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing
is a fad that won't last out the year' Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
It was predicted in 1963 that within five years human language translators would be redundant! c.f. The Dream Machine p
149.
[By 1985], machines [computers] will be capable of doing any work Man can do. Herbert A. Simon, of Carnegie Mellon
University, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence – speaking in 1965.
'But what... is it good for?' Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968
'There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in the home' Ken Olson, Present, Chairman and founder of Digital
Equipment Corporation, 1977
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'640K should be enough for anybody' - attributed to ,but denied by, Bill Gates, 1981
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C.F. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Computers
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Attitudes
1600– Schickard gave drawings for a calculating machine to
Keepler in 1623. (Nothing came of it.)
– Pascal. The Slide Rule - 1620. Patented a calculating
device in 1642.
– Leibniz. Invented a wheel used for efficient
multiplication and division (1694).
– Jacquard (1752-1834). Punched cards for controlling the
operation of looms.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Babbage
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Charles Babbage
1792-1871
ATTITUDES
– The Difference Engine
1823-1842
A design (and partial
implementation) of a
machine to automatically
calculate polynomials (i.e. a
single task machine).
– “..it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the
labour or calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else
if machines were used.”
» Leibniz c.f. Rosenberg p53.
– "I wish to God these calculations (for log tables) had been
executed by steam".
– The Analytic Engine 18321871.
A design for a machines to
solve ANY algebraic
equation.
» Babbage. c.f. The Dream Machine page 16.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Pre-computing
Some Predictions
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Predictions
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
The Analytic Engine
Influence
The Analytic Engine
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Influence
Its operation was variable and controlled by the
sequence or punched cards. Terminology for components
store (memory), mill (arithmetic unit (alu))
punched cards for input output, conditional branching.
– NOTE : Babbage was not an influential figure in the
development of computers.
– The Analytic Engine “....has no pretensions whatever to
originate anything. It can do what we know how to order
it to perform”. Ada Lovelace (1816-1852)
» Percy Ludgate an Irish Accountant tried to build his own
analytic engine at the start of the 20th century.
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Punched Card
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Turing
Punched Cards
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
– Turing's Machine: (1936) By way of a solution to a
mathematical problem on computability he designed a
hypothetical machine to carry out any algorithm.
– Modern computers are electronic implementations of
Universal Turing Machines.
– The 1890 US census published
in the year it was taken.
– Used punched cards (56
million) to store the data and
tabulating machines to
manipulate them.
» See chapter 2 of [Penrose 89] for a good description.
– In the “Turing Test” a machine can be said to think if a
human engaged in a dialogue with it and a human cannot
distinguish, based up the answers alone, which is the
human and which is the machine!
– This technology was the main
form of commercial information
processing for the 1st half of
this century.
– Both IBM and ICL had their
origins in punched card
companies.
» See http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html
» http://www.jabberwacky.com/ - a talking bot.
» http://www.20q.com/
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
ot USA
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Germany:
– Zuse - Z1, Z2 and Z3 1936-44.
– Programmable calculators. Suggested using valves.
– Work not widely publicised outside of Germany at the
time.
UK:
– Colossus: 1943. A single task machine.
Code breaking. Used over 1000 valves.
1936-1946
(Some of)
The First Electronic Machines
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
USA
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Wilkes
USA
Maurice Wilkes:
Cambridge University
– J V Atanasoff: 1939 prototype binary arithmetic electronic digital
computer.
– EIAC: 1943-46 Mauchly and Eckert. Moore School of Electrical
Engineering University of Pennsylvania.
EDSAC 49-58
» Designed to calculate artillery firing tables.
5000 +, 350 *, 38 / operations per second. 20 hours continuous
operation.
18k valves, 70k resistors, 10k capacitors.
Re-program => re-wire!
– The first (working) stored program machine.
Used mercury tubes for memory.
– EDVAC (1945): John von Neumann (1903-1957)
Suggested that programs could also be stored and manipulated by
the machine.
– The von eumann architecture. Memory, ALU, Control and I/O.
– Programmed using text mnemonics which another
EDSAC program converted into machine code.
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Commercialisation
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
The Awesome Thinking
Machine
– 1946 Eckert and Mauchly leave
academia to set up the
Electronic Control Company (ECC).
– US Census department sign up to buy an ECC machine
that has yet to be built.
– Lyons (the London tea house people) start to build their
own EDVAC type machine.
First model produced in ~1952.
http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/pageone.htm
– Remington Rand: Buy out the almost bankrupt EcketMauchly in 1950.
– In 1952 CBS use a UNIVAC to forecast
the results of the presidential election.
» Opinion polls rated the result as too close
to call.
– With 8% of the votes counted the
UNIVAC S/W correctly predicted that
Eisenhower would beat Stevenson with 43
states to 5.
» Walter Cronkite stated “It is awfully early
but I will go out on a limb….”
– Newspaper headlines the following day
spoke of the Awesome Thinking
Machine.
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Semiconductors
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Cost Curve
The Technology Cost Curve
Semiconductor Technology
– TRASISTORS. Invented by
Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain in 1948.
– First transistor based machine from
Bell Labs in 1954.
– Shockley goes to California to make transistors (1955).
– Noyce et al leave Shockley and set up Fairchild (1958)
– Moore's Law (1965) In integrated circuit technology the
number of components per unit surface area will double
each year.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Awesome Machine
COMMERCIALISATIO 1946-
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Unit
Cost
Maturity/# units produced
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Politics
Applications
POLITICS & THE COST CURVE
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Early Major Application Areas
– Missiles being developed in the arms race needed light
computers for guidance.
– Banking: cheque processing.
– 1961 JFK starts the race to the moon.
Again generating a need for light computers.
– Airlines: ticket reservation.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
IBM
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
360
The 360 Mainframe
IBM
– See their data processing machine business under threat
from UNIVAC.
– Produce a Defence Calculator (701) for the U.S. D.O.D.
in 1953 (Korean war) and a business version (650) in
1954.
– 650 used punch cards rather than magnetic tape as they
fit more comfortably into existing data processing set-ups.
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– 1964 IBM spend $5
billion on developing the
360 hardware and
software.
– Successfully marketed as
THE single machine to
meet all needs.
– Sets the computing
agenda until the
microprocessor
revolution.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
ASIDE
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Part II
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Locations
PART II
From Mainframes To PCs
– California - sunshine, Stanford university and other
companies.
– The Boston ring road - MIT and DIGITAL.
– Cambridge (UK) - Maurice Wilkes et al in Cambridge
University.
Or how IBM, DEC, Apple et al made and lost and fortunes
» MicroSoft European Research Institute.
– Ireland (cheap), educated, English speaking labour,
access to the EU.
» Critical mass of expertise.
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Mainframes
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
http://foodman123.com/ibm709.htm
The Mainframe Paradigm
Typical 1960s-80's setup
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Machines are BIG and expensive, O(million €).
Housed in special rooms.
Batch processed. Modest terminal interactive access.
Limited application domain - business data processing,
scientific/engineering applications, educational.
– Mostly stand alone operation, i.e. not networked.
– The mystique of the computer room and the computer professionals.
– Few organisations totally dependent on the technology.
IBM 709
~1955
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Ireland/TCD 60-70s
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
DEC 2060
EARLY IRISH & TCD MACHIES
– 1960 ESB IBM 650
– 1962 TCD IBM 1620
£10,000 -40% Discount
Decimal, 20K digits ferrite core memory.
Table driven arithmetic.
Paper tape + typewriter I/O.
Assembler + FORTRAN.
– 1970 TCD's IBM 360 had 256K memory and 14MB disks
cost ~500,000£
– 1978 TCD VAX 11/780 512K memory, 2x28MB disk,
£250,000
Dec 2060, early 1980s
DEC 2060 with 1 million 36-bit words of MOS memory,
PDP-11 front end, PDP-11 sync communications, 1 RP06 176 MB disk, 2 RP07 498MB disks.
Running TOPS-20 with FORTRAN-20, COBOL-68/74, BASIC-PLUS-2, CPL-20, and MS (a mail system).
http://www.hawaii.edu/infobits/s2000/images/dec2.jpg
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TODAY
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Computers in TCD
Today - Widespread Interactive
Distributed Computing
Number of Computers in TCD Since
1980
– 1,000s of millions of PCs in existence.
– Interactive, user friendly, graphical interfaces.
– Global high speed computer networks.
– Applications - word processing through video games
through to GPS.
– Widespread use by non technical people.
– Deep penetration into almost all organizations with
accompanying decision making power shifted from the
computer centers to the end users.
– Some traditional human functions performed by
computers - playing chess, making cars etc.
Number of Computers
14000
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
0
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
Year
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Question
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
3 Factors
3 FACTORS
QUESTIO
– I Technology
micro-processors and networks.
What Happened in the 70s-80s
to bring this unpredicted
change around ?
– II User Interfaces
psychology etc.
– III "Adoption” by non computer specialists.
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uProcessors
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Moore’s Law
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
I TECHOLOGY
Moore's Law ('65)
– Silicon Valley provided ICs to be used by computer
manufacturers and others in the assembly of complex
machinery, e.g. mainframes and missiles.
– Different ICs had different components to perform
different tasks.
– 1971 Ted Hoff at Intel comes up with the idea of putting
enough components on a single chip to make it a viable
computer which could be programmed to act as required
by the IC purchaser.
– Microprocessor => CPU on a single chip.
Add memory chips, controller chips etc. and you have a
working computer system!
In IC technology the number of
components per unit surface
area will double every year!
As the number of components
increases so does the
processing power.
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II Interactive
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
XEROX PARC
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
XEROX PARC
II. User Interfaces
– Afraid of IBM and the
paperless office set up the
Palo Alto Research
Center.
– Command line interfaces and batch processing are not
user friendly ways of interacting with a computer.
– Speculate on what a
paperless office might
look like and what sort of
computing infrastructure
it would have.
– Draws on work (of among
others) Jean Piaget a
Swiss psychologist who
did work on child/adult
perception of the world.
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XEROX
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Other XEROX PARC
Developments 1970-1980
III "Adoption" by non computer
specialists.
– Laser printer.
– Ethernet Local Area Network.
– SmallTalk (OO) programming environment.
– Main computer manufacturers not interested in
microprocessors.
– In 1974 the Altair "home assembly" Intel 8080 based
computer is advertised in 'Popular Electronics'. Mail order
a (small and primitive) computer for $385!
– Hobbyists/hackers/techies et al take to microprocessors in
a big way.
– Commodore PET, Sinclair Spectrum, Radio Shack Tandy,
BBC Micro etc.
– Apple II, 48K ram, floppy disk and VisiCalc - a
spreadsheet written by MBA graduates!
– The ALTO personal networked computer
using mainframe processing power to
provide a point and click interface with
icons, pull down menus, the idea of a
desktop etc. i.e. the modern computing
paradigm.
– Xerox decide there is no demand for such a
machine and do not make a product based on
the Alto.
» Eventually one appears in the early '80s but
is too expensive....
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IBM PC
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
MAC
THE IBM PC
The Apple Macintosh
– 1981. Made from off the shelf
components.
– Intel 8088 processor + 8080 I/O
chips.
– Disk Operating System (PC DOS =
MS DOS) and Basic interpreter from
Microsoft.
– So "open" was the IBM PC that
once the Basic I/O Systems (bios)
was reverse engineered it became
possible for other companies to
make clone computers with the same
functionality but at a cheaper price!
– Apple hire many Xerox people and bring out an M68000
based machine with many of the Alto features.
– Lisa was a "workstation" and cost >$10,000.
– The simplified MAC at a fraction of the price was "a
success!“
– Apple “1984 Advert”
» http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/1984.html
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KILLER APPLICATIOS
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Adoption
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
Postscript
KILLER APPLICATIOS
POSTSCRIPT
– Jim’s Computer Garage
» http://www.rdrop.com/~jimw/jcgm-mic.shtml
– An application which is of such use that it will sell the
computer on its own.
– ICL bought Lyons. Fujitsu bought ICL.
– Steve Jobs 'left' Apple and founded NeXT.
– The amount of money spent on PCs, in the USA,
surpassed that spent on TVs in 1994.
– Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world.
– Jobs is back at Apple and has turned the company around!
– We survived the “Y2K Bug”.
– The bulk of spending on IT is confined to a few
developed countries.
– For the MAC + postscript printing it was desktop
publishing.
– For the Internet/WWW it is ……
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1BA6 Computers & Society - Selected History
PART III
– Ubiquitous computing ???
– Intimate computers???
– ?????
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