History of Computer

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier
mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that
had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was
used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to
perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational
tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you
had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute
multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to
mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast.
Therefore, inventors have been searching for hundreds of years for a way to
mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can perform) this task.

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it
aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator
can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with
a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower). The abacus is often
wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C.
by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A
modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below
dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word "calculus" comes
from the Latin word for pebble).

In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier

invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be
performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which
was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative
to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now
called Napier's Bones.

A more modern set of Napier's Bones

Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still
in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo
programs which landed men on the moon.

A slide rule

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines

but apparently never built any.

A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing

The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably

the calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm
Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon
afterward in the bubonic plague.

Schickard's Calculating Clock

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who
was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could
only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they
really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the
required precision). Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the
odometer portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism as the
Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel.
Pascal was a child prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of
Euclid's thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent
probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit
version of the Pascaline, and two views of a 6 digit version:

Pascal's Pascaline [photo © 2002 IEEE]

A 6 digit model for those who couldn't afford the 8 digit model

Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with
Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because,
instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their
circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the
decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate
use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern
computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died
poor and alone.

Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you ever heard "calculating" referred to as "reckoning"?)

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base
its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from
punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of
these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from
the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).

Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched car

 This tapestry was woven by a Jacquard loom

Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators
out of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and once attacked Jacquard
himself. History is full of examples of labor unrest following technological innovation
yet most studies show that, overall, technology has actually increased the number of
jobs.

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven
calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This
machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He
obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables
in ocean navigation. By promoting their commercial and military navies, the British
government had managed to become the earth's greatest empire. But in that time
frame the British government was publishing a seven volume set of navigation tables
which came with a companion volume of corrections which showed that the set had
over 1000 numerical errors. It was hoped that Babbage's machine could eliminate
errors in these types of tables. But construction of Babbage's Difference Engine
proved exceedingly difficult and the project soon became the most expensive
government funded project up to that point in English history. Ten years later the
device was still nowhere near complete, acrimony abounded between all involved,
and funding dried up. The device was never finished.
 A small section of the type of mechanism employed in Babbage's Difference Engine [photo © 2002 IEEE]

Babbage was not deterred, and by then was on to his next brainstorm, which he called
the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines,
would be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks
to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an
important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. In the Jacquard loom, the
presence or absence of each hole in the card physically allows a colored thread to pass
or stops that thread (you can see this clearly in the earlier photo). Babbage saw that
the pattern of holes could be used to represent an abstract idea such as a problem
statement or the raw data required for that problem's solution. Babbage saw that there
was no requirement that the problem matter itself physically pass thru the holes.

Furthermore, Babbage realized that punched paper could be employed as a storage

mechanism, holding computed numbers for future reference. Because of the
connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic
Engine the "Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The
Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven" into
new results. In a modern computer these same parts are called the memory unit and
the central processing unit (CPU).

The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from
calculators: the conditional statement. A conditional statement allows a program to
achieve different results each time it is run. Based on the conditional statement, the
path of the program (that is, what statements are executed next) can be determined
based upon a condition or situation that is detected at the very moment the program is
running.

You have probably observed that a modern stoplight at an intersection between a busy
street and a less busy street will leave the green light on the busy street until a car
approaches on the less busy street. This type of street light is controlled by a computer
program that can sense the approach of cars on the less busy street. That moment
when the light changes from green to red is not fixed in the program but rather varies
with each traffic situation. The conditional statement in the stoplight program would
be something like, "if a car approaches on the less busy street and the more busy street
has already enjoyed the green light for at least a minute then move the green light to
the less busy street". The conditional statement also allows a program to react to the
results of its own calculations. An example would be the program that the I.R.S uses
to detect tax fraud. This program first computes a person's tax liability and then
decides whether to alert the police based upon how that person's tax payments
compare to his obligations.

Babbage befriended Ada Byron, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron (Ada
would later become the Countess Lady Lovelace by marriage). Though she was only
19, she was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru letters and meetings with Babbage
she learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning
programs for the still unbuilt machine. While Babbage refused to publish his
knowledge for another 30 years, Ada wrote a series of "Notes" wherein she detailed
sequences of instructions she had prepared for the Analytic Engine. The Analytic
Engine remained unbuilt (the British government refused to get involved with this
one) but Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer. Ada
invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping.
Babbage himself went on to invent the modern postal system, cowcatchers on trains,
and the ophthalmoscope, which is still used today to treat the eye.

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a
census should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the
representation of the states in Congress. While the very first census of 1790 had only
required 9 months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown so much that the count for
the 1880 census took 7.5 years. Automation was clearly needed for the next census.
The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and
this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted
Jacquard's punched cards for the purpose of computation.

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which
sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using
Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial
indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count.
 A few Hollerith desks still exist today [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]

The patterns on Jacquard's cards were determined when a tapestry was designed and
then were not changed. Today, we would call this a read-only form of information
storage. Hollerith had the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called
a read/write technology. While riding a train, he observed that the conductor didn't
merely punch each ticket, but rather punched a particular pattern of holes whose
positions indicated the approximate height, weight, eye color, etc. of the ticket owner.
This was done to keep anyone else from picking up a discarded ticket and claiming it
was his own (a train ticket did not lose all value when it was punched because the
same ticket was used for each leg of a trip). Hollerith realized how useful it would be
to punch (write) new cards based upon an analysis (reading) of some other set of
cards. Complicated analyses, too involved to be accomplished during a single pass
thru the cards, could be accomplished via multiple passes thru the cards using newly
printed cards to remember the intermediate results. Unknown to Hollerith, Babbage
had proposed this long before.
Hollerith's technique was successful and the 1890 census was completed in only 3
years at a savings of 5 million dollars. Interesting aside: the reason that a person who
removes inappropriate content from a book or movie is called a censor, as is a person
who conducts a census, is that in Roman society the public official called the "censor"
had both of these jobs.

Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few
buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM.
IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous. Your gas bill would arrive
each month with a punch card you had to return with your payment. This punch card
recorded the particulars of your account: your name, address, gas usage, etc. (I
imagine there were some "hackers" in these days who would alter the punch cards to
change their bill). As another example, when you entered a toll way (a highway that
collects a fee from each driver) you were given a punch card that recorded where you
started and then when you exited from the toll way your fee was computed based
upon the miles you drove. When you voted in an election the ballot you were handed
was a punch card. The little pieces of paper that are punched out of the card are called
"chad" and were thrown as confetti at weddings. Until recently all Social Security and
other checks issued by the Federal government were actually punch cards. The check-
out slip inside a library book was a punch card. Written on all these cards was a
phrase as common as "close cover before striking": "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate".
A spindle was an upright spike on the desk of an accounting clerk. As he completed
processing each receipt he would impale it on this spike. When the spindle was full,
he'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the
archives. You occasionally still see spindles at restaurant cash registers.

Two types of computer punch cards

Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on
a magazine cover.

IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with
financial accounting and inventory accounting. One characteristic of both financial
accounting and inventory accounting is that although you need to subtract, you don't
need negative numbers and you really don't have to multiply since multiplication can
be accomplished via repeated addition.

But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific
computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing
as much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. Physicists could write the
equations that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc.
would determine the trajectory of the shell. But solving such equations was extremely
laborious. This was the work performed by the human computers. Their results would
be published in ballistic "firing tables" published in gunnery manuals. During World
War II the U.S. military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math
majors to hire for the job of computing these tables. But not enough humans could be
found to keep up with the need for new tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be
delivered to the battlefield without the necessary firing tables and this meant they
were close to useless because they couldn't be aimed properly. Faced with this
situation, the U.S. military was willing to invest in even hair-brained schemes to
automate this type of computation.

One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership
between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer
made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was
constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The machine
weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and
had a 50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor.
The Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting. To
appreciate the scale of this machine note the four typewriters in the foreground of the
following photo.

The Harvard Mark I: an electro-mechanical computer

You can see the 50 ft rotating shaft in the bottom of the prior photo. This shaft was a
central power source for the entire machine. This design feature was reminiscent of
the days when waterpower was used to run a machine shop and each lathe or other
tool was driven by a belt connected to a single overhead shaft which was turned by an
outside waterwheel.

A central shaft driven by an outside waterwheel and connected to each machine by overhead belts was the
customary power source for all the machines in a factory

Here's a close-up of one of the Mark I's four paper tape readers. A paper tape was an
improvement over a box of punched cards as anyone who has ever dropped -- and
thus shuffled -- his "stack" knows.

One of the four paper tape readers on the Harvard Mark I (you can observe the punched paper roll emerging
from the bottom)

One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper
found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I and whose
wings were blocking the reading of the holes in the paper tape. The word "bug" had
been used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining
the word "debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults.
 The first computer bug [photo © 2002 IEEE]

In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This
language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the
infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable
by humans than is the binary language understood by the computing machinery. A
high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to
translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also
constructed the world's first compiler. Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the
Navy Reserves until she was 79 (another record).

The Mark I operated on numbers that were 23 digits wide. It could add or subtract two
of these numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and
divide them in ten seconds. Forty-five years later computers could perform an
addition in a billionth of a second! Even though the Mark I had three quarters of a
million components, it could only store 72 numbers! Today, home computers can
store 30 million numbers in RAM and another 10 billion numbers on their hard disk.
Today, a number can be pulled from RAM after a delay of only a few billionths of a
second, and from a hard disk after a delay of only a few thousandths of a second. This
kind of speed is obviously impossible for a machine which must move a rotating shaft
and that is why electronic computers killed off their mechanical predecessors.

On a humorous note, the principal designer of the Mark I, Howard Aiken of Harvard,
estimated in 1947 that six electronic digital computers would be sufficient to satisfy
the computing needs of the entire United States. IBM had commissioned this study to
determine whether it should bother developing this new invention into one of its
standard products (up until then computers were one-of-a-kind items built by special
arrangement). Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were very few
institutions (principally, the government and military) that could afford the cost of
what was called a computer in 1947. He just didn't foresee the micro-electronics
revolution which would allow something like an IBM Stretch computer of 1959:

(that's just the operator's console, here's the rest of its 33 foot length:)

to be bested by a home computer of 1976 such as this Apple I which sold for only
$600:

The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)
Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand
assembly, such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:

Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]

The microelectronics revolution is what allowed the amount of hand-crafted wiring

seen in the prior photo to be mass-produced as an integrated circuit which is a small
sliver of silicon the size of your thumbnail .

An integrated circuit ("silicon chip") [photo courtesy of IBM]

The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are
miniscule (that's the secondary advantage), but rather that millions of transistors can
be created and interconnected in a mass-production process. All the elements on the
integrated circuit are fabricated simultaneously via a small number (maybe 12) of
optical masks that define the geometry of each layer. This speeds up the process of
fabricating the computer -- and hence reduces its cost -- just as Gutenberg's printing
press sped up the fabrication of books and thereby made them affordable to all.
The IBM Stretch computer of 1959 needed its 33 foot length to hold the 150,000
transistors it contained. These transistors were tremendously smaller than the vacuum
tubes they replaced, but they were still individual elements requiring individual
assembly. By the early 1980s this many transistors could be simultaneously fabricated
on an integrated circuit. Today's Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42,000,000
transistors in this same thumbnail sized piece of silicon.

It's humorous to remember that in between the Stretch machine (which would be
called a mainframe today) and the Apple I (a desktop computer) there was an entire
industry segment referred to as mini-computers such as the following PDP-12
computer of 1969:

The DEC PDP-12

Sure looks "mini", huh? But we're getting ahead of our story.

One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts,
shafts, etc.) digital computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of
physics and mathematics at Iowa State University. By 1941 he and his graduate
student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29
simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as
a charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their
main memory (DRAM or dynamic RAM). As far as its inventors were aware, it was
also the first to employ binary arithmetic. However, the machine was not
programmable, it lacked a conditional branch, its design was appropriate for only one
type of mathematical problem, and it was not further pursued after World War II. It's
inventors didn't even bother to preserve the machine and it was dismantled by those
who moved into the room where it lay abandoned.
 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer [photo © 2002 IEEE]

Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during
World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by
Germany. Britain led the world in designing and building electronic machines
dedicated to code breaking, and was routinely able to read coded Germany radio
transmissions. But Colossus was definitely not a general purpose, reprogrammable
machine. Note the presence of pulleys in the two photos of Colossus below:

Two views of the code-breaking Colossus of Great Britain

The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made
important contributions. American and British computer pioneers were still arguing
over who was first to do what, when in 1965 the work of the German Konrad
Zuse was published for the first time in English. Scooped! Zuse had built a sequence
of general purpose computers in Nazi Germany. The first, the Z1, was built between
1936 and 1938 in the parlor of his parent's home.

The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting

Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational,
general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer.
Without knowledge of any calculating machine inventors since Leibniz (who lived in
the 1600's), Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his
own to employ binary representation for numbers (Babbage had advocated decimal).
The Z3 was destroyed by an Allied bombing raid. The Z1 and Z2 met the same fate
and the Z4 survived only because Zuse hauled it in a wagon up into the mountains.
Zuse's accomplishments are all the more incredible given the context of the material
and manpower shortages in Germany during World War II. Zuse couldn't even obtain
paper tape so he had to make his own by punching holes in discarded movie film.
Because these machines were unknown outside Germany, they did not influence the
path of computing in America. But their architecture is identical to that still in use
today: an arithmetic unit to do the calculations, a memory for storing numbers, a
control system to supervise operations, and input and output devices to connect to the
external world. Zuse also invented what might be the first high-level computer
language, "Plankalkul", though it too was unknown outside Germany.

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded

to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC
was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two
professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding
from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would
replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the
firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the
first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off
their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was
astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").

ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000
vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from
IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of
business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent
but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a
light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only
be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning
system. Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was
basically a mirror image of what's visible.
To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange the patch cords that you can observe
on the left in the prior photo, and the settings of 3000 switches that you can observe
on the right. To program a modern computer, you type out a program with statements
like:

Circumference = 3.14 * diameter

To perform this computation on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch
cords and then locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to
3, 1, and 4.

Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike [U.S. Army photo]

Once the army agreed to fund ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert worked around the clock,
seven days a week, hoping to complete the machine in time to contribute to the war.
Their war-time effort was so intense that most days they ate all 3 meals in the
company of the army Captain who was their liaison with their military sponsors. They
were allowed a small staff but soon observed that they could hire only the most junior
members of the University of Pennsylvania staff because the more experienced
faculty members knew that their proposed machine would never work.

One of the most obvious problems was that the design would require 18,000 vacuum
tubes to all work simultaneously. Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that
even twenty years later many neighborhood drug stores provided a "tube tester" that
allowed homeowners to bring in the vacuum tubes from their television sets and
determine which one of the tubes was causing their TV to fail. And television sets
only incorporated about 30 vacuum tubes. The device that used the largest number of
vacuum tubes was an electronic organ: it incorporated 160 tubes. The idea that 18,000
tubes could function together was considered so unlikely that the dominant vacuum
tube supplier of the day, RCA, refused to join the project (but did supply tubes in the
interest of "wartime cooperation"). Eckert solved the tube reliability problem through
extremely careful circuit design. He was so thorough that before he chose the type of
wire cabling he would employ in ENIAC he first ran an experiment where he starved
lab rats for a few days and then gave them samples of all the available types of cable
to determine which they least liked to eat. Here's a look at a small number of the
vacuum tubes in ENIAC:

Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time.
However, thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I:
a multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC
in 2.8 thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per
second. Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per
second. Built with $500,000 from the U.S. Army, ENIAC's first task was to compute
whether or not it was possible to build a hydrogen bomb (the atomic bomb was
completed during the war and hence is older than ENIAC). The very first problem run
on ENIAC required only 20 seconds and was checked against an answer obtained
after forty hours of work with a mechanical calculator. After chewing on half a
million punch cards for six weeks, ENIAC did humanity no favor when it declared the
hydrogen bomb feasible. This first ENIAC program remains classified even today.

Once ENIAC was finished and proved worthy of the cost of its development, its
designers set about to eliminate the obnoxious fact that reprogramming the computer
required a physical modification of all the patch cords and switches. It took days to
change ENIAC's program. Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the
mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered the stored
program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von
Neumann is often wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the
sequence of computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data
was. But this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever
started working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school
Eckert had scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.

After ENIAC and EDVAC came other computers with humorous names such as
ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, and, of course, MANIAC. ILLIAC was built at the University
of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, which is probably why the science fiction author
Arthur C. Clarke chose to have the HAL computer of his famous book "2001: A
Space Odyssey" born at Champaign-Urbana. Have you ever noticed that you can shift
each of the letters of IBM backward by one alphabet position and get HAL?

JOHNNIAC was a reference to John von Neumann, who was unquestionably a

genius. At age 6 he could tell jokes in classical Greek. By 8 he was doing calculus. He
could recite books he had read years earlier word for word. He could read a page of
the phone directory and then recite it backwards. On one occasion it took von
Neumann only 6 minutes to solve a problem in his head that another professor had
spent hours on using a mechanical calculator. Von Neumann is perhaps most famous
(infamous?) as the man who worked out the complicated method needed to detonate
an atomic bomb.

Once the computer's program was represented electronically, modifications to that

program could happen as fast as the computer could compute. In fact, computer
programs could now modify themselves while they ran (such programs are called self-
modifying programs). This introduced a new way for a program to fail: faulty logic in
the program could cause it to damage itself. This is one source of thegeneral
protection fault famous in MS-DOS and the blue screen of death famous in
Windows.

Today, one of the most notable characteristics of a computer is the fact that its ability
to be reprogrammed allows it to contribute to a wide variety of endeavors, such as the
following completely unrelated fields:

 the creation of special effects for movies,

 the compression of music to allow more minutes of music to fit within the
limited memory of an MP3 player,
 the observation of car tire rotation to detect and prevent skids in an anti-lock
braking system (ABS),
 the analysis of the writing style in Shakespeare's work with the goal of proving
whether a single individual really was responsible for all these pieces.

By the end of the 1950's computers were no longer one-of-a-kind hand built devices
owned only by universities and government research labs. Eckert and Mauchly left the
University of Pennsylvania over a dispute about who owned the patents for their
invention. They decided to set up their own company. Their first product was the
famous UNIVAC computer, the first commercial (that is, mass produced) computer.
In the 50's, UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal Automatic Computer") was the
household word for "computer" just as "Kleenex" is for "tissue". The first UNIVAC
was sold, appropriately enough, to the Census bureau. UNIVAC was also the first
computer to employ magnetic tape. Many people still confuse a picture of a reel-to-
reel tape recorder with a picture of a mainframe computer.
 A reel-to-reel tape drive [photo courtesy of The Computer Museum]

ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry, but
its inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, never achieved fortune from their work and their
company fell into financial problems and was sold at a loss. By 1955 IBM was selling
more computers than UNIVAC and by the 1960's the group of eight companies selling
computers was known as "IBM and the seven dwarfs". IBM grew so dominant that
the federal government pursued anti-trust proceedings against them from 1969 to
1982 (notice the pace of our country's legal system). You might wonder what type of
event is required to dislodge an industry heavyweight. In IBM's case it was their own
decision to hire an unknown but aggressive firm called Microsoft to provide the
software for their personal computer (PC). This lucrative contract allowed Microsoft
to grow so dominant that by the year 2000 their market capitalization (the total value
of their stock) was twice that of IBM and they were convicted in Federal Court of
running an illegal monopoly.

If you learned computer programming in the 1970's, you dealt with what today are
called mainframe computers, such as the IBM 7090 (shown below), IBM 360, or
IBM 370.
There were 2 ways to interact with a mainframe. The first was called time
sharing because the computer gave each user a tiny sliver of time in a round-robin
fashion. Perhaps 100 users would be simultaneously logged on, each typing on
a teletype such as the following:

The Teletype was the standard mechanism used to interact with a time-sharing computer

A teletype was a motorized typewriter that could transmit your keystrokes to the
mainframe and then print the computer's response on its roll of paper. You typed a
single line of text, hit the carriage return button, and waited for the teletype to begin
noisily printing the computer's response (at a whopping 10 characters per second). On
the left-hand side of the teletype in the prior picture you can observe a paper tape
reader and writer (i.e., puncher). Here's a close-up of paper tape:
 Three views of paper tape

After observing the holes in paper tape it is perhaps obvious why all computers use
binary numbers to represent data: a binary bit (that is, one digit of a binary number)
can only have the value of 0 or 1 (just as a decimal digit can only have the value of 0
thru 9). Something which can only take two states is very easy to manufacture,
control, and sense. In the case of paper tape, the hole has either been punched or it has
not. Electro-mechanical computers such as the Mark I used relays to represent data
because a relay (which is just a motor driven switch) can only be open or closed. The
earliest all-electronic computers used vacuum tubes as switches: they too were either
open or closed. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes because they too could act as
switches but were smaller, cheaper, and consumed less power.

Paper tape has a long history as well. It was first used as an information storage
medium by Sir Charles Wheatstone, who used it to store Morse code that was arriving
via the newly invented telegraph (incidentally, Wheatstone was also the inventor of
the accordion).

The alternative to time sharing was batch mode processing, where the computer gives
its full attention to your program. In exchange for getting the computer's full attention
at run-time, you had to agree to prepare your program off-line on a key punch
machine which generated punch cards.
An IBM Key Punch machine which operates like a typewriter except it produces punched cards rather than a
printed sheet of paper

University students in the 1970's bought blank cards a linear foot at a time from the
university bookstore. Each card could hold only 1 program statement. To submit your
program to the mainframe, you placed your stack of cards in the hopper of a card
reader. Your program would be run whenever the computer made it that far. You
often submitted your deck and then went to dinner or to bed and came back later
hoping to see a successful printout showing your results. Obviously, a program run in
batch mode could not be interactive.

But things changed fast. By the 1990's a university student would typically own his
own computer and have exclusive use of it in his dorm room.

The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)

This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor. A
microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC).
Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was
developed at Intel in 1971. The micro in the name microprocessor refers to the
physical size. Intel didn't invent the electronic computer. But they were the first to
succeed in cramming an entire computer on a single chip (IC). Intel was started in
1968 and initially produced only semiconductor memory (Intel invented both the
DRAM and the EPROM, two memory technologies that are still going strong today).
In 1969 they were approached by Busicom, a Japanese manufacturer of high
performance calculators (these were typewriter sized units, the first shirt-pocket sized
scientific calculator was the Hewlett-Packard HP35 introduced in 1972). Busicom
wanted Intel to produce 12 custom calculator chips: one chip dedicated to the
keyboard, another chip dedicated to the display, another for the printer, etc. But
integrated circuits were (and are) expensive to design and this approach would have
required Busicom to bear the full expense of developing 12 new chips since these 12
chips would only be of use to them.

A typical Busicom desk calculator

But a new Intel employee (Ted Hoff) convinced Busicom to instead accept a general
purpose computer chip which, like all computers, could be reprogrammed for many
different tasks (like controlling a keyboard, a display, a printer, etc.). Intel argued that
since the chip could be reprogrammed for alternative purposes, the cost of developing
it could be spread out over more users and hence would be less expensive to each
user. The general purpose computer is adapted to each new purpose by writing
a program which is a sequence of instructions stored in memory (which happened to
be Intel's forte). Busicom agreed to pay Intel to design a general purpose chip and to
get a price break since it would allow Intel to sell the resulting chip to others. But
development of the chip took longer than expected and Busicom pulled out of the
project. Intel knew it had a winner by that point and gladly refunded all of Busicom's
investment just to gain sole rights to the device which they finished on their own.

Thus became the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor (uP). The 4004 consisted of
2300 transistors and was clocked at 108 kHz (i.e., 108,000 times per second).
Compare this to the 42 million transistors and the 2 GHz clock rate (i.e.,
2,000,000,000 times per second) used in a Pentium 4. One of Intel's 4004 chips still
functions aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which is now the man-made object
farthest from the earth. Curiously, Busicom went bankrupt and never ended up using
the ground-breaking microprocessor.

Intel followed the 4004 with the 8008 and 8080. Intel priced the 8080 microprocessor
at $360 dollars as an insult to IBM's famous 360 mainframe which cost millions of
dollars. The 8080 was employed in the MITS Altair computer, which was the world's
first personal computer (PC). It was personal all right: you had to build it yourself
from a kit of parts that arrived in the mail. This kit didn't even include an enclosure
and that is the reason the unit shown below doesn't match the picture on the magazine
cover.

The Altair 8800, the first PC

A Harvard freshman by the name of Bill Gates decided to drop out of college so he
could concentrate all his time writing programs for this computer. This early
experienced put Bill Gates in the right place at the right time once IBM decided to
standardize on the Intel microprocessors for their line of PCs in 1981. The Intel
Pentium 4 used in today's PCs is still compatible with the Intel 8088 used in IBM's
first PC.