ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE:
A Visual History of Computing & the Mass Media
Created for
MSTD 101 Introduction to Mass Media
and MSTD 300 Media History
By Bill Kovarik
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COMPUTER VISION - 1950 (?) Click on this picture to enlarge it. Read the caption. Think about it. Could this be real? Why would a computer have a steering wheel? What about the grammar -- "how a home computer could look like..." Ugh. And where is the photographic attribution in the caption? What we see here is not a computer of the future from the year1950. Instead, it is a caricature from the present poking fun at supposed miscalculations of the past -- a classic blunder in understanding history. This supposed vision of 21st century home computer is in fact a full-scale mock-up of a control room in a nuclear submarine from the 1950s. The original photograph was taken at a Smithsonian Institution exhibit called "Fast Attacks and Boomers: Submarines of the Cold War," It became the basis of a Fark.com Photoshop contest in September 2004, for which the above image, including caption, was created. See the Snopes.com site for more explanation. |
First, a curmudgeon's view of the Internet.
Statler and Waldorf are named for the famous hotels in New York. Believe it or not they have their own Wikipedia page. They also had their own show called From the Balcony.
OK, some history.
In the beginning, there was the telegraph... --- ...
Samuel Morse's invention was soon powerful enough to span the Atlantic ocean. When it did, technicians noticed that the telegraph cables attracted metal objects like a magnet.
Meanwhile, Thomas Edison, inventor of the telegraph, phonograph,
electric light and other things, noticed
that 2 adjacent circuits in a vacuum will activate each other electronically.
This was the beginning of electronics, of radio and TV, and of computing.
Scientists investigate
Heinrich Hertz -- Investigated mysterious electromagnetic waves
JJ Thomson Develops electron theory and finds that the atom not indivisible
Neils Bohr electron shells, stability, etc. / Solar system model of atom
Guglielmo Marconi developed the radio telegraph using the Edison effect to detect broad spectrum sparks
Lee DeForest "Father" of the radio triode
/ amplifier
Vacuum tubes are the first electronic switches but scientists also get close to developing solid state circuits with crystals (semiconductors).
Charles Babbage 1791-1871 / 1833 design for a difference engine // Eccentric, English mathematician who is considered to have conceptualized the modern computer a century before technology let it be built. He conceptualized the Difference Engine, a machine that would have computed lengthy scientific tables, but money, labor, and health problems prevented its completion. The Analytical Engine, a more ambitious plan, would have done a wide range of calculating tasks. With it, Babbage recognized the need for an input device, memory, a central processing unit, and an output device, and for this he is known as the Father of Computing. (Important people...)
English mathematician who was crucial in the work at Bletchley Park designing the Colossus, which deciphered German code during WWII and is considered to be the first electronic computer. He later invented the Turing Test, in which he proposed that if a computer could pass his test, it had proven that it could think. (So far no computer has passed).
Grace Hopper 1906 - 1992 American computer specialist with US Navy, developed COBOL language / naval research
The famous quotation "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is often attributed to Grace Hopper.[8]Also attributed to her is the quote, "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for."
Although they were developed for the radio industry, the vacuum tube allowed machines to calculate several times faster than adding machines.
This IBM tube system from 1946 could multiply two 10-digit numbers 40 times a second.
The tubes were used in a machine called the ENIAC -- Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. It was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory and was used to calculate problems for H-bomb development.
According to Wikipedia and other sources ENIAC:
- Had 17,468 vacuum tubes
- weighed 30 tons
- was 8 feet by 3 feet by 100 feet , and
- consumed 150 kW of power
- 100,000 calculations a second.
TRADIC (for TRAnsistor DIgital Computer or TRansistorized Airborne DIgital Computer)
- a million operations per second
- operated on less than 100 watts of power
- transistor was 20 more expensive than a tube, $20 vs. $1
Yet connecting these 10,000 transistor is very difficult, and there is bound to be a flaw somewhere.
Computers become the stuff of legend, even in the 1950s...
IBM dominates computer market
1960s Insurance, banking, govt The 360 announced in 1964 has been placed alongside the Boeing 707 and the Ford Model T in terms of historical business accomplishments.
Computing power doubles every 12 - 18 months. (From Whatis.com) The pace of microchip technology change is such that the amount of data storage that a microchip can hold doubles every year or at least every 18 months.
In 1965 when preparing a talk, Gordon Moore noticed that up to that time computer processing capacity seemed to double each year. It still does.
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Many people were worried that computers could be used by governments to dominate and tyranize by organizing confidential information about them.
So this theme of computer liberation, first promoted by Ted Nelson, ran throughout the industry.
The Apple Mac computer was developed as part of this anti-1984 theme.
Understand that the PERSONAL computer was one that the government couldn't watch you use.
What people really feared was the networked computer with dumb terminals, where everything ran through a central computer.
This view, possibly antiquated, may stand in the way of developing networked applications on a broad scale.
1978 Introduction of 8086 by Intel, the first commercially successful 16 bit processor.An 8 bit version was developed (the 8088), which was chosen by IBM for the first IBM PC. The 8 MHz version achieved 0.8 MIPs and contained 29,000 transistors.
1983 -- 12.5 MHz, achieved 2.7 MIPs and contained 134,000 transistors
1989 -- 80486 DX released by Intel. It contains the equivalent of about 1.2 million transistors. At the time of release the fastest version ran at 25 MHz and achieved up to 20 MIPs.
Rising computer power means consumers can do far more with less. Standard consumer computers, by around 2005, ran at 2,000 MHz (See How do microprocessors work?)
2007 -- IBM's BlueGene/L - 280.6 TFlop/s “teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second or 140 million times faster than the 80486
Lumpen-programmers like Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines (IBM) in the 1950s and 60s, dominated the government, insurance and banking markets for data processing.
Ironically, just as IBM was being sued by the Justice Department over its business dominating tactics, the company missed the "curve in the road" and lost its core software business to the nerd engineers.
Nerd engineers like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, opened up the capabilities of personal computing. Gates developed an operating system for IBM but held onto the copyright. IBM thought that the hardware would be the key to the future of the business. Gates predicted that software would be the key. He was right. 
Hip visionaries like Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, wanted to develop "insanely great" technologies. With the help of Steve Wozniak Apple became the first big personal computer company but had a hard time breaking into the business market. 
