The first computers were people!
That is,
This picture shows what were
known as "counting tables" [photo
courtesy IBM]
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.
A typical computer operation back when computers were people.
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 A very old abacus
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).
A more modern abacus. Note how the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers:
the 5 lower rings on each rod represent the 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2 hands.
 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.
An original set of Napier's
Bones [photo courtesy IBM]
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
A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

made drawings of gear-driven
calculating machines but apparently
never built any.
 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
A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which
rotated to display the numerical result

Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you
ever heard "calculating" referred to as
"reckoning"?)
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.
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 cards
By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined
the woven pattern [photo © 2002 IEEE]
A close-up of a Jacquard card
 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.

This tapestry was woven by a

Jacquard loom
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.
An operator working at a Hollerith Desk like the one below
Preparation of punched cards for the U.S. census
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.
Incidentally, the
Hollerith census
machine was the first
machine to ever be
featured on a
magazine cover.

Two types of computer punch cards

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.
Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" (note
that it wasn't even given the name of computer since "computers" were people)
[U.S. Army photo]
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?

ILLIAC II built at the University of Illinois (it is a good thing

computers were one-of-a-kind creations in these days, can you
imagine being asked to duplicate this?)
HAL from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". Look at the previous picture
to understand why the movie makers in 1968 assumed computers of the
future would be things you walk into.
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 the general 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.
The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer [photo courtesy of IBM]
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.
If you've enjoyed this history of computers, I encourage you to
try your own hand at programming a computer. That is the only
way you will really come to understand the concepts of looping,
subroutines, high and low-level languages, bits and bytes, etc. I
have written a number of Windows programs which teach
computer programming in a fun, visually-engaging setting. I
start my students on a programmable RPN calculator where we
learn about programs, statements, program and data memory,
subroutines, logic and syntax errors, stacks, etc. Then we move
on to an 8051 microprocessor (which happens to be the most
widespread microprocessor on earth) where we learn about
microprocessors, bits and bytes, assembly language,
addressing modes, etc. Finally, we graduate to the most
powerful language in use today: C++ (pronounced "C plus
plus"). These Windows programs are accompanied by a book's
worth of on-line documentation which serves as a self-study
guide, allowing you to teach yourself computer programming!
The home page (URL) for this collection of software is
www.computersciencelab.com.