Materials for the History of Computing

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Materials for the History of Computing

Master Index
Foreword
Part I: From the Dawn of Mankind till the advent of commercial computers
part II: The “Big Iron” Era: (1952-1969)
Part III:The 70s: From Mini to Micro: the world gets smaller.
Part IV: The 80s: visions of the future
Part V: It’s the 90s, baby…
Part VI: Facts of the New Millennium
Monographs

Disclaimer

The materials presented here come from publicly available Web Sites. The author has no way to check the exact copyright status of each documents he
links.
All material linked is believed to be either in public domain or otherwise
publicly viewable.

If the legal copyright holder of a document wants a reference to be removed, all (s)he’s got to do is sending me a mail to <gilberto@gadaleta.org>, and I will abide as readily as I can (expect a delay ranging from a few hours to 3 business days).
Needless to say, I am NOT responsible of the contents of any page I link.
Last time I checked the content was pertinent, and that’s all I can say.

Foreword

This page is a collection of Internet material about computer history. Browsing
through the Web I found plenty of it, but no one has still created an organic
compendium about computer history.

This page aims to fill this gap, following a (mostly) chronological order.
Where the lack of material has made this approach impractical (e.g.: Computers in the former Eastern Bloc) I switched to a geographic criterion, and the
argument is treated as an appendix in the most relevant historical period.
Being an “in progress” work, you will certainly note errors and omissions.
This is unintentional, and will be corrected when I have the time to update
the page or when I find new material to fill in the gaps. As a matter of
fact, Internet is a constantly evolving medium, so it’s possible that you
come across non-working links. Again, these will be corrected as soon as
I can.

I hereby would like to thank the Wikipedia project, which provided much material, and The Wayback Machine, that prevents it
from getting lost.

Your suggestions and corrections are highly appreciated.

Please write me to < gilberto@gadaleta.org
>
Best wishes to you all.

Part I: From the Dawn of Mankind till the advent of commercial computers

The History

Until 1945, computer history can be followed in good detail in Computing Before Computers, Iowa University Press, 1990
For a more in depth view of the 1935-1945 era Reckoners by Paul Ceruzzi
For the late 40’s and the 50’s the best source on the web is Herb Grosch’s
Computers: bit slices from a life , which spans through 1967.

Early British Computers gives the British side of the story

Prominent Figures

The Machines & The Places

The Colossus at Bletchey Park And the Allies won WWII.
The Baby, at Manchester Univ. (UK), the prototype for the much more famous
Manchester Mark I, leading to the Ferranti Mark I commercial
computer

IBM SSEC, the first computer available to the general scientific community.

Part II: The “Big Iron” Era: (1952-1969)

The “dinosaurs” that shaped the world.

Today when people think about mainframes, they think of them as being
dinosaurs of a distant past.. sort of Dark Age of Information Technology,that
we’d better forget. This myth, the brainchild of “hacker” subculture and
best portrayed in Steven Levy’s “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”,is
just that. A myth. Reality is different. Mainframes are not Evil Machines.
They drove computing out of the labs, into big commercial businesses. They
got more people in touch with computers. They showed that computers could
be put into “real” (as opposed to academic) work. We’re here to remember.

The History

Chapter I: Big Irons, Big Market (IBM and the Seven Dwarves)

First of all: we all know who IBM is… but who were the Seven Dwarves ?
Here they were: Burroughs, Control Data Corp. General Electric, Honeywell,
NCR, Univac,RCA
Not even dwarves: Scientific Data Systems/Xerox Data Systems Philco

Chapter II: The minis and timesharing: a new world of computing
Chapter III: Software established
Chapter IV: Computing behind the Iron Curtain

Little is known in Western countries about this subject, but is immediately
apparent, even to the casual observer, that the most creative years for Eastern
Bloc engineers were the 50s and 60s. Therefore I decided to put all material
about Eastern Bloc computing here.
Cold War Computing an overview in Computer Shopper
History of Computing in Russia and USSR The Russian standpoint
Computing in the USSR Space
program From MIT

The Machines

BESM 6 Page

The Machines

Prominent Figures


  • Seymour
    Cray     His name means supercomputers. Always looking for the smart
    way to do things. An awesome engineer.

    • Part III: The 70s: From
    Mini to Micro: the world gets smaller.

    The 70s are commonly depicted as the “Decade of The Hackers”. This
    is only partially true. While it is correct that the forerunners of today’s
    PC were not conceived by those who were at the time the driving force of
    the market, but rather came for one-man firms located in place you wouldn’t
    expect, the real “building block” of the computer revolution were the microprocessor
    and, more generally speaking, the IC. Without those essential devices no
    “hacker” would have ever built a “microcomputer”. IC and microprocessor markets
    were fueled by what we today call the “embedded” market. There were buyer
    eager to get small intelligent devices, and the microprocessor was the logical
    answer. Obviously once the microprocessor was launched it was only a matter
    of time before someone had the idea to build a small computer around it.
    This had to be said to restore historical truth, that may have been somewhat
    lost in the clouds of myth. That said, “Glory to the ALTAIR”.

    The History

    Chapter I: Market in the 70s
    Chapter II: Micros: straight from cellars & garages

    The microcomputer revolution of the 70s was powered by the advent
    of microprocessor. For your studying pleasure here you can find links about
    the most remarkable CPUs developed in the 70s

    Part IV: The 80s: visions of the future

    The 80s were a decade of deep changing for IT. While, strictly speaking
    they have NOT produced many new ideas, they have changed the IT landscape
    forever. The decade has seen the introduction of “commercial grade” networks,
    the debut of previously envisioned GUIs and the battle for standard in the
    world of “microcomputers”. From a software point of view, the decade’s most
    influential legacy is Object oriented Programming (OOP), viewed by most people
    as a cornerstone in software engineering. A very creative decade after all.

    Chapter I: Mainframes and minis in the 80s
    Chapter II: GUI and WIMP: the now revolution

    Vid1 An Alan Kay 1987 video detailing the beginning of WIMP revolution. This video includes the famous 1968 Engelbart “Mother of all demos” which can be found here. More on Engelbart and the mouse at this site

    Chapter III: It’s a networked world

    Chapter IV: Computers In Japan: a documentary history

    The decade is marked by the entrance of the Japanese in the world computer
    market, both with their consumer products and their supercomputers, with
    excellent results on both fronts.
    While the position of Japan on the consumer market has since then declined,
    (today most products are outsourced to Chinese contractor), the tradition
    of Japan in supercomputers is still strong today, and from 2002 to late 2004
    the world most powerful computer was NEC “Earth Simulator”.

    Chapter V: The “Home Computer” phenomenon

    While, technically speaking, microcomputers are an innovation of
    the 70s, the “computer for the ma masses” really belongs to the 80s.
    The name says it all, “home computer”. The computer is not named after its “power”( so we’ve got supercomputers, mainframes,
    mini and micro) but after its supposed use (”home computer” vs “business
    computer”). This was intended to market computers as a new electrodomestic.
    It was not clear what really people were intended to do with their shiny
    new computers, but they were bolstered in ads as The Future, and people bought
    them.
    From an historical standpoint however, the term “home computer” is misleading,
    as it is the term “personal computer”, because very different machines may
    be given that name. (And in fact were given).

    Machined intended for different markets and (partially) different uses.
    Putting together the IBM PC and the ZX Spectrum is clearly incorrect:, as
    audiences who bought IBM PCs would have laughed if the seller presented them
    with a Sinclair,a Commodore, or an Atari machine.
    The distinguishing marker is clearly the price. We have:

  • Hobbyist Machines (Sinclair, Atari, Commodore), that tipically
    based their appeal on the reduced price and the rich availability of games.
    You didn’t expect to find many business application, and developer tools
    were hard to find (although this difficulty varied much from product to product).
    It was not infrequent to be left “alone” by makers who went out
    of business just some months after releasing their products, or were just
    not interested in providing user support. After all, you got what you paid
    for.
    But nobody told you.

    Of course there is an overlap between these two categories: power users
    of hobbyist machines frequently turned them into fully fledged business computers,
    often writing their own software. This home-developed software was frequently
    published in newly-born computer hobbyist magazines (being in fact open source),
    and the best of it seriously challenged commercial software, since in those
    days software houses were frequently family-run businesses, and the talent
    of a single developer really made a difference.
    People were driven (and sometimes forced) to write their own software by
    the cost (or the lack) of commercial alternatives, and by the marketing strategies
    used by hardware makers, who often publicized the computer as a way to learn
    programming, knowledge which was viewed as essential in tomorrow professional
    world. The hobbyist

    market in the 80s may be clearly divided
    in two phases:

  • The 68000 period (1986 onward), with two computer series

    reigning on the hobbyist market, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. A typical configuration

    included an 8 Mhz CPU, 512Kb-1Mb RAM,
    integrated 3 1/2 DD floppy, a mouse, a joystick and a monitor.     Surely
    a more “commercial” period, when BASIC programming was no longer considered
    “cool” and the mushroom magazines disappeared. The more tenacious of these
    former BASIC junkies however continued their work, which was, however, no
    longer distributed as “open source” printed in magazines, but as shareware
    or freeware software, distributed via (traditional) mail or through BBSes.
    Maybe a step backwards, but, viewed in an 80s’ perspective, even the shareware
    concept was revolutionary.

    • Part V: It’s the 90s, baby…

    The 90s, like the 80s, were not shaped by groundbreaking discoveries
    (these are going to be less frequenuret as the scientific foundations of
    IT stabilize) but rather by massive market movements. Smaller networks were
    consolidated in the “Information Superhighway”, and IT really began to change
    people’s lives (in developed countries, of course). A day which may be taken
    as a symbol of the decade was Aug. 31,1995, the day of Windows 95 release.
    Apart from the massive media coverage (which I didn’t expect), I was impressed
    by the fact that even people who didn’t have a pc stood in front of closed
    stores waiting for the opening to buy their own copy “so when I’ll buy a
    PC I’ll have it”… So if the 70s brought us “the affordable computer” and
    the 80s “the consumer computer” the 90s almost forced us to buy one. Today,
    even non computer-literate people write documents using word processor and
    write e-mail. Traditional methods are increasingly considered unusual if
    not odd.

    Chapter I: The Internet Revolution
    Chapter II: The “Software Crisis” and the Open Source movement
    Chapter III: The Fall of the Giants and the .com frenzy

    Part VI: Facts of the New Millennium

    It’s hard to say where market trends are leading us, and whether
    the future will be PC-centric or will be characterized by the “smartphone
    on steroids” syndrome, as the prophet of pervasive computing tell us, however
    Sun’s “Network PC” failure tells us that probably we won’t return to the”mainframe+dumb
    term” paradigm of the 60s. Manageability costs of PC networks is certainly
    an issue, and the trend is toward a more centralized model, but probably
    the circle won’t close. People have become accustomed to having data processing
    power under their control, and they won’t release it just because someone
    tells them to do so. Let’s just wait and see.. Two facts however are already
    distinguishable:

    Chapter I: From Information Technology to Information Culture: opening
    to a wider world.

    Invented as a number-crunching tool, the computer has been adopted
    as a control tool for industrial processes since the early 60s, but it’s
    its adoption in Humanities that marks a real cultural achievement. Computer
    aided textual analysis brings a powerful new tool for literary criticism
    (in fact it may be the beginning of a “quantitative” literary criticism),
    and commercial quality translation systems begins to break linguistic barriers:
    they’ve got still a LONG way to go, but even today people can benefit from
    these tools for their “non literary” translation needs (e.g. technical documents,
    office memos, etc).
    The most prominent change IT has brought in the world of culture lies however
    in digital libraries: mammoth collections of works no one could ever store
    in their home can be readily accessible through the Net and conveniently
    stored in cheap digital media. Of course there’s a price in it: viewing an
    e-text may not be as easy or convenient as its book counterpart, but certainly
    IS cheaper. Digital libraries besides are the only possible medium to effectively
    preserve for centuries to come the massive amounts of documents which Man
    has produced in the past and is producing,at much greater rate, now.
    These aspects are explored here.

    A Hypertextual History of Humanities Computing provides some background facts. From a talk given in 1995.

    As you can read the initiator of computer usage in the humanities was Roberto Busa SJ A bit of patriotism once in a while doesn’t do any harm…

    Computer Aided Literary Criticism

    Text preservation through digitizing

    Chapter II: Privacy, Freedom, Information: the three challenges of an
    IT-powered society.

    The ever growing role played by IT on “ordinary life” has led to
    concerns about the way computers are used, and, from the mid 90s on, developed
    countries have begun to adopt a legislation that pose some legal boundaries
    to what people can legally do with their computers.

    Chapter III: Sociological aspects of computing.

    Some papers about “The Computer and us”.

    Monographs

    Computers in Spaceflight: the NASA experience (1988), a detailed account on the subject from Gemini mission to the Space Shuttle. Handy if you want to understand the problems of mission-critical realtime system

    Computers take flight:a history of NASA’s pioneering fly-by-wire project From NASA’s history department.

    Computers take flight:a history of NASA’s pioneering fly-by-wire project From NASA’s history department.





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