As you probably know,
and there is more of this in my Earth history section, the
20th century started out fairly peacefully, with monarchies
and empires “ruling” the world. But all was not quiet, and
monarchal despotism, nationalism, radical socialism, and
class unrest were going to tear the world apart within a
decade or so. While the war to end all wars didn’t, the
peace to begin global peace didn’t work either. Fairly
immediately after the first war ended, the depression
began. It started first in Europe and then spread to the
US. To cut a long story short, it was not long -- before
extreme radical forces began to rule and conquer. I had a
chief executive at one time who told me “Desperate Times
call for Desperate Men”. Well, that’s what happened -- in
the creation of the USSR and the Nazis.
If I can move aside from the horror of those times, one
outcome was a quantum leap in technology and the
construction of the first real computers.
In the 1911, Tom Watson consolidated the “Computing -
Tabulating - Recording (C-T-R)” and the “International Time
Recording” Companies and in 1924, changed their name to
“International Business Machines” -- IBM.
It seems
that most inventions in computing started though, in
people’s bedrooms and garages.
The first
binary computer to be developed was by a German
-- Konrad Zuse in his parent’s living room. The Z1 had
64 words of memory and a clock speed of 1hz. It used
punched paper tape as input and output.
In the 1920s and 30s, there are a lot of public and secret
efforts started to develop "Thinking Machines",
essentially, machines that took different actions or
branches based upon data.
Commercially, machines
like programmable
tabulators were
developed. These had cables that the operators would
switch manually depending on the application -- sorting
or counting. These machines were relatively inexpensive
and could still be found in use into the 1970s. This
mindset pegged the computer as something to solve
complex mathematical problems - like counting payrolls -
and were narrowly targeted.
Privately and secretly, more research was taking place in
Britain, Germany and the US to develop truly programable
computers that could use punched cards and paper tape, not
just for data entry, but for program entry as well. So the
computer would become "general purpose".
In Germany, Zuse's work continued, but under the Nazis, his
work was directed towards a calculating machines for
bombing trajectories.
In Britain, the
"Colossus" computers (there were 10 built) were
being developed by Tommy Flowers
but they had a
single-purpose -- to defeat the German military codes.
Another effort to break the german "Enigma" codes was
also underway, and this is where the wild genius of Alan
Turing was used.
The first real
general-purpose
programmable electronic computer is accredited to the work of
J. Presper
Eckert and John Maunchly. It was built between 1943 and 1946 at
the University of Pennsylvania. It's name was
ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical
Integrator And Calculator. The pair went on to design
the EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC 1. Parts of ENIAC are now at
home in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, while
other parts are still on display at U. Penn, the
Computer History
Museum, and a
few other sites. ENIAC was one of the only early
computers to be saved. All of the others were destroyed
(we think), either by allied bombing raids, or to
"maintain secrecy".
However, after the war, the story of ENIAC was released,
the public imagination was captured, and a whole new world
of computers was about to emerge.
ENIAC at U. Penn.
The first general purpose computers used vacuum tubes and
either cables, paper tape or punched cards to program their
functions. This programming was the first generation of
software.
