Creation of the Computer 3After the success of UNIVAC, various companies began to see a future in computer development. New companies like Burrow, as well as old giants like General Electric, jumped into the computer business. But most large American businesses were dependent on the data process systems provided by one company, the office machine monolith, IBM. IBM had no computers. IBM's aging leader, the legendary sale guru, Thomas Watson Sr., was not eager to jump into the enormously costly development of computers.Computers back then, contained thousands of vacuum tubes, occupied one or more large rooms, and required a small army of attendants to run. IBM and most other people didn't see how computers could be used in business. It took Watson's son, Tom Watson Jr. to lead IBM into the computer age.As Watson himself recalled, the move was spurred by IBM's customers who were fed up with bulking punch cards. I remember particularly, Jim Madden, the Vice-President of Metropolitan life, who said we're going to cancel our IBM just the minute we learn to do this in tape because three floors of Metropolitan Life building are used to store the cards of our customer's accounts and if we keep going the way we will, they occupied the whole building.We were threatened into this progress. Faced with the prospect of losing customers, Tom Watson Jr. ordered the development of a computer. IBM's famous sales force told their customers a computer would arrive soon, in fact, it was still being planned. Finally, in 1953, IBM unveiled the 701. Although technologically inferior to the UNIVAC, the 701 and other early IBM computers were hits with the customers because the conformed to standard IBM systems and support.IBM saw the future, and it was computers. They redirected corporate efforts to computer development. IBM's efforts paid off, and by the beginning of 1960s, the company's large mainframe computers, dominated the business. But the development of the computer was about to go in an altogether different direction.We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the others things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. In 1961, America was trailing Russia in the race for space. 1961, a year of achievements for Soviet scientists in the race for space. Yuri Gagarin, has become the first human to orbit the earth. And crowds in Moscow's Red Square salute the 27 year old cosmonaut. As NASA engineers began planning the lunar mission, they realized a computer as powerful as one currently the size of a room must be on board. The engineers wondered, is such a small computer even possible.The first great break through that would lead to computer miniaturization had already been made on December 23rd, 1947 when three scientists at Bell labs, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen invented the transistor. Formed on the semiconductor silicon, the transistor could replace large vacuum tubes in computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors were tiny, required little power and produced little heat. The breakthrough was sufficiently important that the three inventors of the transistor were awarded the Nobel Prize. A computer that could navigate to the moon and back would require thousands of transistors, and although small, there were not nearly small enough.The next step in miniaturization occurred in 1959, when Robert Noice and Jack Kilby, engineers for rival transistor manufacturers, independently came up with breakthroughs that lead to the same revolutionary idea. An entire network of electronic components: Transistors, diodes, capacitors and resistors could be incorporated onto a single chip of silicon. This great innovation in electronics was called the Integrated Circuit. Using integrated circuits, a ten ounce computer was built that was as powerful as a thirty pound one made of transistors. But integrated circuits had an inherent problem, they were difficult to manufacture and therefore, were expensive. But the space race started just in time to pay for them.In 1969, five thousand integrated circuits made up the heart of each of two identical computers. One on the lunar orbiter, and one on the lander. For their size, these were the most powerful computers on earth. Soon to leave the earth entirely.As Neil Armstrong took one small step in the lunar dust, Intel engineer, Ted Hoff was making the last great leap in miniaturization. Developing an idea that would put an entire computer on a chip ofsilicon, the microprocessor. The genie would be out of its bottle, beginning the computer revolution and changing the world forever. Apollo 13, intended as the third lunar landing, has just lost two fuel cells and was venting oxygen into space two hundred thousand miles from earth. Soon, the second oxygen tank would begin loosing pressure. The astronauts would die unless they could precisely align their spacecraft and fire their rocket to slingshot themselves around the moon and back to earth. Critical to the alignment was Apollo's state of the art guidance computer. A new trajectory was figured. The all or nothing rocket firing was made. The Apollo 13 crew miraculously returned to earth with the help of their small and powerful computer.By the last Apollo mission two and one half year later, computers as powerful as those on Apollo would be available to everyone. That was because soon before the Apollo 13 flight, an engineer at Intel, Ted Hoff had come up with and ingenious idea. Hoff had been told to design twelve separated integrated circuits to make a Japanese pocket calculator. He suggested placing the entire processing unit on a chip and programming it just like a computer.Intel developed the idea and by 1970 they had a working model of a microprocessor. It was the invention not just of integrated circuits, but of a particular kind of integrated circuit, the microprocessor that makes today's personal computers possible. Smaller than a fingernail, microprocessors contains many of the components of a computer, including a control unit, a clock, and areas where data can be stored and modified. Processing power was about to become very cheap and very compact.In the mid 1970's, two friends, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, were manufacturing a small computer in a Palo Alto garage. Steve Jobs was a college drop out, but he was a college drop out with a difference. He was very intelligent, had a lot of street smarts, and he's also extremely ambitious. But perhaps more important than that, he knew the other Steve, Steve Wozniak had created something exceptional. Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen and Steven Wozniak sold his HP calculator to finance their company that would revolutionize the computer industry. Jobs trekked all over the San Francisco Bay area to find buyers for the five hundred dollar machine, which they called the Apple One.The Apple One was large and unwieldy. Jobs realized they needed a new design for a computer that anyone could use. Wozniak began to build the Apple Two. The fate of the Apple changed dramatically when in the fall of 1976, a visitor to Wozniak garage saw the prototype of the Apple Two. The visitor was Mike Marckkula, who at 32 had retired from Intel as a millionaire. He was so impressed by the Apple Two that he joined Apple and put it on a sound business footing. The Apple Two was introduced to the public and sales skyrocketed. But in 1978, even with the success of the Apple Two, using a computer wasn't easy.The early Apple computers as well as all early personal computers, did not have graphical interfaces, they didn't have mice. They had what's known as a command line interface, that is, you type instructions into the computer and your instructions appeared as text on the screen. A simple to use computer had been conceived by a computer scientist named Doug Engelbart. He demonstrated his vision in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Wielding a keyboard and a pointing device he called a mouse, Engelbart worked with a computer thirty miles away linked by microwaves and demonstrated word processing and hypertext.Many in the audience went home inspired, but one group alone was to fulfill Englebart's vision. That group was just down the road from San Francisco at Xerox Parc. In 1970s, Xerox dominated the copier industry but thought the future might be in computers. A young Xerox executive, Robert Taylor, worked with a team to transform the way the computer industry was perceived. As Robert Taylor himself remembers, The chairman of Xerox at the time, Peter McColough made a speech where he said that Xerox was going to become the architecture of information. So I asked his speech writer not too long after that, what did that mean, because I had an idea about what it ought to mean and so did other people. And the speech writer said he didn't really know but it's a ringing phrase. And so I said, well, we're going to make it happen.Robert Taylor Hired many of the countries top computer scientists and challenged them to create an easy to use personal computer. The result was the Alto which incorporated many of the innovations in personal computers we take for granted today. All developed at Xerox Parc. The Alto used a mouse, a graphical interface, built-in networking, and printed on a laser printer. Xerox developed the Star, the commercial model of the Alto, but it never sold well.Xerox was a large and very successful photo copier company. And it didn't really understand computers, didn't appreciate the brilliance, the originality, and the enormous commercial worth of the computer development at Xerox Parc. But Steve Jobs did.In 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox Parc and saw the Alto. He returned to Apple and immediately set to work on what would become the Macintosh Computer, the first popular personal computer similar to those used today. What made the Macintosh easy to use was its operating system and applications, otherwise known as software. Increasingly, software was dominating the advances made in computers.Bill Gates, the young president of computing software company, Microsoft, understood the importance of software to the future of computers and parlayed this vision into a vast software empire, making him the richest man in the world. The dream of a machine that could think come from a mechanical device to an electronic one, where the bits of coded information that ran it was important, perhaps more important than the machine that the control. This may have been the best evidence that a thinking machine had arrived and could now be placed on your desk.Soon, nearly half the jobs in America would use the computer. Within a decade, microprocessors would be everywhere, incorporated into automobiles, appliances, and scientific instruments, significantly increasing their capability and reliability. Unprecedented fortunes will be made in business that hadn't existed a decade before. Education would be transformed forever as the access to information would be transferred from libraries and universities to your desktop. The earth would shrink with unprecedented speed as the worldwide communication grid becomes accessible to anyone with a computer and modem. And even now, the evolution of a thinking machine isn't finished. Computers have already changed the way we live, and they'll change the way we explorer our world and other worlds in the 21st century. They will take us into distant galaxies, and they will connect us right here on earth. Computers will continue to become more interconnected. They will continue to become smaller, faster, cheaper. And software will become more powerful. Minds that have yet to be formed will mould this power to create new marvels, inconceivable to us today.。
