The evolution of computer technology from laboratory experiments to personal computers

¶ … Computer: What is going to be next?

The development of computers is a process that has been going on for the last 70 years or so. The nature of development has been different over the years and the changes have come due to the realization of mankind of the possible utilities of computers also. The first attempts were mainly laboratory experiments to help men calculate faster through the use of mechanical-electrical methods. The developments were also more scientific than developments of technology. At the same time, other scientists came up with their own version of a computer which was used in the Navy. The next development came with the armed forces giving a contract for the development and building of a computer exclusively for them. The development was a computer which the forces could not use as the war ended in the meantime. The team that developed this computer went on to make further developments and those developments led to the development of UNIVAC, which was the first computer apart from IBM as the operations of this computer was faster due to its method of input. There was no competitor till now for IBM's punched card input. This was the beginning of the decline for IBM and its dominance in the computer industry.

IBM tried their hand utilizing their superiority in terms of design and product technology when the age of computers shifted to personal computers by coming out with the real personal computer in 1981. By that time, the world of technology had shifted and there were different specializations in areas of the industry. Intel dominated the central processing unit manufacture and this dominance lasts even today; the base system operation software had been monopolized by Microsoft and this permitted them to have a stranglehold on personal computer software totally; and the starting check up and system logic was developed by IBM, but this was also copied and started by others.

Thus the manufacture and development of computers became really widespread. The usage of personal computers for a home gadget with abilities to calculate fast, write down long passages, copy different material that one seeks, see or hear songs or movies; communicate with others, etc. are done by today's computers. Yet, this is an industry where the pace of development has to be kept up, or the participant in the industry will be thrown out. This is leading to many developments which are falling by the wayside and new developments are coming out. Whether these will succeed or not finally depends on the desires of the users. Ultimately they have to meet some needs that the user feels are required, or they will just be a technological curiosity fit for a museum.

Analysis

The nature of computers has developed over the years and the first levels were designing of calculating machines with a high speed rather development of computers with the benefits as we know them to exist today. At different stages in history, new technologies have come out, or the developments of some scientists have reached a stage where the final machine from that research has been available for mankind to use.

1946 - The First Practical Electronic computer

The United States military needed a calculating machine for preparing the artillery firing tables and these are the settings used for different weapons for target accuracy. The branch of military responsible for preparing the tables is Ballistic Research Laboratory and they decided to give the job to John Mauchly who was at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at Pennsylvania. Mr. Mauchly had become famous for his research for preparing some calculating machines with electric motors inside and in 1942 had started building a better calculating machine based on the work of John Atanasoff. He wanted to use vacuum tubes to speed up calculation and the development work started in May 1943. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The ENIAC I Computer - J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly)

In the designing of this machine and its building, he was joined by J. Presper Eckert. The total period for designing was one year and another year and a half for building. The cost for building it was $500,000. The main reason for the designing of ENIAC -- Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator was then over as the war had ended. The machine was then used for designing a hydrogen bomb, weather forecasting, cosmic ray studies, thermal ignition studies and designing of wind tunnels. The machine was the biggest of all with 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints.

The area covered was 1,800 square feet, and the machine had a weight of 30 tons and a consumption of electric power of 160 kilowatts. The machine was also the fastest till that time and could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions within one second. The increase in speed was achieved, but the programming was a very slow process. In the same year, the founders started a new company for computer development called the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. By 1949, this company launched the BINAC or Binary Automatic computer. This computer made use of magnetic tape for the storage of data. Then this company was bought by Remington Rand Corporation and the name was changed to Univac Division of Remington Rand. This company was the organization to bring out UNIVAC which is one of the originals of the type of computers that are used today. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The ENIAC I Computer - J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly)

1951 - UNIVAC begins to take over the business industries market:

Presper Eckert and John Mauchly set up their company and found their first client in the United States Census Bureau. The population of United States was growing very fast due to the baby boom that was taking place then and they needed a new computer for calculation purposes. This led to the start of the project for the new project called UNIVAC with a deposit of $300,000 given to the new company by the census bureau. The designing and development went slowly and the design and contract could be finalized only in 1948 and then the problem was that the ceiling of expenditure had been fixed by the Census Bureau at $400,000. The inventors wanted the project to continue and in doing so wanted to absorb the excess expenditure, but the situation was grim. This led to the entry of Remington Rand, and in spite of all efforts, the price of the computer remained fixed at that price. The total expenditure for the project was nearly one million dollars, and the first computer was accepted by the bureau in 1951. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The History of the UNIVAC Computer - J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly)

This led to other orders and forty six UNIVAC computers were built and sold. This was thus the first manufacture of a commercial computer system. The first buyer from outside the government was General electric for their Appliance Park facility in Louisville, Kentucky. The computer was used for payroll purposes. This computer added in a time of 120 microseconds, multiplied within 1,800 microseconds and divided within 3,600 microseconds. The biggest advantage was that input was from a magnetic tape from which characters could be read at 12,800 characters per second. J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly had built this UNIVAC and the machine was a direct competitor with IBM's computing equipment for the business users of computers. The speed with which Univac's magnetic tape could collect input data was faster than IBM's technology of collecting data from punch cards. However, it was not until the presidential election of 1952 that the public had got to accept the Univac's ability to perform better than IBM. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The History of the UNIVAC Computer - J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly)

1981 - The era of personal computers begin:

One of the first attempts to assist computing for single users was the 'SCAMP' project by IBM in 1973. This was a development effort by the General Systems Division of the company to produce a piece of equipment which was called "Special Computer, APL Machine Portable." This was called by the PC Magazine as a revolutionary concept and "the world's first personal computer." (IBM Personal Computer) This machine had multiple uses as a desktop calculator, an interactive programming device and could run canned applications. (IBM Personal Computer) Another "personal computer" produced by IBM was the IBM 5110 Computing System, and this was announced in January 1978. This was similar to the 5100 which met all the requirements of professional and scientific problem-solvers, the 5110 was provided as a full-function computer to business and industry. This used a new system and programs, and helped businesses to use the 5110 to automate such applications as general ledger and accounts payable. Apart from this, the 5110 system could be programmed to offer a variety of reports in order to "help management analyze sales, schedule resources, reduce inventory cost and plan future growth." (IBM 5110: Computing System) It can be clearly seen that IBM were making efforts to launch the personal computers and going through experiments for that purpose.

They succeeded with their model 5150 which was released in September 1981 at a price of $3,000 a piece. The CPU being used was Intel 8088 with a speed of 4.77 MHz. There was only an available RAM of 16K and that could be increased to a maximum of 640 K. The display was for text in the form of 80 characters and 24 lines. There was no built in storage, but one could take storage of 160 KB in 5.25-inch disk drives. There were ports for cassette and keyboard with internal expansion slots. The operating system was IBM PC-DOS Version 1.0. When the situation is analyzed, it will be seen that the IBM personal computer system was not built to be as powerful as the other systems from which it wanted to grab market shares. The RAM was low and used audio cassettes to load and record information. The floppy drive could be taken if desired by the customers and no hard drives were yet available. (The IBM Personal Computer)

At the same time, the system was made to be easily expandable and this expansion was permitted for additional memory, serial ports, parallel ports, videos and whatever was desired. As the leader of the computer industry, IBM knew that they had to produce the computer fast and did not think that the system will reach the level it has reached today. They used available material from others and this made them rely on Intel CPU and operating system from Microsoft who called it as PC-Dos and gave it to IBM. This permitted other companies to get the same components from the same suppliers and build up their own PCs and thus cut down market shares of IBM. The only problem that they had was regarding the BIOS which was under copyright of IBM and thus legally protected. This made some other manufacturers and potential manufacturers go through an exercise of getting suitable BIOS and this gave them an opportunity to produce and sell PCs.

The PCs produced by competitors were cheaper, but similar to IBM PCs. This led to the development of PCs all over the world, and due to the designing by IBM the products look extremely professional. Today, these products are the Windows operating system and Intel CPU computers. At the same time, it is important to note that within one year IBM had succeeded in selling 200,000 IBM PCs. This is a very large number when compared to 46 UNIVAC computers that were sold. In the same year, 1982, Compaq launched their PC and it was 100% compatible with IBM. They had to spend $1 million to develop the ROM BIOS that made it similar to IBM PCs, and which did not yet violate the copyright held by IBM. (The IBM Personal Computer)

Another very interesting point which needs to be understood is that the Personal Computers now have brought about areas pertaining to development of the computers. One was with regard to the development relating to the machinery and the other was with regard to the development of the methods of instructions for operation or for software. For the earlier initial models with regard to the computers, the methods of functioning of the computer were basically being decided in great terms by the circuits which prevailed within the scope of the computer and any changes which took a considerably higher amount of time in order to implement it. In this case, as it relates the computers which were being created and further developed into various useful tools for individuals. However it needs to be understood that it was not possible to create individual computers or PC's for personal use, and thus different types of software were being developed and promoted for various kinds of use and these are considered to be known as programs. Most of the individual users however do not know as to what of the programs serve the different purposes, but there are several general packages which are being available in order to enable them to make use of the computer.

Thus there are several organizations that have built into various software developers who have become specialized and the most important advantage for them over others is that the computers are on the process of changing. This is basically because of the technological changes that are occurring frequently. Let us now make a comparison of a modern present day computer with that of the first Personal Computer which was being introduced by IBM. The storage levels which was then available during that time was at the range of 160K and today we find that it is around 80M which comes to about 500 times much bigger than that of the previous storage. The speed levels were then of the range of 4.77 MHz and today the level of speed is that of 133 MHz. The RAM earlier was that of the range of 16K, even though the standard nowadays is that of 256 M. Thus the speed and the level of storage have been greatly enhanced and this makes way for the PC users to relate to their PC in any manner that individual likes. Above all, we need to note that PCs have made everybody possible to take the benefits offered by the Internet. This is really a very huge storage level relating to information and though there are several useless websites, there is also a huge amount of useful information which is available.

2000 - Turn of the century - PDA:

This is an area where the presently used equipment of a few is being entered into. This device was launched only in 2000 and there are two very similar items - PDA and Smart phones. The definition of connected PDA is as converged devices with a PDA-based operating system, and these are like Palm OS or Microsoft's Pocket PC. Smart phones are defined as cellular handsets and use OS like Symbian or Microsoft's Smart phone. There are some differences, but the operating systems for PDA and Smart phones by Microsoft are both based on Windows CE.NET. So it is very difficult to make a clear distinction between PDA and Cell phones that some try to make. Of the two, some feel that Smart phones, which are a PDA/phone combination, will become popular as it has the ability to perform multiple tasks with one piece of hardware. (Do PDAs have a future?)

Presently the overall acceptance of Smart phones has not been high due to a few issues: the earlier models have been large and bulky, and thus unwieldy for daily phone use; the phone quality was poor; there were very few cell phone carriers that gave support to Smart phone advantages; and, the screen size for the PDA were very small to be useful. During recent periods, the difficulties of customers have been realized and both PDA manufacturers and cell phone providers have seen that a well-made converged device is important. According to analysts, the PDA market will continue to grow, despite a general agreement among experts that there will be a decline in the market as Smart phones grow more popular. According to reports, the overall PDA market is expected to grow to $10 billion by 2008, and the biggest portion of that will come from wireless handhelds. (Do PDAs have a future?)

How are these equipments going to be used for? For this purpose let us refer to a case that IBM gives in one of its manuals. The example that they provide is that of a traveler who arrives at an airport from outside and has taken a shuttle in order to reach the rental car agency. In most of the regular cases, the driver will have to ask for information's pertaining to rental record, or that of the club membership number. When they have a PDA in hand, they need to have to ask for the name. The picture might be available on the device and then the driver does not need to ask for any information, assuming that the picture is considered to be good. They look up for the records which are available on a handheld device and mark the arrival. Ideally, the driver should be able to tell as to where in which parking space, or slot, the car meant for the traveler is to be located. By the time the traveler gets to the area of the rental agency, the car need to be waiting for the traveler in the allotted parking space. The objective here is to clearly provide and promote better service to the customers. (IBM Workplace Client Technology Micro Edition Version 5.7.1: Application Development and Case Study) Only thing is that a person who is a marketing individual, who is as well a cynic, may think that this is rather like an electric toothbrush.

2005 - What is going to be the next?

This is the most difficult part. The direction that the development of the device will take depends on what the developer feels is the utility of the instrument to mankind. In the meantime, let us note that some of the developments are still not clear of potential health hazards. There has been a confirmation from the Food and Drug Administration that it has called for more tests on wireless health issues, and has asked that the tests have to be overseen by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Department of Health and Human Services. It is clear that the FDA is not satisfied with the studies that have been conducted till date, and it is increasing its involvement. The organization has declared the studies to be of a high priority, and FDA officials would like to see some studies that showed potential health concerns being repeated. (Conspiracy theories aside, FDA steps up wireless health research)

Still in the future, no one knows exactly as to which direction computers will go. There are many possibilities like computers thinking as humans think, robots taking over the jobs of humans, and so on. Whatever happens, the future development of computers will have a big social impact on the world as we now know it now. Once we increase our dependence on computers further, will society be able to deal with the changes that automation will bring? (Future of Computers)

There are certain sites on which interesting thoughts on this may be found. These are " ACM's Anti-Mac Interface Approach, Wearable Computing at MIT, Jakob Nielsen's UseIt, Don Gentner's Homepage, ACM's list of HCI Sites, British HCI Group, Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence Resources, Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Future Technology, Future Of Artificial Intelligence, Robo Space Daily, The Robotics Institute, www-robotics.usc.edu (Future of Computers) It is important to remember that there are bursts in development of technology and then they seem to go into a slumber. This has been seen in the history of space probes, atomic energy development, etc.