Evaluation of computer technology trends and future developments

¶ … 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.

1942: The first Electronic Computer

Professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry put together the world's first electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942. The computer prepared by them contained several innovations in computing, and the innovations included a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, and a separation of storage memory for the computer and its computing functions. John Atanasoff was very fond of fast cars and scotch and even wrote most of the concepts of the first modern computer on the back of a cocktail napkin. He teamed up with Clifford Berry to build a prototype of the computer in late 1939. Their computer was the first computing machine to use electricity, vacuum tubes, binary numbers and capacitors. The capacitors were contained in a rotating drum which also held the electrical charge required for the memory. Berry had a background in electronics and mechanical construction skills and was brilliant and inventive. He proved to be the ideal partner for Atanasoff. The prototype that was built by the team got them a grant of $850 so that they build a full-scale model. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The Atanasoff-Berry Computer the First Electronic Computer - John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry)

This took them the next two years in the effort to improve their machine, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. When the final machine was ready, it was the size of a desk, weighed over 700 pounds, contained more than 300 vacuum tubes, and a mile of wire. Compared to computers of today, it was very slow and could calculate one operation in 15 seconds, when today a computer can calculate over 150 billion operations in 15 seconds. The computer was very large, and could not be carried around, and thus it remained in the basement of the physics department. At that time, the war was going on and John Atanasoff could not complete the patent process and/or develop the computer further. Then storage space was needed in the physics building, and the result was the dismantling of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The Atanasoff-Berry Computer the First Electronic Computer - John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry)

1944, another computer:

Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper built the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The first in this series of computers was Mark I which was built in 1944. The machine was a giant roomful of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The weight of the machine was 5 tons and it contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. This machine was used by the U.S. Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations in operation until 1959. The computer was controlled by pre-punched paper tape, and able to add, subtract, multiply, divide and refer to previous results. It contained special subroutines for logarithms and trigonometric functions and operated up to 23 decimal place numbers. Data was stored and counted mechanically through the use of 3000 decimal storage wheels, 1400 rotary dial switches, and 500 miles of wire. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The Harvard MARK I Computer - Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper)

Since the computer had electromagnetic relays, the machine was classified as a relay computer. All output was printed out on an electric typewriter. By today's standards, the Mark I was slow, needing 3-5 seconds for a multiplication operation, but it was probably faster than the earlier machine. One of the developers, Howard Aiken had no idea of the eventual widespread appeal of computers. "Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States," he said as late as 1947. Apart from building this machine, Grace Hopper is responsible for the term 'bug' that denotes a computer fault. The original 'bug' was a moth, and that had caused a hardware fault in the Mark I. Hopper was the first to 'debug' a computer by removing the moth. (Inventors of the Modern Computer: The Harvard MARK I Computer - Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper)

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?)