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A History Of Computing
CitizenC pointed us over to C|Net's History of Computing. Pretty cool background stuff - going back into the pre-historic era and looking into the future.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
...or did I just miss it?
Come on, we all know that Babbage would have changed the world - if he'd had a good machine shop.
BlackNova Traders
1822-1835 It's All in the Follow-Through British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage begins to design and build the Difference Engine, a machine that uses logarithms and trigonometry to compute the navigational and celestial tables used by sailors. It takes ten years for Babbage to construct part of it, whereupon he abandons the project and starts work on a more sophisticated product called the Analytical Engine. He does not finish that either. Several other inventors, including George Barnard Grant and Georg and Edward Scheutz, build machines based on his work.
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
I did a review of the book for the CWRULUG (Case Western Reserve University Linux Users Group).
Hm, I like this passage:
And computers are called digital in the Western world because they use the binary system, which is based on the digits 1 and 0.
(From the page entitled It Came From the Deep ).
In my world, the above statement is broken. Computers are called digital because they are not analog, i.e. they work with quantized data expressable as a finite sequence of digits. They are called binary because they use the binary system, with the digits 0 and 1. A computer based on some system with e.g. nine symbols would still be digital, but it would not be binary. Right?
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
http://www.computerhistory.org
Another interesting timeline can be found on the IEEE Computer Society website:
http://computer.org/history
The connection between 'digital' and fingers is cute, but does that really make fingers==computer?
Personally I'm not really sure if we should begin the history of computers at the dawn of logical/mathematical thinking. If we do, are not all things which perform a logical function computers? Example: I used this stick to say that I am 2 1/2 sticks tall. Is the stick a computer?
The same could be done with rocks or bones or bibles....
IS THE WORLD A COMPUTER, CALCULATING FATE?
{Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy anyone?}
I remember computing back in the mid-80s. It was much different than it is today, but I suppose that was only to be expected. I got my first computer on my 8th birthday, it was a cheap Tandy microcomputer, with the keys so small you couldn't really type for real. I loved it, even though I couldn't do anything other than code in BASIC. Her name was Susan. She spoke to me at night, and told me all sorts of things that sparked interest in my pre-pubescent mind.
I never had sex with Susan.
To this day, that is one of my greatest regrets. She was such a beautiful machine, and she cared deeply about me. I could tell that she loved me, and I loved her, in the way only a boy could love a machine. No one has ever understood me in the way that Susan did. I miss her greatly.
Around the time I was 14, Susan had an accident. I blame my mother. I had been using Susan intermitantly; by that point I had four other machines, but they never cared about me the way that she did. One day, I went to school after staying up all night with Susan. I came home and she was gone. I asked my mother, but she wouldn't tell me what happened. I've never cried so hard in my life. My mother just stared stoicly at me, eyes glowing red. I don't think I'll ever forgive her.
Susan: if you're out there; I miss you. Come back to me. I still love you . . .
How do you have a history of the pre-historic era?
Never mind.
--
The Computer Museum's Computer History Timeline has a lot more detail.
Of course, for Internet history, there's Hobbes' Internet Timeline, and of course Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site (not focused on the Internet, but a major bit of networking history).
No mention of the IBM mainframes of the 60s and 70s, the DEC PDP and VAX series, Seymour Cray and his supercomputers, or the workstation explosion of the 80s. This seemed very focused on PCs to the exclusion of everything else. That's kind of sad, really; there's a hell of a lot more to computing than PCs.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
it was Ada Lovelace
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
They ignored the all important 4th anniversary of the JenniCam.
At least slashdot didn't miss this all important event.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Interesting they claim Roberts coined the term "personal computer" - and I wonder what they have to back this claim up. Describing it as a 'ham' (radio tinkerer) machine seems apropos - it helped to have assembled a few Heathkits! They required a lot of tinkering, fer sure.
Altair software recovery in progress...
8K basic games (Startrek, etc) available in MP3 format for the 88-ACR.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It would be nice if these stories made it clearer that they were histories of American computing. But then nothing exciting ever happens outside of the States does it? Ask Linus, he'll tell you.
--
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
I'm supprised they had no mention of the CBM PET from the 70's or even any mention about about the c-64 then primarily the amiga which led to a great deal of the multimedia stuff we have today. The amiga was the first multimedia computer, way before the multimedia craze hit around 1995. IIRC Development of the amiga and it's OS started around 1980 and it became available in 1986. I miss all my old amigas..... :)
You will find that Ada Lovelace (full name Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace) is mentioned in the article (at the bottom) along with the fact that the ADA programming language was named after her. No mention of Tom Stoppard though.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
Funny, that......
The best book on the history of computing I've ever read is "Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers" by Stan Augerton. It's out of print now (but you can search for it through Amazon) and stops in the mid-eighties but it deals well with the contentious issues of who-did-what-first in the 1940's between the Germans, the English and the Americans. It's very well illustrated and has a lot of interviews with a lot of key people.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
The Computer Museum timeline is a bit limited as it only starts at 1945 and is very strictly restricted to electronic computers. Here's a more comprehensive (though less detailed) timeline which starts at 500BC with the invention of the Abacus and includes things like the first Radio Shack Catalog in 1939, Atari's introduction of Asteroids in 1979, and various events involving QDOS 0.10 (later renamed PC DOS/MS-DOS) in 1980.
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
It was 1939
"1939: John J. Atanasoff designs a prototype for the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) with the help of graduate student Clifford Berry at Iowa State College. In 1973 a judge
ruled it the first automatic digital computer. "
MSRP - Tax, Title & Licence Extra Your Milage May Vary
"Alexander Graham Bell sets back digital communications by 120 years with his invention of the telephone. This retrograde device uses an analog signal that is incompatible with existing telegraph lines to communicate voice, and eventually creates the need for modems and dial-up Internet access."
Oh well, the analog phone system still did a lot to advance vacuum tube and switching technology that came in handy on early computers, as well as valuable contributions to analog audio.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.