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.

Comments

Fire in the Valley

[sinnergy]

An even better account of the evolution of the computer can be read in the book "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer" (Second Edition) by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It goes into great detail and gives a lot of interesting anecdotes and really explores not only the technology, but the personalities behind the computer revolution as well.

I did a review of the book for the CWRULUG (Case Western Reserve University Linux Users Group).

Digital and binary

[Emil Brink]

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?

Timelines

[papou]

I recently found the computer history museum website. It features a nice illustrated timeline of computing history. You can find it at

http://www.computerhistory.org

Another interesting timeline can be found on the IEEE Computer Society website:

http://computer.org/history

Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

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 . . .

Very skewed view of computing...

[Troy Baer]

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.

--Troy

Usual Omissions

[Dunx]

So, Turing gets a mention, but not the Manchester Mark I. The first mainframe manufacturer Lyons (yes, they of the ice cream and cakes) never opened their doors. Sinclair and Acorn didn't exist either, it seems.

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.

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