'Modern' Computers Turn 60 Years Old

Christian Smith writes "Stored program computers are 60 years old on Saturday. The Small Scale Experimental Machine, or 'Baby,' first ran on the 21st of June, 1948, in Manchester. While not the first computer, nor even programmable computer, it was the first that stored its program in its own memory. Luckily, transistors shrank the one tonne required for this computing power to something more manageable."

Comments

Not entirely true

[jd]

It used 24 bit address space, expandable to 32, so although it only physically posessed 32 words of memory, it could easily have supported a modern operating system if the memory had been built for it. And you didn't mind the response times.

Not so fast...

[DrYak]

Luckily, transistors shrank the one tonne required for this computing power to something more manageable The poster apparently hasn't checked the specs needed to run Vista.

More seriously :

In 60 years we've gone from computers the size of a room to a laptop computers thin enough to fit in an interoffice envelope. Where will we be in another 60 years, or even ten for that matter? You can bet that the developer will definitely find use for additional power, as machine performance increases.

What has caused the computers to shrink to envelop-size isn't as much the increased performance/size ratio. It's the market.

If Moore's law stated (roughly paraphrasing) that computer performance doubles each 2 years, one should expect the computer to reduce their size by half in that time frame. But that didn't happen. Because most of the time people only one to use the additional performance to have the same box as before but faster.

Only from time to time the users' interest shifts.
Desktop replaced microcomputers and mainframes, not (only) because suddenly the circuits could have been made smaller, but mainly because there was an increased interest in having a computer in each house.

Today's UMPC appeared only because the public is starting to have interest into something that is small and cheap. With the increase of circuit density, building pocketable devices that have the same power as computers from a couple of years before has been possible for quite long time. PDA have been around for a few years and some have quite decent performance. But the demand only started arising now.

So what will happen in 10 years ?
It all depends on the market then.
The technology will be around that could fit the processing power of today's big cluster into a chip as small as a pen.
But then it all depends of buyers choice. If suddenly pen--sized computer are the latest trends, you'll see them around. Probably with geeks claiming that 2018 will finaly be year of the Linux PenComputer, because Windows 8.0 just can't run on them.

But if UMPC are still the trend, you'll only see the same form factor as before, only with 40x processing power than today - three quarter of which will be taken by a combination of the bloated operating system and the DRM lock mechanisms.