The Computer Labs That Created the Digital World

MrSeb writes "In the time of Socrates, Plato and Cicero, great minds came together in local forums or sophist schools. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was triggered by homely gatherings at salons and fueled by the steaming hotpot of coffeehouses and caffeine. Today we still use forums, of course, and plenty of inventions and insight still originate from coffeehouses, but most innovation occurs in laboratories. ExtremeTech takes a look at the six computer labs that gave birth to the digital world — from Bletchley Park in Blighty, to PARC labs in Palo Alto, and everything in between."

Comments

Volta Labs?

[Animats]

This is another one of those "top N, one per page, ads on every page" ad farm trolls.

Their list isn't too impressive, either. Bell Labs, yes. IBM Watson, yes. PARC, yes. But where's the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, from which came ENIAC, and the beginnings of UNIVAC, the first commercial electronic computer to go into production? Also, Bletchly Park wasn't that influential because nobody knew about it until the 1970s.

What we call a "computer" today is properly a stored-program general purpose digital computer. There were machines built before that which had some, but not all, of those attributes. Bletchley Park's machines fall into that category). The WWII US crypto operation was at Arlington Hall, which did more hardware development than Bletchley Park. were developed. They were using punched cards where Bletchley used people and filing cabinets, and they seem to have developed digital magnetic tape, although the history there is cloudy. NSA is the direct descendant of Arlington Hall.

Another major pre-computer computing company was Teleregister, which was a spinoff from Western Union in 1949. They pioneered "remote computing" for stock quotations, railroad ticketing, and airline ticketing. Their Magnetronic Reservisor was the first big remote-access system, with magnetic drums holding the reservation data.

Re:Volta Labs?

[webmistressrachel]

I hate to tell you this (can't you tell?), but the Ferranti Mark one, based on Alan Turing's Manchester "Baby", was the first commercially produced programmable computer.

You pesky Americans, always trying to rewrite history! You're modded Insightful, too, and I bet I get "Troll" mods for stating facts, yet again.

Re:would love to visit

[leighklotz]

There are two ways anyone can visit PARC:
1. PARC Forum every Thursday http://www.parc.com/events/forum.html
      Not a guided tour, but you get to ask questions. And the talks are available for viewing afterward.
      I've asked questions of Guido van Rossum (a famous Dutchman no doubt you know) and Jill Tarter (SETI), and dozens of others.
2. Art exhibits
      There are art exhibits occasionally and they have guided tours of the art on specified days.
      You don't get to ask any questions; it's just an art exhibit space.

Intel has a small museum you can visit, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is a must-see.
The Tech computer museum in San Jose is iffy even if you have kids (exhibits aren't well maintained) though the imax theatre there is nice.

Now, what can I see in Amsterdam ;-)

uhhh... MIT and Harvard?

[lophophore]

I think they missed something important...

Sure, Silicon Valley and Stanford. They get their props.

But what about 128 ("America's Technology Highway") in Massachusetts, centering around MIT and Harvard?

Digital, Data General, Wang, Prime -- all from that area. Raytheon. Analog Devices. Symbolics. BBN. The list goes on and on.

Multix, Tenex -- foundations from which modern interactive operating systems were derived -- from MIT. Harvard has a *computer architecture* named after it.

Ok. Never mind what I said about Silicon Valley. They were late to the party.