Computer Industry in America: From Abacus to Supercomputers
Only once in a lifetime will a new invention come about to touch every aspect of
our lives. Such a device that changes the way we work, live, and play is a special one,
indeed. A machine that has done all this and more now exists in nearly every business in
the U.S. and one out of every two households (Hall, 156). This incredible invention is
the computer. The electronic computer has been around for over a half-century, but its
ancestors have been around for 2000 years. However, only in the last 40 years has it
changed the American society. From the first wooden abacus to the latest high-speed
microprocessor, the computer has changed nearly every aspect of peoples lives for the
better.
The earliest existence of the modern day computer ancestor is the abacus. These
date back to almost 2000 years ago. It is simply a wooden rack holding parallel wire on
which beads are strung. When these beads are moved along the wire according to
"programming" rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can
be performed (Soma, 14). The next innovation in computers took place in 1694 when Blaise
Pascal invented the first digital calculating machine. It could only add numbers and
they had to be entered by turning dials. It was designed to help Pascal's father who was
a tax collector (Soma, 32).
In the early 1800, a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage designed an
automatic calculation machine. It was steam powered and could store up to 1000 50-digit
numbers. Built into his machine were operations that included everything a modern
general-purpose computer would need. It was programmed by and stored data on cards with
holes punched in them, appropriately called punch cards. His inventions were failures
for the most part because of the lack of precision machining techniques used at the time
and the lack of demand
for such a device (Soma, 46).
After Babbage, people began to lose interest in computers. However, between 1850
and 1900 there were great advances in mathematics and physics that began to rekindle the
interest (Osborne, 45). Many of these new advances involved complex calculations and
formulas that were very time consuming for human calculation. The first major use for a
computer in the U.S. was during the 1890 census. Two men, Herman Hollerith and James
Powers, developed a new punched-card system that could automatically read information on
cards without human intervention (Gulliver, 82). Since the population of the U.S. was
increasing so fast, the computer was an essential tool in tabulating the totals.
These advantages were noted by commercial industries and soon led to the
development of improved punch-card business-machine systems by International Business
Machines (IBM), Remington-Rand, Burroughs, and other corporations. By modern standards
the punched-card machines were slow, typically processing from 50 to 250 cards per
minute, with each card holding up to 80 digits. At the time, however, punched cards was
an enormous step forwards; they provided a means of input, output, and memory storage on
a massive scale. For more than 50 years following their first use, punched-card machines
did the bulk of the world's business computing and a good portion of the computing work
in science (Chposky, 73).
By the late 1930's punched-card machine techniques had become so
well established and reliable that Howard Hathaway Aiken, in
collaboration with engineers at IBM, undertook construction of a large automatic digital
computer based on standard IBM electromechanical parts. Aiken's machine, called the
Harvard Mark I, handled 23-digit numbers and could perform all four arithmetic
operations. Also, it had
special built-in programs to handle logarithms and trigonometric functions. The Mark I
was controlled from prepunched paper tape. Output was by card punch and electric
typewriter. It was slow, requiring 3 to 5 seconds for a multiplication, but it was fully
automatic and could complete long computations without human intervention (Chposky,
103).
The outbreak of World War II produced a desperate need for computing capability,
especially for the military. New weapons' systems were produced which needed trajectory
tables and other essential data. In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchley, and their
associates at the University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high-speed electronic
computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC, for "Electrical Numerical
Integrator And Calculator". It could multiply two numbers at the rate of 300 products
per second, by finding the value of
each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was thus about 1,000
times faster than the previous generation of computers (Dolotta, 47).
ENIAC used 18,000 standard vacuum tubes, occupied 1800 square feet of floor
space, and used about 180,000 watts of electricity. It used punched-card input and
output. The ENIAC was very difficult to program because one had to essentially re-wire
it to perform whatever
task he wanted the computer to do. It was, however, efficient in handling the particular
programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is generally accepted as the first
successful high-speed electronic digital computer and was used in many applications from
1946 to 1955
(Dolotta, 50).
Mathematician John von Neumann was very interested in the ENIAC. In 1945 he
undertook a theoretical study of computation that demonstrated that a computer could have
a very simple and yet be able to execute any kind of computation effectively by means of
proper
programmed control without the need for any changes in hardware. Von Neumann came up
with incredible ideas for methods of building and organizing practical, fast computers.
These ideas, which came to be referred to as the stored-program technique, became
fundamental for
future generations of high-speed digital computers and were universally adopted (Hall,
73).
The first wave of modern programmed electronic computers to take advantage of
these improvements appeared in 1947. This group included computers using random access
memory (RAM), which is a memory designed to give almost constant access to any particular
piece of information (Hall, 75). These machines had punched-card or punched-tape input
and output devices and RAMs of 1000-word capacity. Physically, they were much more
compact than ENIAC: some were about the size of a grand piano and required 2500 small
electron tubes. This was quite an improvement over the earlier machines. The
first-generation stored-program
computers required considerable maintenance, usually attained 70% to 80% reliable
operation, and were used for 8 to 12 years. Typically, they were programmed directly in
machine language, although by the mid-1950s progress had been made in several aspects of
advanced programming. This group of machines included EDVAC and UNIVAC, the first
commercially available computers (Hazewindus, 102).
The UNIVAC was developed by John W. Mauchley and John Eckert, Jr. in the 1950's.
Together they had formed the Mauchley-Eckert Computer Corporation, America s first
computer company in the 1940's. During the development of the UNIVAC, they began to run
short on funds and sold their company to the larger Remington-Rand Corporation.
Eventually they built a working UNIVAC computer. It was delivered to the U.S. Census
Bureau in 1951 where it was used to help tabulate the U.S. population (Hazewindus, 124).
Early in the 1950s two important engineering discoveries changed the electronic
computer field. The first computers were made with vacuum tubes, but by the late 1950's
computers were being made out of transistors, which were smaller, less expensive, more
reliable, and more efficient (Shallis, 40). In 1959, Robert Noyce, a physicist at the
Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, invented the integrated circuit, a tiny chip of
silicon that contained an entire electronic circuit. Gone was the bulky, unreliable, but
fast machine; now computers began to
become more compact, more reliable and have more capacity (Shallis, 49).
These new technical discoveries rapidly found their way into new models of
digital computers. Memory storage capacities increased 800% in commercially available
machines by the early 1960s and speeds increased by an equally large margin. These
machines were very
expensive to purchase or to rent and were especially expensive to operate because of the
cost of hiring programmers to perform the complex operations the computers ran. Such
computers were typically found in large computer centres--operated by industry,
government, and private
laboratories--staffed with many programmers and support personnel (Rogers, 77). By 1956,
76 of IBM's large computer mainframes were in use, compared with only 46 UNIVAC's
(Chposky, 125).
In the 1960s efforts to design and develop the fastest possible computers with
the greatest capacity reached a turning point with the completion of the LARC machine for
Livermore Radiation Laboratories by the Sperry-Rand Corporation, and the Stretch computer
by IBM. The LARC had a core memory of 98,000 words and multiplied in 10 microseconds.
Stretch was provided with several ranks of memory having slower access for the ranks of
greater capacity, the fastest access time being less than 1 microseconds and the total
capacity in the vicinity of 100 million words (Chposky, 147).
During this time the major computer manufacturers began to offer a range of
computer capabilities, as well as various computer-related equipment. These included
input means such as consoles and card feeders; output means such as page printers,
cathode-ray-tube displays,
and graphing devices; and optional magnetic-tape and magnetic-disk file storage. These
found wide use in business for such applications as accounting, payroll, inventory
control, ordering supplies, and billing. Central processing units (CPUs) for such
purposes did not need to be
very fast arithmetically and were primarily used to access large amounts of records on
file. The greatest number of computer systems were delivered for the larger
applications, such as in hospitals for keeping track of patient records, medications, and
treatments given. They were
also used in automated library systems and in database systems such as the Chemical
Abstracts system, where computer records now on file cover nearly all known chemical
compounds (Rogers, 98).
The trend during the 1970s was, to some extent, away from extremely powerful,
centralized computational centres and toward a broader range of applications for
less-costly computer systems. Most continuous-process manufacturing, such as petroleum
refining and electrical-power distribution systems, began using computers of relatively
modest capability for controlling and regulating their activities. In the 1960s the
programming of applications problems was an obstacle to the self-sufficiency of
moderate-sized on-site computer
installations, but great advances in applications programming languages removed these
obstacles. Applications languages became available for controlling a great range of
manufacturing processes, for computer operation of machine tools, and for many other
tasks (Osborne, 146). In 1971 Marcian E. Hoff, Jr., an engineer at the Intel
Corporation,
invented the microprocessor and another stage in the development of the computer began
(Shallis, 121).
A new revolution in computer hardware was now well under way, involving
miniaturization of computer-logic circuitry and of component manufacture by what are
called large-scale integration techniques. In the 1950s it was realized that "scaling
down" the size of electronic
digital computer circuits and parts would increase speed and efficiency and improve
performance. However, at that time the manufacturing methods were not good enough to
accomplish such a task. About 1960 photo printing of conductive circuit boards to
eliminate wiring became highly developed. Then it became possible to build resistors and
capacitors into the circuitry by photographic means (Rogers, 142). In the 1970s entire
assemblies, such as adders, shifting registers, and counters, became available on tiny
chips of silicon. In the 1980s very large scale integration (VLSI), in which hundreds of
thousands of transistors are placed on a single chip, became increasingly common. Many
companies, some new to the computer field, introduced in the 1970s programmable
minicomputers supplied with software packages. The
size-reduction trend continued with the introduction of personal computers, which are
programmable machines small enough and inexpensive enough to be purchased and used by
individuals (Rogers, 153).
One of the first of such machines was introduced in January 1975. Popular
Electronics magazine provided plans that would allow any electronics wizard to build his
own small, programmable computer for about $380 (Rose, 32). The computer was called the
Altair 8800. Its programming involved pushing buttons and flipping switches on the front
of the box. It didn't include a monitor or keyboard, and its applications were very
limited (Jacobs, 53). Even though, many orders came in for it and several famous owners
of computer and software manufacturing companies got their start in computing through the
Altair.
For example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple Computer, built a much
cheaper, yet more productive version of the Altair and turned their hobby into a business
(Fluegelman, 16).
After the introduction of the Altair 8800, the personal computer industry became
a fierce battleground of competition. IBM had been the computer industry standard for
well over a half-century. They held their position as the standard when they introduced
their first personal
computer, the IBM Model 60 in 1975 (Chposky, 156). However, the newly formed Apple
Computer company was releasing its own personal computer, the Apple II (The Apple I was
the first computer designed by Jobs and Wozniak in Wozniak s garage, which was not
produced on a wide scale). Software was needed to run the computers as well. Microsoft
developed a
Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) for the IBM computer while Apple developed its own
software system (Rose, 37). Because Microsoft had now set the software standard for
IBMs, every software manufacturer had to make their software compatible with Microsoft's.
This would lead to huge profits for Microsoft (Cringley, 163).
The main goal of the computer manufacturers was to make the computer as
affordable as possible while increasing speed, reliability, and capacity. Nearly every
computer manufacturer accomplished this and computers popped up everywhere. Computers
were in businesses keeping track of inventories. Computers were in colleges aiding
students in research. Computers were in laboratories making complex calculations at high
speeds for scientists and physicists. The computer had made its mark everywhere in
society and built up a huge industry (Cringley, 174).
The future is promising for the computer industry and its technology. The speed
of processors is expected to double every year and a half in the coming years. As
manufacturing techniques are further perfected the prices of computer systems are
expected to steadily fall.
However, since the microprocessor technology will be increasing, it's higher costs will
offset the drop in price of older processors. In other words, the price of a new computer
will stay about the same from year to year, but technology will steadily increase
(Zachary, 42)
Since the end of World War II, the computer industry has grown from a standing
start into one of the biggest and most profitable industries in the United States. It
now comprises thousands of companies, making everything from multi-million dollar
high-speed
supercomputers to printout paper and floppy disks. It employs millions of people and
generates tens of billions of dollars in sales each year (Malone, 192). Surely, the
computer has impacted every aspect of people's lives. It has affected the way people
work and play. It has
made everyone s life easier by doing difficult work for people. The computer truly is
one of the most incredible inventions in history.
Works Cited
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Publishing, 1992.
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1985.
Fluegelman, Andrew. A New World, MacWorld. San Jose, Ca: MacWorld
Publishing, February, 1984 (Premire Issue).
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Gulliver, David. Silicon Valley and Beyond. Berkeley, Ca: Berkeley Area
Government Press, 1981.
Hazewindus, Nico. The U.S. Microelectronics Industry. New York:
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Jacobs, Christopher W. The Altair 8800, Popular Electronics. New
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Malone, Michael S. The Big Scare: The U.S. Computer Industry. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1985.
Osborne, Adam. Hyper growth. Berkeley, Ca: Idthekkethan Publishing
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Rogers, Everett M. Silicon Valley Fever. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Publishing, 1984.
Rose, Frank. West of Eden. New York: Viking Publishing, 1989.
Shallis, Michael. The Silicon Idol. New York: Shocken Books, 1984.
Soma, John T. The History of the Computer. Toronto: Lexington Books,
1976.
Zachary, William. The Future of Computing, Byte. Boston: Byte
Publishing, August 1994.
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