The earliest notion of a "computer" that most people had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had one key feature: enormous size. Babbage's 1837 "Analytical Engine," widely regarded as the earliest ancestor of the computer, would -- had it ever been completed -- have filled a warehouse-sized room and weighed nearly 30,000 pounds. Babbage's designs used interlocking gears with various ratios to perform calculations, and his system contemplated a punch-card I/O unit, a calculating unit known as the "Mill" (a sort of CPU), and a storage unit he called the "Store." In his search for backers, he enlisted Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, who wrote an erudite explanation of the Engine's operations for a French journal; in 1983, a new computer language designed for the US Department of Defense was christened "Ada" in her honor. Two working models of his machine have been built in recent years; you can see one of them in action here.
Few significant advances in computing were made until the late 1930's and early 1940's, when military needs -- calculating target data, and (most importantly) breaking secret codes such as Germany's ENIGMA, provided both the impetus and the funding. In the UK, researchers at Bletchley Park, led by the young computer genius Alan Turing, constructed machines they named "bombes" which used electrical relays and motors to run through hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of the wheels and wires of an Enigma machine. Later, they constructed a far more advanced machine, known literally as "Colossus," for the same task. Advances in cryptography would eventually render all these computers obsolete -- indeed, a carefully-done "one time pad" or "Vernam cipher"is unbreakable once the pad text is destroyed (as witness a message found on a skeletized pigeon, though some have claimed to have deciphered it).
Yet other problems, such as calculating trajectories, remained. The first fully digital machine along these lines was ENIAC (short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) which used vacuum tubes -- more than 17,000 of them! -- as relays and switches. The machine had to be literally re-wired for each different kind of operation; the task was entrusted to a group of young women who, even though many of them had college degrees in mathematics and engineering, were regarded at first as little more than glorified switchboard operators. All of the units together weighed more than 60,000 pounds, and consumed 150 kilowatts of power -- all to perform roughly 5,000 calculations per second. While this was many times faster than any earlier machine, it's equivalent to a CPU speed of 5 kHz -- fifty million times slower than the average desktop computer of today.
The key invention which began the change from room- and-building-sized machines to something that could actually fit in an office or a home was of course the transistor, developed at Bell Labs in 1947. The basic idea was to use a semiconductor sandwiched between more conductive materials; such a device, like a radio tube, could be used either as a signal amplifier or a switch. There were several key advantages: transistors produced less heat, were cheaper to manufacture, and -- even in their early state -- much smaller. Each of the women of ENIAC shown in the photo above is holding a unit with the same storage capacity; the first two decreases in size are due to smaller, specially-made tubes, but the last is due to transistors. A typical smart phone today has nearly a million times the number of transistors in this smallest unit.
With the war over, business demands drove the computer market. The first commercial computer introduced for this market was the UNIVAC, introduced in the early 1950's. For around $750,000, you got a CPU speed of 1.9 kHz, about 1.5 Kb of memory, and tape drives, each the size of a small refrigerator, which held about 1.5 Kb per tape. A decade later, IBM introduced its 1401 system; with the top model, one could now have 16 Kb of memory, and perform almost 23,000 calculations per second -- 23 kHz. IBM did not sell the 1401, but you could lease one for around $2,500 a month. Home computing on a practical scale was still far in the future; although the SIMON and other home-kit computers were available throughout this period for home hobbyists, their size -- 8 binary switches -- made them useless for any but the most limited tasks.
One of the ideas that stood out, as Grace Hopper expounded on, is that computers had to be small to be fast. I understand that smaller allows for convenience of weight, but when it comes to power and storage capacity I tend to think in terms of "bigger is better". This is where the transistor seems to defy the standards of physical properties. It's analogous to diamonds, which are small yet possess immense atomic density.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother had an old transistor radio and it used to crack me up. After reading about the impact that the technology had on the development of the digital revolution, I feel ashamed at my attitude toward her dated yet reliable gadget.
I wonder how many of the home/personal computer pioneers started off with those hobby kits. It'd be interesting to find out how many of them might have tinkered with a SIMON in their youth.