The Dawn of Computers

When comparing current technology with the emergence of computers in the 1960s, the usual focus is understandably on factors like speed, memory size, cost, or the development of programming languages. While those metrics are impressive, there are other, perhaps more subtle, changes worth noting. As someone just entering his eighties, it was my privilege to witness firsthand many of these developments. Although I was never a computer professional and I never made my living as a programmer, I've always had a serious interest, and computers were never far away from my focus.

So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a few of the other, less heralded, things that have changed over the past 60 years or so. Let's revisit the computer center of those earlier times.

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Big Iron

Early mainframes were huge amalgamations of mechanical and electronic parts.

Mainframes were expensive, demanding, noisy, large, heavy, and primitive. They created their own environments and their own set of demands. By the time I was a college sophomore I had been exposed to three: one was essentially all electro-mechanical. The second ran on vacuum tubes. The third was one of the first all-transistor computers.

Big Iron
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Noise

Computer environments in the 1950s and 1960s were noisy.

Today the loudest components of a computer system are the keyboard and the occasional whir of a laser or ink jet printer. In the 1950s and 1960s, printers were percussive. Card readers, card sorters, and especially card punches were all mechanical and noisy.

Noise
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Manuals

Early computers came with their own library.

There were manuals about how to operate and manage it. There were manuals on the operating system. There was at least one manual about each programming language that came with it: machine language, assembler, COBOL, FORTRAN, and perhaps others). There were manuals about the operation of the peripherals: tape drives, printers, card readers, card punches, etc. Even the first personal computers came with several manuals.

Manuals
Some Dates

Some Early Dates

1954IBM 704vacuum tube mainframe
1955ALWAC III-Evacuum tube mainframe
1956IBM 350 RAMACfirst disk drive
1958FORTRAN for IBM 704first high-level programming language
1962IBM 7094transistorized mainframe
1972Intel 80088-bit microprocessor
1977Commodore PETMOS Technology 6502 microprocessor (1.0 MHz)
1977Apple IIMOS Technology 6502 microprocessor (1.023 MHz)
1977TRS-80Zilog Z80 microprocessor (1.78 MHz)
1979VisiCalc for Apple IIfirst spreadsheet & first "killer app"
1979WordStar for CP/Mmarket leading word processor
1981IBM Personal ComputerIntel 8088 microprocessor (4.77 MHz)
1991DOS for Dummies, by Dan Gookinone of scores of how-to computer books
1991World Wide Webeventually to make manuals all but obsolete
Colophon
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