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Companies
1947
Eckert and Mauchly with the ENIAC
Computer pioneers Presper Eckert and John Mauchly founded the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. to construct machines based on their experience with ENIAC and EDVAC. The only machine the company built was BINAC. Before completing the UNIVAC, the company became a division of Remington Rand.
1952 Heinz Nixdorf founded Nixdorf
Computer Corp. in Germany. It remained an independent corporation until merging with Siemens in 1990.
1956
ElectroData computer in use, 1955
Burroughs buys Electrodata. Calculator manufacturer Burroughs gained entry to the computer industry by purchasing the southern California company Electrodata Corporation. The combined firm became a giant in the calculating machine business and expanded into electronics and digital computers when these technologies developed. Burroughs created many computer systems in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually merged with the makers of the Sperry Rand (maker of Univac computers) to form Unisys.
1957
Digital Equipment Corp.
A group of engineers led by Ken Olsen left MIT´s Lincoln Laboratory founded a company based on the new transistor technology. In August, they formally created Digital Equipment Corp. It initially set up shop in a largely vacant woolen mill in Maynard, Mass., where all aspects of product development — from management to manufacturing — took place.
CDC 1604
In Minneapolis, the original Engineering Research Associates group led by Bill Norris left Sperry Rand to form a new company, Control Data Corp., which soon released its model 1604 computer.
1963 Tandy Radio Shack is founded. Tandy
Radio Shack (TRS) was formed by the 1963 merger of Tandy Leather Company and Radio Shack. TRS began by selling a variety of electronic products, mainly to hobbyists. The TRS-80 Model I computer, introduced in 1977, was a major step in introducing home computers to the public. Like the Commodore PET and the Apple II, which were introduced within months of the TRS-80, the computer came assembled and ready to run.
1965
Commodore Business Machine founder Jack Tramiel
Commodore Business Machines (CBM) is founded. Its founder Jack Tramiel emigrated to the US after WWII where he began repairing typewriters. In 1965, he moved to Toronto and established Commodore International which also began making mechanical and electronic calculators. In 1977, Commodore released the Commodore PET computer; in 1981 the VIC-20; and, in 1982, the Commodore 64. CBM purchased competitor Amiga Corporation in 1984. Despite being the largest single supplier of computers in the world at one time, by 1984 internal disputes and market pressures led to financial problems. The company declared bankruptcy in 1994.
1968
Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, 1969
Evans & Sutherland is formed. In 1968, David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, both professors of computer science, founded a company to develop a special graphics computer known as a frame buffer. This device was a special high-speed memory used for capturing video. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, the two founders trained a generation of computer graphics pioneers—either at E&S or at the University of Utah computer science department. Sutherland left the firm in 1975, and Evans retired in the early 1990s, but E & S continues today as a major supplier of military and commercial graphics systems.
1969
Xerox
Xerox Corp. bought Scientific Data Systems for nearly $1 billion — 90 times the latter´s earnings. The SDS series of minicomputers in the early 1960s logged more sales than did Digital Equipment Corp. Xerox
changed the series to the XDS computers but eventually closed the division and ceased to manufacture the equipment.
1970
Engineers at PARC circa 1972
Xerox opens Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 1970, Xerox Corporation hired Dr. George Pake to lead a new research center in Palo Alto, California. PARC attracted some of the United States’ top computer scientists, and produced many groundbreaking inventions that transformed computing—most notably the personal computer graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming. Xerox was unable to market the inventions from PARC but others did, including Steve Jobs (Apple), Bob Metcalfe (3Com), as well as Charles Geschke and John Warnock (Adobe)
1971
RCA Spectra 70 advertisment
RCA sells its computer division. RCA was founded in 1919 to make vacuum tubes for radio, then a new invention. RCA began designing and selling its own computers in the early 1950s, competing with IBM and several other companies. By the 1970s, RCA, as well as other computer makers, were struggling to compete against IBM. RCA made their machines IBM-compatible, but ultimately even this strategy proved unsuccessful. RCA announced it would no longer build computers in 1971, selling its computer business to Sperry-Rand.
1973
IMSAI 8080 System
IMSAI is founded. In 1973, Bill Millard left his regular job in management to found the consulting firm Information Management Services or IMS. The following year, while he was working on a client’s project, he developed a small computing system using the then-new Intel 8080 microprocessor. He realized this computer might attract other buyers and so placed an advertisement in the hobbyist magazine “Popular Electronics,” offering it in kit form. The IMSAI 8080, as it was known, sold briskly and eventually about 20,000 units were shipped. The company was eventually purchased by one of its dealers and is today a division of the Fischer-Freitas Company, which still offers reproductions of the original for sale to hobbyists.
1975
Xerox Sigma-5
Xerox closes its computer division. After acquiring computer maker Scientific Data Systems (SDS) in 1969, Xerox redesigned SDS’s well-known Sigma line of computers. Xerox struggled against competitors like IBM and in 1975 closed the division. Most of the rights to the machines were sold to Honeywell.
1980
Doug and Gary Carlston at Broderbund Headquarters
Broderbund is founded. In 1980, brothers Doug and Gary Carlston formed a company to market the games Doug had created. Their first games were Galactic Empire, Galactic Trader and Galactic Revolution. They continued to have success with popular games such as Myst (1993) and Riven (1997) and a wide range of home products such as Print Shop, language tutors, etc. In 1998, Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company which, a year later,
was itself acquired by Mattel, Inc.1983
Connection Machine 2 with DataVault
Thinking Machines is founded. Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) was formed by MIT graduate student Danny Hillis and others to develop a new type of supercomputer. Their idea was to use many individual processors of moderate power rather than one extremely powerful processor. Their first machine, called The Connection Machine (CM-1), had 64,000 microprocessors, and began shipping in 1986. TMC later produced several larger computers with more powerful—the CM-2 and CM-5. Competition from more established supercomputer firms forced them into bankruptcy in 1993.
1994
Early Netscape diskette
Netscape Communications Corporation is founded. Netscape was originally founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation in April of 1994 by Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and others. Its name was soon changed to Netscape and it delivered its first browser in October of 1994. On the day of Netscape's initial public offering in August of 1995, it’s share price went from $28 to $54 in the first few minutes of trading, valuing the company at $2 billion. Netscape hired many of Silicon Valley’s programmers to provide new features and products and began the Internet boom of the 1990s.
Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, 2000
Yahoo is founded. Founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" before being renamed. Yahoo originally resided on two machines, Akebono and Konishiki, both named after famous Sumo wrestlers. Yahoo would quickly expand to become one of the Internet’s most popular search engines.
Components
1947
Williams tube
The Williams tube won the race for a practical random-access memory. Sir Frederick Williams of Manchester University modified a cathode-ray tube to paint dots and dashes of phosphorescent electrical charge on the screen, representing binary ones and zeros. Vacuum tube machines, such as the IBM 701, used the Williams tube as primary memory.
Point-contact transistor
On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully tested this point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution. Improved models of the transistor, developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, supplanted vacuum tubes used on computers at the time.
1953
Core memory
At MIT, Jay Forrester installed magnetic core memory on the Whirlwind computer. Core memory made computers more reliable, faster, and easier to make. Such a system of storage remained popular until the development of semiconductors in the 1970s.
1954
First production silicon junction
transistors
A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments Inc., brought the price of this component down to $2.50. A Texas Instruments news release from May 10, 1954, read, "Electronic "brains" approaching the human brain in scope and reliability came much closer to reality today with the announcement by Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes."
The company became a household name when the first transistor radio incorporated Teal´s invention. The radio, sold by Regency Electronics for $50, launched the world into a global village of instant news and pop music.
1955
Felker and Harris program
TRADIC
Felker and Harris program TRADIC, AT&T Bell Laboratories announced the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC. It contained nearly 800 transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Transistors — completely cold, highly efficient amplifying devices invented at Bell Labs — enabled the machine to operate on fewer than 100 watts, or one-twentieth the power required by comparable vacuum tube computers.
In this photograph, J. H. Felker (left) gives instructions to the TRADIC computer by means of a plug-in unit while J. R. Harris places numbers into the machine by flipping simple switches. The computer occupied only 3 cubic feet.
1958
Kilby integrated circuit
Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. His circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires.
1959
First Planar transistor
Jean Hoerni's Planar process, invented at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., protects transistor junctions with a layer of oxide. This improves reliability and, by allowing printing of conducting channels directly on the silicon surface, enabled Robert Noyce's invention of the monolithic integrated circuit.
1961
RTL integrated circuit
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. invented the resistor-transistor logic (RTL) product, a set/reset flip-flop and the first integrated circuit available as a monolithic chip.
1962
Fairchild NPN transistor
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. produced the first widely accepted epitaxial gold-doped NPN transistor. The NPN transistor served as the industry workhouse for discrete logic.
1967
MOS semiconductor
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. built the first standard metal oxide semiconductor product for data processing applications, an eight-bit arithmetic unit and accumulator. In a MOS chip, engineers treat the semiconductor material to produce either of two varieties of transistors, called n-type and p-type.
Using integrated circuits, Medtronics constructed the first internal pacemaker.
1971
Intel 4004
The first advertisement for a microprocessor, the Intel 4004, appeared in Electronic News. Developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, the 4004 had 2250 transistors and could perform up to 90,000 operations per second in four-bit chunks. Federico Faggin led the design and Ted Hoff led the architecture.
1972
Intel 8008
Intel´s 8008 microprocessor made its debut. A vast improvement over its predecessor, the 4004, its eight-bit word afforded 256 unique arrangements of ones and zeros. For the first time, a microprocessor could handle both uppercase and lowercase letters, all 10 numerals, punctuation marks, and a host of other symbols.
1976
Zilog Z-80
Intel and Zilog introduced new microprocessors. Five times faster than its predecessor, the 8008, the Intel 8080 could address four times as many bytes for a total of 64 kilobytes. The Zilog Z-80 could run any program written for the 8080 and included twice as many built-in machine instructions.
1979
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 microprocessor exhibited a processing speed far greater than its contemporaries. This high performance processor found its place in powerful work stations intended for graphics-intensive programs common in engineering.
Introduction to VLSI Systems
California Institute of Technology professor Carver Mead and Xerox Corp. computer scientist Lynn Conway wrote a manual of chip design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Demystifying the planning of very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems, the text expanded the ranks of engineers capable of creating such chips. The authors had observed that computer architects seldom participated in the specification of the standard integrated circuits with which they worked. The authors intended "Introduction to VLSI Systems" to fill a gap in the literature and introduce all electrical engineering and computer science students to integrated system architecture.
1986 David Miller of AT&T Bell Labs patented the optical transistor, a
component central to digital optical computing. Called Self-ElectroOptic-Effect Device, or SEED, the transistor involved a light-sensitive switch built with layers of gallium arsenide and gallium aluminum arsenide. Beams of light triggered electronic events that caused the light either to be transmitted or absorbed, thus turning the switch on or off.
Within a decade, research on the optical transistor led to successful work on the first all-optical processor and the first general-purpose all-optical computer. Bell Labs researchers first demonstrated the processor there in 1990. A computer using the SEED also contained lasers, lenses, and fast light switches, but it still required programming by a separate, non-optical computer. In 1993, researchers at the University of Colorado unveiled the first all-optical computer capable of being programmed and of manipulating instructions internally.
Compaq
Compaq beat IBM to the market when it announced the Deskpro 386, the first computer on the market to use Intel´s new 80386 chip, a 32-bit microprocessor with 275,000 transistors on each chip. At 4 million operations per second and 4 kilobytes of memory, the 80386 gave PCs as much speed and power as older mainframes and minicomputers.
The 386 chip brought with it the introduction of a 32-bit architecture, a significant improvement over the 16-bit architecture of previous microprocessors. It had two operating modes, one that mirrored the segmented memory of older x86 chips, allowing full backward compatibility, and one that took full advantage of its more advanced technology. The new chip made graphical operating environments for IBM PC and PC-compatible computers practical. The architecture that allowed Windows and IBM OS/2 has remained in subsequent chips.
1987
Motorola 68030
Motorola unveiled the 68030 microprocessor. A step up from the 68020, it built on a 32-bit enhanced microprocessor with a central processing unit core, a data cache, an instruction cache, an enhanced bus controller, and a memory management unit in a single VLSI device — all operating at speeds of at least 20 MHz.
1988 Compaq and other PC-clone makers developed enhanced industry
standard architecture — better than microchannel and retained compatibility with existing machines. EISA used a 32-bit bus, or a means by which two devices can communicate. The advanced data-handling features of the EISA made it an improvement over the 16-bit bus of industry standard architecture. IBM´s competitors developed the EISA as a way to avoid paying a fee to IBM for its MCA bus.
1989
Intel 80486
Intel released the 80486 microprocessor and the i860 RISC/coprocessor chip, each of which contained more than 1 million transistors. The RISC microprocessor had a 32-bit integer arithmetic and logic unit (the part of the CPU that performs operations such as addition and subtraction), a 64-bit floating-point unit, and a clock rate of 33 MHz.
The 486 chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the 386 chips. What set the 486 apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit. Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the microprocessor doubled the performance of the 386 without increasing the clock rate.
Motorola 68040
Motorola announced the 68040 microprocessor, with about 1.2 million transistors. Due to technical difficulties, it didn´t ship until 1991, although promised in January 1990. A 32-bit, 25-MHz microprocessor, the 68040 integrated a floating-point unit and included instruction and data caches. Apple used the third generation of 68000 chips in Macintosh Quadra computers.
1993
Intel Pentium Processor diagram
The Pentium microprocessor is released. The Pentium was the fifth generation of the ‘x86’ line of microprocessors from Intel, the basis for the IBM PC and its clones. The Pentium introduced several advances that made programs run faster such as the ability to execute several instructions at the same time and support for graphics and music.
About Us Exhibits Collection What's Happening Giving About This
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About Us Exhibits Collection What's Happening Giving About This
Timeline of Computer History
About the Museum | Exhibits | Collections | What's Happening | Giving | About This Site
Privacy | Copyright | Feedback | Credits | Advanced Search | Site Map
© 2006 Computer History Museum. All rights reserved. 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 Ph 650-810-1010
About Us Exhibits Collection What's Happening Giving About This
Timeline of Computer
History
About the Museum | Exhibits | Collections | What's Happening | Giving | About This Site Privacy | Copyright | Feedback | Credits | Advanced Search | Site Map
© 2006 Computer History Museum. All rights reserved. 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 Ph 650-810-1010
About Us Exhibits Collection What's Happening Giving About This
Timeline of Computer History
About the Museum | Exhibits | Collections | What's Happening | Giving | About This Site Privacy | Copyright | Feedback | Credits | Advanced Search | Site Map
© 2006 Computer History Museum. All rights reserved. 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 Ph 650-810-1010
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Timeline of Computer History
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© 2006 Computer History Museum. All rights reserved. 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 Ph 650-810-1010
The history of MS-DOS is surprisingly long. It started off as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) which was developed by Seattle Computer Products to run on IBM's new PC. This list is fairly comprehensive although a number of the more obscure versions of DOS have been omitted.
Version Date Comments
1.0 1981The original version of MS-DOS. This was a renamed version of QDOS which had been purchased by an upstart company called Microsoft.
1.25 1982This added support for double-sided disks. Previously the disk had to be turned over to use the other side
2.0 1983This added support for IBM's 10 MB hard disk, directories and double-density 5.25" floppy disks with capacities of 360 KB
2.11 1983 Support for foreign and extended characters was added.
3.0 1984Support for high-density (1.2 MB) floppy disks and 32 MB hard disks was added.
3.1 1984 Network support was added.
3.3 1987
This release was written to take advantage of IBM's PS/2 computer range. It added support for high density 3.5" floppy disks, more than one partition on hard disks (allowing use of disks bigger than 32 MB) and code pages.
4.0 1988This version provided XMS support, support for partitions on hard disks up to 2 GB and a graphical shell. It also contained a large number of bugs and many programs refused to run on it.
4.01 1989 The bugs in version 4.0 were fixed.
5.0 1991
This was a major upgrade. It allowed parts of DOS to load itself in the high memory area and certain device drivers and TSRs to run in the unused parts of the upper memory area between 640K and 1024K. This version also added support for IBM's new 2.88 MB floppy disks. An improved BASIC interpreter and text editor were included, as was a disk cache, an undelete utility and a hard-disk partition-table backup program. After the problems with MS-DOS 4, it also provided a utility to make programs think they were running on a different version of MS-DOS.
5.0a 1992/3This was a minor bug fix which dealt with possibly catastrophic problems with UNDELETE and CHKDSK.
6.0 1993
This was a catch-up with Novell's DR-DOS 6. It added a disk-compression utility called DoubleSpace, a basic anti-virus program and a disk defragmenter. It also finally included a MOVE command, an improved backup program, MSBACKUP and multiple boot configurations. Memory management was also improved by the addition of MEMMAKER. A number of older utilities, such as JOIN and RECOVER were removed. The DOS Shell was released separately as Microsoft felt that there were too many disks.
6.2 1993Extra security was built into DoubleSpace following complaints of data loss. A new disk checker, SCANDISK, was also introduced, as well as improvements to DISKCOPY and SmartDrive.
6.21 1993Following legal action by Stac Electronics, Microsoft released this version which had DoubleSpace removed. It came with a voucher for an alternative disk compression program.
6.22 1994 Microsoft licenced a disk-compression package called DoubleDisk from
VertiSoft Systems and renamed it DriveSpace, which was included in this version.
7.0 1995
This version is part of the original version of Windows 95. It provides support for long filenames when Windows is running, but removes a large number of utilities, some of which are on the Windows 95 CD in the \other\oldmsdos directory.
7.1 1997This version is part of OEM Service Release 2 and later of Windows 95. The main change is support for FAT 32 hard disks, a more efficient and robust way of storing data on large drives.
Microsoft
first began development of the Interface Manager (subsequently renamed Microsoft Windows) in September 1981. Although the first prototypes used Multiplan and Word-like menus at the bottom of the screen, the interface was changed in 1982 to use pull-down menus and dialogs, as used on the Xerox Star. Microsoft finally announced Windows in November 1983, with pressure from just-released VisiOn and impending TopView. This was after the release of the Apple Lisa, and before Digital Research announced GEM, and DESQ from Quarterdeck and the Amiga Workbench , or GEOS/GeoWorks Ensemble, IBM OS/2, NeXTstep or even DeskMate from Tandy. Windows promised an easy-to-use graphical interface, device-independent graphics and multitasking support. The development was delayed several times, however, and the Windows 1.0 hit the store shelves in November 1985. The selection of applications was sparse, however, and Windows sales were modest.
Windows 1.0 package, included:
MS-DOS Executive, Calendar, Cardfile, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Reversi, Control Panel, PIF (Program Information File) Editor, Print Spooler, Clipboard,
RAMDrive, Windows Write, Windows Paint. -
Windows 1.0
Click here for more photos off WINDOWS 1.01 Thanks to Oliver Schade.
Windows 1.0 advertising:
"Windows will instantly deliver you a more productive present. And a leap into the future."
When Windows/386 was released, Microsoft renamed Windows 2.0 to Windows/286 for consistency.
Windows 2.0, introduced in the fall of 1987, provided significant useability improvements to Windows. With the addition of icons and overlapping windows, Windows became a viable environment for development of major applications (such as Excel, Word for Windows, Corel Draw!, Ami, PageMaker and Micrografx Designer), and the sales were spurred by the runtime ("Single Application Environment") versions supplied by the independent software vendors. In late 1987 Microsoft released Windows/386. While it was functionally equivalent to its sibling, Windows/286, in running Windows applications, it provided the capability to run multiple DOS applications simultaneously in the extended memory.
Windows/286 >>
Windows 3.0, released in May, 1990, was a complete overhaul of the Windows environment. With the capability to address memory beyond 640K and a much more powerful user interface, independent software vendors started developing Windows
applications with vigor. The powerful new applications helped Microsoft sell more than 10 million copies of Windows, making it the best-selling graphical user interface in the
history of computing. Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1, released in April, 1992 provides significant improvements to Windows 3.0. In its first two months on the market, it sold over 3 million copies, including
upgrades from Windows 3.0. Windows 3.11, added no new features but corrects some existing, mostly network-related problems. It is replacing Windows 3.1 at the retail and OEM levels, and the upgrade was
available free from ftp.microsoft.com.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 , released in October, 1992, was the first integrated Windows and networking package offered by Microsoft. It provided peer-to-peer file and printer sharing capabilities highly integrated into the Windows environment. The simple-to-use-and-install networking allows the user to specify which files on the user's machine should be made accessible to others. The files can then be accessed from other machines running either Windows or DOS. Windows for Workgroups also includes two additional applications: Microsoft Mail, a network mail package, and Schedule+, a workgroup scheduler. On November, 1993 Microsoft ships Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
Windows NT 3.1, 94-03-01 is Microsoft's platform of choice for high-end systems. It is intended for use in network servers, workstations and software development machines; it
will not replace Windows for DOS. While Windows NT's user interface is very similar to that of Windows 3.1, it is based on an entirely new operating system kernel. Windows NT 3.5, 94-04-12 provides OLE 2.0, improved performance and reduced memory requirements. It was released in September 1994. Windows NT 3.5 Workstation replaces Windows NT 3.1, while Windows NT 3.5 Server replaces the Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. Windows NT 4.0, ("Cairo") 94-03-15 Microsoft's project for object-oriented Windows, and a successor to the "Daytona" release of Windows NT.
Windows 95, released in August of 1995. A 32-bit system providing full pre-emptive multitasking, advanced file systems, threading, networking and more. Includes MS-DOS 7.0, but takes over from DOS completely after starting. Also includes a completely revised user interface.
Windows 95/98 >>
Click here to see Windows 98 crash in Bill Gates face.(1.7megs Quick Time movie)
Windows CE has the look and feel of Windows 95 and NT. Users familiar with either of these operating systems are able to instantly use Handheld PCs and Palm-size PCs.
Windows CE 1.0 devices appeared in November 1996. Over the next year, approximately 500,000 Handheld PC units were sold worldwide.
Windows CE 2.0>> Click here for more on the Windows CE/OS Windows CE 2.0 became available in early 1998 addresses most of the problems experienced by Windows CE 1.0 users and also added features to the operating system that make it more viable for use by corporate
rather than home users. Windows CE 3.0 Availability June 15, 2000 -- Embedded operating system and its
comprehensive development tools -- Platform Builder 3.0 and eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0 -- which enable developers to build rich embedded devices that demand dynamic applications and Internet services. Windows CE 3.0 combines the flexibility and the
reliability of an embedded platform with the power of Windows and the Internet.
Windows 98, released in June of 1998. Integrated Web Browsing gives your desktop a browser-like interface. You will 'browse' everything, including stuff on your local computer. Active Desktop allows you to setup your desktop to be your personal web page, complete with links and any web content. You can also place active desktop items, such as a stock ticker, that will update automatically. Internet Explorer 4.0 New browser that supports HTML 4.0 and has an enhanced user interface. ACPI supports OnNow specs for better power management of PCs. FAT32 with Conversion utility Enhanced & Efficient support for larger hard drives. Includes a utility to convert your FAT16 to a FAT32 partition. Multiple Display Support can expand your desktop onto up to 8 connected monitors. New Hardware support will support the latest technology such as DVD, Firewire, USB, and AGP. Win32 Driver model Uses same driver model as Windows NT 5.0 Disk Defragmentor Wizard Enhanced hard drive defragmentor to speed up access to files and applications.
Windows NT 5.0 will include a host of new features. Like Windows 98, it will integrate Internet Explorer 4.0 into the operating system. This new interface will be matched up with the Distributed File System, which Microsoft says will provide "a logical way to organize and navigate the huge volume of information an enterprise assembles on servers, independent of where the servers are physically located. As of november 1998, NT 5.0 will be known as Windows 2000, making NT a "mainstream" operating system.
Feb. 17 2000, Windows 2000 provides an impressive platform of Internet, intranet, extranet, and management applications that integrate tightly with Active Directory. You can set up virtual private networks - secure, encrypted connections across the Internet - with your choice of protocol. You can encrypt data on the network or on-disk. You can give users consistent access to the same files and objects from any network-connected PC. You can use the Windows Installer to distribute software to users over the LAN.Thursday Sep. 14, 2000 Microsoft released Windows Me, short for Millenium Edition, which is aimed at the home user. The Me operating system boasts some enhanced multimedia features, such as an automated video editor and improved Internet plumbing. But unlike Microsoft's Windows 2000 OS which offers advanced security, reliability, and networking features Windows Me is basically just an upgrade to the DOS-based code on which previous Windows versions have been built. WINDOWS XP Microsoft officially launches it on October 25th. 2001.
XP is a whole new kind of Windows for consumers. Under the hood, it contains the 32-bit kernel and driver set from Windows NT and Windows 2000. Naturally it has tons of new features that no previous version of Windows has, but it also doesn't ignore the past--old DOS and Windows programs will still run, and may even run better.
XP comes in two flavors: Home and Professional. XP Home is a $99 upgrade ($199 for the full version) and Professional is a $199 upgrade ($299 for the full version). Recognizing that many homes have more than one PC, Microsoft also plans to offer discounts of $8 to $12 off the price of additional upgrades for home users (the Open Licensing Program is still available for business or home users who need 5 or more copies). That's fortunate because you'll need the additional licenses since the Product Activation feature makes it all but impossible to install a single copy on more than one PC.
WINDOWS XP
And in 2002 comes!
LindowsOS SPX - the first "Broadband OS"
An operating system-- built to take full advantage of broadband technology.
LindowsOS SPX is designed to fully utilize the world of tomorrow, where Internet connectivity is bountiful and cheap, and computers are ubiquitous. For tomorrow's computing needs, computer users need a computing solution that's affordable and beneficial, a system where software is digitally transmitted, easy to deploy and highly customizable. Computing needs to be effortless, so people spend less time working on computers and more time having computers work for them; LindowsOS SPX, the broadband operating system, does all of this.
LindowsOS SPX provides an advanced digital experience at an affordable price. Applications can all be digitally downloaded and installed at the click of a mouse. Individual machines can be customized quickly and easily.
LINDOWSOS BRIDGES THE GAP TO COMPUTER OWNERSHIP WITH MICROTEL PCs AND WALMART.COM
Microtel Computer Systems, Pre-Installed with LindowsOS, to Cost Less Than $300 at Walmart.com
SAN DIEGO –June 17, 2002 — Lindows.com, Inc., whose mantra has been “Bringing Choice to Your Computer,” is now delivering on its promises of choice by partnering with Microtel Computer Systems to ship Lindows.com’s Operating System, LindowsOS, pre-installed on their personal computers. For less than $300, computer-buyers can take advantage of LindowsOS and Microtel’s offering at Walmart.com (NYSE and PCX: WMT) therefore bringing computer ownership closer to those with limited resources.
LindowsOS, a Linux®-based operating system, formerly only available to Lindows.com Insiders (www.lindows.com/signup), is now publicly available for the first time on Microtel PCs
Brian Kernighan
Dennis Ritchie
Ken Thompson
Bill Joy Steve JobsLinus Torvalds
Richard Stallman
Computer History Images
Charles Babbage designed the first computer, starting in 1823. Though not completed until 1990 (?), his Difference Engine worked. Ada King, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron, wrote programs for the Difference Engine, thus becoming the world's first programmer.
The ENIAC was the first successful electronic digital computer. The Fiftieth Anniversary of ENIAC is fast approaching.
The IBM SSEC is something I know nothing about.
The IBM 360 was a revolutionary advance in computer system architecture, enabling a family of computers covering a wide range of price and performance.
The LGP30 was built by Litton General Precision in the mid 1950's. It was implemented with vacuum tubes and drum memory. It used a Flexowriter for I/O. The instructions had three addresses, two for the operands and one for the next instruction.
. Digital Equipment Corporation's first computer was the PDP-1.
Spacewar is the first video game and was written by Steve "Slug" Russell at MIT in 1960-61.
The PDP-6 was DEC's first 36-bit computer.
The PDP-8 was the world's first minicomputer. It was priced at the amazingly low price of $20,000.00.
The DEC PDP-11 was a wildly successful minicomputer.
The DEC VAX 11/780 brought mainframe capability to the minicomputer market.
HISTORY OF ELECTRONIC AND COMPUTER MUSICINCLUDING AUTOMATIC INSTRUMENTS AND COMPOSITION MACHINES
compiled and annotated by Dr. Kristine H. Burns
2nd century, BC. The Hydraulis was invented by Ktesibios sometime in the second century B.C. Ktesibios, the son of a Greek barber, was fascinated by pneumatics and wrote an early treatise on the use of hydraulic systems for powering mechanical devices. His most famous invention, the Hydraulis, used water to regulate the air pressure inside an organ. A small cistern called the
pnigeus was turned upside down and placed inside a barrel of water. A set of pumps forced air into the pnigeus, forming an air reservoir, and that air was channeled up into the organ's action.
Greek Aeolian harp. This may be considered the first automatic instrument. It was named for Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind. The instrument had two bridges over which the strings passed. The instrument was placed in a window where air current would pass, and the strings were activated by the wind current. Rather than being of different lengths, the strings were all the same length and tuned to the same pitch, but because of different string thicknesses, varying pitches could be produced.
5th-6th centuries BC, Pythagorus discovered numerical ratios corresponding to intervals of the musical scale. He associated these ratios with what he called "harmony of the spheres."
890 AD Banu Musa was an organ-building treatise; this was the first written documentation of an automatic instrument.
ca. 995-1050, Guido of Arezzo, a composer, developed an early form of solmization that used a system of mnemonics to learn "unknown songs." The method involved the assignment of alphabetic representations, syllables, to varying joints of the human hand. This system of mnemonics was apparently adapted from a technique used by almanac makers of the time.
1400s The hurdy-gurdy, an organ-grinder-like instrument, was developed.
Isorhythmic motets were developed. These songs made use of patterns of rhythms and pitches to define the composition. Composers like Machaut (14th century), Dufay and Dunstable, (15th century) composed isorhythmic motets. Duration and melody patterns, the talea and the color respectively, were not of identical length. Music was developed by the different permutations of pitch and rhythmic values. So if there were 5 durations and 7 pitches, the pitches were lined up with the durations. Whatever pitches were 'leftover,' got moved to the first duration values. The composer would permute through all pitches and durations before the original pattern would begin again.
Soggetto cavato, a technique of mapping letters of the alphabet into pitches, was developed. This technique was used Josquin's Mass based on the name of Hercules, the Duke of Ferrara. One application of soggetto cavato would involve be to take the vowels in Hercules as follows: e=re=D; u=ut=C (in the solfege system of do, re, mi, fa, etc., ut was the original do syllable); e=re=D. This pattern of vowel-mapping could continue for first and last names, as well as towns and cities.
1500s The first mechanically driven organs were built; water organs called hydraulis were in existence.
Don Nicola Vicentino (1511-1572), Italian composer and theorist, invented Archicembalo, a harpsichord-like instrument with six keyboards and thirty-one steps to an octave.
1600s Athanasius Kircher, described in his book, Musurgia Universalis (1600), a mechanical device that composed music. He used number and arithmetic-number relationships to represent scale, rhythm, and tempo relations, called the Arca Musarithmica.
1624 English philosopher and essayist, Francis Bacon wrote about a scientific utopia in the New Atlantis. He stated "we have sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds, and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and less slides of sounds."
1641Blaise Pascal develops the first calculating machine.
1644 The Nouvelle invention de lever, an hydraulic engine produced musical sounds.
1738 Mechanical singing birds and barrel organs were in existence.
The Industrial Revolution flourished. There were attempts to harness steam power to mechanical computation machines
1761 Abbe Delaborde constructed a Clavecin Electrique, Paris, France.
Benjamin Franklin perfected the Glass Harmonica.
Maelzel, inventor of the metronome, and friend of Beethoven invented the Panharmonicon, a keyboard instrument.
1787 Mozart composed the Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game). This composition was a series of precomposed measures arranged in random eight-bar phrases to build the composition. Each throw of a pair of dice represented an individual measure, so after eight throws the first phrase was determined.
1796 Carillons, "a sliver of steel, shaped, polished, tempered and then screwed into position so that the projections on a rotating cylinder could pluck at its free extremity," were invented.
1830 Robert Schumann composer the Abegg Variations, op. 1. This composition was named for one of his girlfriends. The principal theme is based on the letters
of her name: A-B-E-G-G--this was a later application of a soggetto cavato technique.
1832 Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.
1833-34 Charles Babbage, a British scientist builds the Difference Enginer, a large mechanical computer. In 1834, he imagines the Analytical Engine, a machine that was never realized. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, assisted in the documentation of these fantastic devices.
1835 Schumann composed the Carnaval pieces, op. 9 , twenty-one short pieces for piano. Each piece is based on a different character.
1850 D.D. Parmelee patented the first key-driven adding machine.
1859 David E. Hughes invented a typewriting telegraph utilizing a piano-like keyboard to activate the mechanism.
1863 Hermann Helmholtz wrote the book, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Historically this book was one of the foundations of modern acoustics (this book completed the earlier work of Joseph Sauveur).
1867 Hipps invented the Electromechanical Piano in Neuchatel, Switzerland. He was the director of the telegraph factory there.
1876 Elisha Gray (an inventor of a telephone, along with Bell) invented the Electroharmonic or Electromusical Piano; this instrument transmitted musical tones over wires.
Koenig's Tonametric was invented. This instrument divided four octaves into 670 equal parts--this was an early instrument that made use of microtuning.
1877 Thomas Edison (1847-1931) invented the phonograph. To record, an indentation on a moving strip of paraffin coated paper tape was made by means of a diaphragm with an attached needle. This mechanism eventually lead to a continuously grooved, revolving metal cylinder wrapped in tin foil.
Emile Berliner (1851-1929) developed and patented the cylindrical and disc phonograph system, simultaneously with Edison.
Dorr E. Felti, perfected a calculator with key-driven ratchet wheels which could be moved by one or more teeth at a time.
1880 Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) financed his own laboratory in Washington, D.C. Together with Charles S. Tainter, Bell devised and patented several means for transmitting and recording sound.
1895 Julian Carillo's theories of microtones, 96 tone scale, constructed instruments to reproduce divisions as small as a sixteenth tone. He demonstrated his instruments in New York, 1926. The instruments included an Octavina for eighth tones and an Arpa Citera for sixteenth tones. There are several recordings of Carillo's music, especially the string quartets.
1897 E.S. Votey invented the Pianola, an instrument that used a pre-punched, perforated paper roll moved over a capillary bridge. The holes in the paper corresponded to 88 openings in the board.
1898 Valdemar Poulson (1869-1942) patented his "Telegraphone," the first magnetic recording machine.
1906 Thaddeus Cahill invented the Dynamophone, a machine that produced music by an alternating current running dynamos. This was the first additive synthesis device. The Dynamophone was also known as the Telharmonium. The instrument weighed over 200 tons and was designed to transmit sound over telephone wires; however, the wires were too delicate for all the signals. You can sort of consider him the 'Father of Muzak.' The generators produced pure tones of various frequencies and intensity; volume control supplied dynamics. Articles appeared in McClure's Magazine that stated "democracy in music...the musician uses keys and stops to build up voices of flute or clarinet, as the artist uses his brushes for mixing color to obtain a certain hue...it may revolutionize our musical art..."
Lee De Forest (1873-1961) invented the Triode or Audion tube, the first vacuum tube.
1907 Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) believed that the current musical system was severely limited, so he stated that instrumental music was dead. His treatise on aesthetics, Sketch of a New Music, discussed the future of music.
1910 The first radio broadcast in NYC (first radio station was built in 1920, also in NYC).
1912 The Italian Futurist movement was founded by Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), a painter, and Filippo Marinetti, a poet. Marinetti wrote the manifesto, Musica Futurista; the Futurist Movement's creed was "To present the musical soul of the masses, of the great factories, of the railways, of the transatlantic liners, of the battleships, of the automobiles and airplanes. To add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machines and the victorious kingdom of Electricity."
Henry Cowell (1897-1965) introduced tone clusters in piano music. The Banshee and Aeolian Harp are good examples.
1914 The first concert of Futurist music took place. The "art of noises" concert was presented by Marinetti and Russolo in Milan, Italy.
1920 Lev (Leon) Theremin, Russia, invented the Aetherophone (later called the Theremin or Thereminovox). The instrument used 2 vacuum tube oscillators to produce beat notes. Musical sounds were created by "heterodyning" from oscillators which varied pitch. A circuit was altered by changing the distance between 2 elements. The instrument had a radio antenna to control dynamics and a rod sticking out the side that controlled pitch. The performer would move his/her hand along the rod to change pitch, while simultaneously moving his/her other hand in proximity to the antenna. Many composers used this instrument including Varese.
1922 Darius Milhaud (b. 1892) experimented with vocal transformation by phonograph speed changes.
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) called for a phonograph recording of nightingales in his Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome).
1926 Jorg Mager built an electronic instrument, the Spharophon. The instrument was first presented at the Donaueschingen Festival (Rimsky-Korsakov composed some experimental works for this instrument). Mager later developed a Partiturophon and a Kaleidophon, both used in theatrical productions. All of these instruments were destroyed in W.W.II.
George Antheil (1900-1959) composed Ballet Mechanique. Antheil was an expatriate American living in France. The work was scored for pianos, xylophones, pianola, doorbells, and an airplane propeller.
1928 Maurice Martenot (b. 1928, France) built the Ondes Martenot (first called the Ondes Musicales). The instrument used the same basic idea as the Theremin, but instead of a radio antenna, it utilized a moveable electrode was used to produce capacitance variants. Performers wore a ring that passed over the keyboard. The instrument used subtractive synthesis. Composers such as Honegger, Messiaen, Milhaud, Dutilleux, and Varese all composed for the instrument.
Friedrich Trautwein (1888-1956, Germany) built the Trautonium. Composers such as Hindemith, Richard Strauss, and Varese wrote for it, although no recordings can be found.
1929 Laurens Hammond (b. 1895, USA), built instruments such as the Hammond Organ, Novachord, Solovox, and reverb devices in the United States.
The Hammond Organ used 91 rotary electromagnetic disk generators driven by a synchronous motor with associated gears and tone wheels. It used additive synthesis.
1931 Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931 was composed. This is one of the first works to employ extended serialism, a systematic organization of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and articulation.
Henry Cowell worked with Leon Theremin to build the Rhythmicon, an instrument which could play metrical combinations of virtually unlimited complexity. With this instrument Cowell composed the Rhythmicana Concerto.
Jorg Mager (Germany) was commissioned to create electronic bell sounds for the Bayreuth production of Parsifal
1935 Allegemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft (AEG), built and demonstrated the first Magnetophon (tape recorder).
1937 "War of the Worlds" was directed by Orson Welles. Welles was the first director to use the fade and dissolve technique, first seen in "Citizen Kane." To date, most film directors used blunt splices instead.
Electrochord (the electroacoustic piano) was built.
1938 Novachord built.
1939 Stream of consciousness films came about.
John Cage (1912-1992) began experimenting with indeterminacy. In his composition, Imaginary Landscape No. 1, multiple performers are asked to perform on multiple record players, changing the variable speed settings.
1930s Plastic audio tape was developed.
The Sonorous Cross (an instrument like a Theremin) was built.
1941 Joseph Schillinger wrote the The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. This book offered prescriptions for composition--rhythms, pitches, harmonies, etc. Schilllinger's principal students was George Gershwin and Glenn Miller.
The Ondioline was built.
1944 Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross patented a machine that "freed" music from the constraints of conventional tuning systems and rhythmic inadequacies of human performers. Mechanical invention for composing "Free Music" used
eight oscillators and synchronizing equipment in conjunction with photo-sensitive graph paper with the intention that the projected notation could be converted into sound.
1947 Bell Labs developed and produced the solid state transistor.
Milton Babbitt's Three Compositions for Piano serialized all aspects of pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and articulation.
The Solovox and the Clavioline were built.
1948 John Scott Trotter built a composition machine for popular music.
Hugh LeCaine (Canada) built the Electronic Sakbutt, an instrument that actually sounded like a cello.
Pierre Schaeffer (b. 1910), a sound technician working at Radio-diffusion-Television Francaise (RTF) in Paris, produced several short studies in what he called Musique concrete. October, 1948, Schaeffer's early studies were broadcast in a "concert of noises."
Joseph Schillinger wrote The Mathematical Basis of the Arts.
1949 Pierre Schaeffer and engineer Jacques Poullin worked on experiments in sound which they titled "Musique concrete." 1949-50 Schaeffer and Henry (1927-96), along with Poullin composed Symphonie pour un homme seul (Symphony for a Man Alone); the work actually premiered March 18, 1950.
Olivier Messiaen composed his Mode de valeurs et d'intensities (Mode of Durations and Intensities), a piano composition that "established 'scales' not only of pitch but also of duration, loudness, and attack."
The Melochord was invented by H. Bode.
1940s The following instruments were built: the Electronium Pi (actually used by a few German composers, including: Brehme, Degen, and Jacobi), the Multimonica, the Polychord organ, the Tuttivox, the Marshall organ, and other small electric organs.
1950 The Milan Studio was established by Luciano Berio (b. 1925, Italy).
1951-> Clara Rockmore performed on the Theremin in worldwide concerts.
Variations on a Door and a Sigh was composed by Pierre Henry.
The RTF studio was formally established as the Groupe de Musique Concrete, the group opened itself to other composers, including Messiaen and his pupils Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and George Barraque. Boulez and Stockhausen left soon after because Schaeffer was not interested in using electronically-generated sounds, but rather wanted to do everything based on recordings.
John Cage's use of indeterminacy culminated with Music of Changes, a work based on the charts from the I Ching, the Chinese book of Oracles.
Structures, Book Ia was one of Pierre Boulez' earliest attempts at employing a small amount of musical material, called cells (whether for use as pitches, durations, dynamics, or attack points), in a highly serialized structure.
1951-53 Eimert and Beyer (b. 1901) produced the first compositions using electronically-generated pitches. The pieces used a mechanized device that produced melodies based on Markov analysis of Stephen Foster tunes.
1952 The Cologne station of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (later Westdeutscher Rundfunk) was founded by Herbert Eimert. He was soon joined by Stockhausen, and they set out to create what they called Elektronische Musik.
John Cage's 4'33" was composed. The composer was trying to liberate the performer and the composer from having to make any conscious decisions, therefore, the only sounds in this piece are those produce by the audience.
1953Robert Beyer, Werner Meyer-Eppler (b. 1913) and Eimert began experimenting with electronically-generated sounds. Eimert and Meyer-Eppler taught at Darmstadt Summer School (Germany), and gave presentations in Paris as well.
Louis and Bebe Baron set up a private studio in New York, and provided soundtracks for sci-fi films like Forbidden Planet (1956) and Atlantis that used electronic sound scores.
Otto Luening (b. 1900, USA; d. 1996, USA) and Vladimir Ussachevsky (b. 1911, Manchuria; d. 1990, USA) present first concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, October 28. The program included Ussachevsky's Sonic Contours (created from piano recordings), and Luening's Fantasy in Space (using flute recordings). Following the concert, they were asked to be on the Today Show with Dave Garroway. Musicians Local 802 raised a fuss because Luening and Ussachevsky were not members of the musicians' union.
1953-4 Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) used Helmholtz' research as the basis of his Studie I and Studie II. He tried to build increasingly complex synthesized sounds from simple pure frequencies (sine waves).
1954 The Cologne Radio Series "Music of Our Time" (October 19) used only electronically-generated sounds by Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, etc. The pieces used strict serial techniques.
Dripsody was composed by Hugh LeCaine. The single sound source for this concrete piece is a drip of water.
1955 Harry Olson and Belar, both working for RCA, invent the Electronic Music Synthesizer, aka the Olson-Belar Sound Synthesizer. This synth used sawtooth waves that were filtered for other types of timbres. The user programmed the synthesizer with a typewriter-like keyboard that punched commands into a 40-channel paper tape using binary code.
The Columbia-Princeton Studio started, with its beginnings mostly in the living room of Ussachevsky and then the apartment of Luening.
Lejaren Hiller (1924-92) and Leonard Isaacson, from the University of Illinois composed the Illiac String Quartet, the first piece of computer-generated music. The piece was so named because it used a Univac computer and was composed at the University of Illinois.
1955-56 Karlheinz Stockhausen composed Gesang der Junglinge. This work used both concrete recordings of boys' voices and synthesized sounds. The original version was composed for five loudspeakers, but was eventually reduced to four. The text from the Benedicite (O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord), which appears in Daniel as the canticle sung by the three young Jews consigned to the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar.
1956 Martin Klein and Douglas Bolitho used a Datatron computer called Push-Button Bertha to compose music. This computer was used to compose popular tunes; the tunes were derived from random numerical data that was sieved, or mapped, into a preset tonal scheme.
Tokyo at Japanese Radio, an electronic studio established.
Luening and Ussachevsky wrote incidental music for Orson Welles' King Lear , City Center, New York.
1957 Of Wood and Brass was composed by Luening. Sound sources included trumpets, trombones and marimbas.
Scambi, composed by Henri Pousseur, was created at the Milan Studio, Italy.
Warsaw at Polish Radio, an electronic studio established.
Munich, the Siemens Company, an electronic studio established.
Eindhoven, the Philips Company, an electronic studio established.
David Seville created the Chipmunks, by playing recordings of human voices at double speed. Electronic manipulation was never really used again in rock for about ten years.
1958 Edgard Varese (1883-1965) composed Poeme Electronique for the World's Fair, Brussels. The work was composed for the Philips Pavilion, a building designed by the famous architect, Le Corbusier who was assisted by Iannis Xenakis (who later became well-known as a composer rather than an architect). The work was performed on ca. 425 loudspeakers, and was accompanied by projected images. This was truly one of the first large-scale multimedia productions.
Iannis Xenakis (b.1922) composed Concret PH. This work was also composed for the Brussels World's Fair. It made use of a single sound source: amplified burning charcoal.
Max Mathews, of Bell Laboratories, generated music by computers.
John Cage composed Fontana Mix at the Milan Studio.
London, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, an electronic studio established.
Stockholm, Swedish Radio, an electronic studio established.
The Studio for Experimental Music at the University of Illinois established, directed by Lejaren Hiller.
Pierre Henry leaves the Group de Musique Concrete; they reorganize as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)
Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley founded the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music, Ann Arbor , MI (University of Michigan).
Luciano Berio composedThema-omaggio a Joyce. The sound source is woman reading from Joyce's Ulysses.
1958-60 Stockhausen composed Kontakte (Contacts) for four-channel tape. There was a second version for piano, percussion and tape.
1958-9 Mauricio Kagel, an Argentinian composer, composed Transicion II, the first piece to call for live tape recorder as part of performance. The work was realized in Cologne. Two musicians perform on a piano, one in the traditional manner, the other playing on the strings and wood. Two other performers use tape recorders so that the work can unites its present of live sounds with its
future of pre-recorded materials from later on and its past of recordings made earlier in the performance.
Max Mathews, at Bell Labs, began experimenting with computer programs to create sound material. Mathews and Joan Miller also at Bell Labs, write MUSIC4, the first wide-spread computer sound synthesis program. Versions I through III were experimental versions written in assemble language. Music IV and Music V were written in FORTRAN. MUSIC4 did not allow reentrant instruments (same instrument becoming active again when it is already active), MUSIC5 added this. MUSIC4 required as many different instruments as the thickest chord, while MUSIC5 allowed a score to refer to an instrument as a template, which could then be called upon as many times as was necessary.
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was formally established. The group had applied through the Rockefeller Foundation, and suggested the creation of a University Council for Electronic Music. They asked for technical assistants, electronic equipment, space and materials available to other composers free of charge. A grant of $175,000 over five years was made to Columbia and Princeton Universities. In January, 1959, under the direction of Luening and Ussachevsky of Columbia, and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions of Princeton, the Center was formally established.
The RCA Mark II synthesizer was built at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (the original version was built for the artificial creation of human speech). The Mark II contained oscillators and noise generators. The operator had to give the synthesizer instructions on a punched paper roll to control pitch, volume, duration and timbre. The synth used a conventional equal-tempered twelve-note scale.
1960 Composers of more traditional orchestral music began to rebel. Many composers tried to get quasi-electronic sounds out of traditional instruments. Bruno Bartelozzi, wrote new book on extended instrumental techniques.
Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender established the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
John Cage composed Cartridge Music, an indeterminate score for several performers applying gramophone cartridges and contact mics to various objects.
1961 The first electronic music concerts at the Columbia-Princeton Studio were held; the music was received with much hostility from other faculty members.
Varese finally completed Deserts at the Columbia-Princeton Studio.
Fortran-based Music IV was used in the generation of "Bicycle Built for Two" (Mathews).
The production of integrated circuits and specifically VLSI-very large scale integration.
Robert Moog met Herbert Deutsch, and together they created a voltage-controlled synthesizer.
Luciano Berio composed Visage. This radio composition is based on the idea of non-verbal communication. There are many word-like passages, but only one word is spoken during the entire composition (actually heard twice), parole (Italian for 'word'). Cathy Berberian, the composer's wife, was the performer.
The theoretical work, Meta+Hodos, written in 1961 by James Tenney (META Meta+Hodos, 1975 followed).
1962 Bell Labs mass produces transistors, professional amplifiers and suppliers.
PLF 2 was developed by James Tenney. This computer program was used to write Four Stochastic Studies, Ergodos and others.
Iannis Xenakis composed Bohor for eight tracks of sound.
Milton Babbitt composed Ensembles for Synthesizer (1962-64) at the Columbia-Princeton Studio.
At the University of Illinois, Kenneth Gaburo composed Antiphony III, for chorus and tape.
Paul Ketoff built the synket. This synthesizer was built for composer John Eaton and was designed specifically as a live performance instrument.
1963 Lejaren Hiller and Robert Baker composed the Computer Cantata.
Babbitt composed Philomel at the Columbia-Princeton Studio. The story is about Philomel, a woman without a tongue, who is transformed into a nightingale (based on a story by Ovid).
Mario Davidovsky composed Synchronism I for flute and tape. Davidovsky has since written many "synchronism" pieces. These works are all written for live instrument(s) and tape. They explore the synchronizing of events between the live and tape.
1964 The fully developed Moog was released. The modular idea came from the miniaturization of electronics.
Gottfried Michael Koenig used PR-1 (Project 1), a computer program that was written in Fortran and implemented on an IBM 7090 computer. The purpose of
the program was to provide data to calculate structure in musical composition; written to perform algorithmic serial operations on incoming data. The second version of PR-1 completed, 1965.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed Mikrophonie I, a piece that required six musicians to generate. Two performers play a large tam-tam, while two others move microphones around the instrument to pick up different timbres, and the final two performers are controlling electronic processing.
Ilhan Mimaroglu, a Turkish-American composer, wrote Bowery Bum. This is a concrete composition, and used rubber band as single source. It was based on a painting by Dubuffet.
1965 Hi-fi gear is commercially produced.
The first commercially-available Moog.
Varese died.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed Solo. The composition used a tape recorder with moveable heads to redefine variations in delay between recording and playback, live manipulation during performance.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed Mikrophonie II for choir, Hammond organ, electronics and tape.
Steve Reich composed It's gonna rain. This is one of the first phase pieces.
1966 The Moog Quartet offered world-wide concerts of (mainly) parlor music.
Herbert Brun composed Non Sequitur VI
Steve Reich composed Come out, another phase piece.
1967 Walter Carlos (later Wendy) composed Switched on Bach using a Moog synthesizer.
Iannis Xenakis wrote Musiques Formelles (Formalized Music). The first discussion of granular synthesis and the clouds and grains of sound is presented in this book.
Leon Kirschner composed String Quartet No. 3, the first piece with electronics to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Kenneth Gaburo composed Antiphony IV, a work for trombone, piccolo, choir and tape.
Morton Subotnick composed Silver Apples of the Moon (title from Yeats), the first work commissioned specifically for the recorded medium.
The Grateful Dead released Anthem of the Sun and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention released Uncle Meat. Both albums made extensive use of electronic manipulation.
1968 Lejaren Hiller and John Cage composed HPSCHD.
Morton Subotnick composed The Wild Bull
Hugh Davies compiled an international catalogue of electronic music.
1969 Terry Riley composed Rainbow in Curved Air
late 1960s The Sal-Mar Construction was built. The instrument was named for composer Salvatore Martirano and designed by him. The Sal-Mar Construction weighed over fifteen hundred pounds and consisted of "analog circuits controlled by internal digital circuits controlled by the composer/performer via a touch-control keyboard with 291 touch-sensitive keys."
Godfrey Winham and Hubert Howe adapted MUSIC IV for the IBM 7094 as MUSIC4B was written in assembly language; MUSIC4BF (a Fortran-language adaptation of MUSIC4B, one version was written by Winham, another was written by Howe).
Music V variants include MUSIC360 and MUSIC11 for the IBM360 and the PDP11 computers, these were written by Barry Vercoe, Roger Hale, and Carl Howe at MIT, respectively.
GROOVE was developed by Mathews and F. Richard Moore at Bell Labs, and was used to control analog synthesizers.
1970 Charles Wuorinen composed "Times Encomium," the first Pulitzer Prize winner for entirely electronic composition.
Charles Dodge composed Earth's Magnetic Field. This is a great example of mapping numerical statistics into musical data.
Steve Reich composed Four Organs.
1972 Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon was released; it used ensembles of synthesizers, also used concrete tracks as interludes between tunes.
1973 SAWDUST, a language by Herbert Brun, used functions including: ELEMENT, LINK, MINGLE, MERGER, VARY, and TURN.
1974 The Mellotron was built. The instrument was an early sample player that used tape loops. There were versions that played string sounds or flute sounds, and the instrument was used in movie soundtracks and on recordings.
Clara Rockmore releases Theremin recordings.
1976 Composer Philip Glass collaborated with librettist Robert Wilson on Einstein on the Beach. This was a large-scale multimedia 'opera' in the minimalist style.
1977 The Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris, under direction of Pierre Boulez.
Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer (SCDS), built by Peter Samson for CCRMA, signal generating and processing elements all executing in parallel, and capable of running in real time. There are 256 digital oscillators, 128 signal modifiers (filters, reverb, amplitude scalers), a scratch-pad memory for communicating values between processing elements, and a large memory for reverberation and table storage.
1980 Philip Glass composed Satyagraha, another full scale opera in the minimalist style.
1981 Larry Austin composed Canadian Coastlines, a composition that used a land map of Canada in order to determine textural, rhythmic, and melodic content.
Music V variants: newer developments include Cmusic (by F.R. Moore), so named because it is written entirely in C programming language.
1985 HMSL, Hierarchical Music Specification Language was released. The basic organization of HMSL is a series of data structures called "morphs" (named for the flexible or morphological design of the software). Within the superstructure of these morphs there exist other data substructures named shapes, collections, structures, structures, productions, jobs, players, and actions. These secondary types of morphs are used to control aspects of higher level scheduling and routines.
Interactor, by Morton Subotnick and Mark Coniglio, was designed specifically for live performance and score-following capabilities.
1986 Another Music V variant was release--CSound, by Barry Vercoe of MIT.
Jam Factory written by programmer David Zicarelli. He was trying to create a program that would listen to MIDI input and 'improvise' immediately at some level of proficiency, while allowing (Zicarelli) to improve its ability.
Joel Chadabe, Offenhartz, Widoff, and Zicarelli began work on an algorithmic program that could be used as an improvisation environment. The performer could be seated at the computer and shape data in real time by "a set of scroll bars that changed the parameters of this algorithm, such as the size of the jump from one note to another, the lowest and highest note, etc." The original version was to be named "Maestro," then "RMan" (Random Manager), and finally, "M."
Music Mouse, written by Laurie Speigel, was designed to be a stand-alone performance system. It may be used as a MIDI controller or as a performance station using the Macintosh internal sound. Unlike other programs for the Macintosh environment, Music Mouse was not intended to be used as a recorder/player program. Instead, the program enables the programmer to "play" the computer. Check out the software at: http://www.dorsai.org/~spiegel/ls_programs.html
The Max program was written in the C language and was developed at IRCAM by Miller Puckette. It was later scheduled for distribution by Intelligent Music (the company that also distributed M and Jam Factory), but it was the Opcode company that eventually released it. Miller Puckette's original intention was to build a language that could control IRCAM's 4X synthesizer, and there was no need for the graphical implementation. The graphics were added after a version of Max for Macintosh computer using MIDI was proposed. Since 1989, David Zicarelli has updated and expanded the program for the Macintosh environment.
Dolby SR introduced
R-DAT spec announced
Mackie Designs Inc. founded
Sonic Solutions founded
1987 Apple introduced MacII
first consumer DAT decks available
1988 Steve Reich composed Different Trains for string quartet and tape.
1989 Digidesign introduces Sound Tools
Mackie 1604 debuts
1990 Sony introduces writeable CD
1991 Sony develops MiniDisc
Alesis ADAT introduced
1992 Sony announces multimedia CD-ROM
Emagic founded
Macromedia founded
Spirit by Soundcraft introduced
1994 DVD introduced
1996 first MiniDisc multitracks introduced
1997 DVD-Audio standard develops
Computer Science Lab
An Illustrated History of Computers Part 1
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002
The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been searching for
hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can perform) this task.
This picture shows what were known as "counting tables" [photo courtesy IBM]
A typical computer operation back when computers were people.
The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus
operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the Latin word for pebble).
A very old abacus
A more modern abacus. Note how the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers: the 5 lower rings on each rod
represent the 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2 hands.
In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.
An original set of Napier's Bones [photo courtesy IBM]
A more modern set of Napier's Bones
Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.
A slide rule
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never built any.
A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing
The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon afterward in the bubonic plague.
Schickard's Calculating Clock
In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required precision). Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid's thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit version of the Pascaline, and two views of a 6 digit version:
Pascal's Pascaline [photo © 2002 IEEE]
A 6 digit model for those who couldn't afford the 8 digit model
A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the numerical result
Click on the "Next" hyperlink below to read about the punched card system that was developed for looms for later applied to the U.S. census and then to computers...
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An Illustrated History of Computers Part 2
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002
Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.
Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you ever heard "calculating" referred to as "reckoning"?)
In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).
Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards
By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pattern [photo © 2002 IEEE]
A close-up of a Jacquard card
This tapestry was woven by a Jacquard loom
Jacquard's technology was a real boon to mill owners, but put many loom operators out of work. Angry mobs smashed Jacquard looms and once attacked Jacquard himself. History is full of examples of labor unrest following technological innovation yet most studies show that, overall, technology has actually increased the number of jobs.
By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. This machine would be able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in ocean navigation. By promoting their commercial and military navies, the British government had managed to become the earth's greatest empire. But in that time frame the British government was publishing a seven volume set of navigation tables which came with a companion volume of corrections which showed that the set had over 1000 numerical errors. It was hoped that Babbage's machine could eliminate errors in these types of tables. But construction of Babbage's Difference Engine proved exceedingly difficult and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up to that point in English history. Ten years later the device was still nowhere near complete, acrimony abounded between all involved, and funding dried up. The device was never finished.
A small section of the type of mechanism employed in Babbage's Difference Engine [photo © 2002 IEEE]
Babbage was not deterred, and by then was on to his next brainstorm, which he called the Analytic Engine. This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, would be more general purpose in nature because it would be programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of Jacquard. But it was Babbage who made an important intellectual leap regarding the punched cards. In the Jacquard loom, the presence or absence of each hole in the card physically allows a colored thread to pass or stops that thread (you can see this
clearly in the earlier photo). Babbage saw that the pattern of holes could be used to represent an abstract idea such as a problem statement or the raw data required for that problem's solution. Babbage saw that there was no requirement that the problem matter itself physically pass thru the holes.
Furthermore, Babbage realized that punched paper could be employed as a storage mechanism, holding computed numbers for future reference. Because of the connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic Engine the "Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are used in the weaving industry. The Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they were "woven" into new results. In a modern computer these same parts are called the memory unit and the central processing unit (CPU).
The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from calculators: the conditional statement. A conditional statement allows a program to achieve different results each time it is run. Based on the conditional statement, the path of the program (that is, what statements are executed next) can be determined based upon a condition or situation that is detected at the very moment the program is running.
You have probably observed that a modern stoplight at an intersection between a busy street and a less busy street will leave the green light on the busy street until a car approaches on the less busy street. This type of street light is controlled by a computer program that can sense the approach of cars on the less busy street. That moment when the light changes from green to red is not fixed in the program but rather varies with each traffic situation. The conditional statement in the stoplight program would be something like, "if a car approaches on the less busy street and the more busy street has already enjoyed the green light for at least a minute then move the green light to the less busy street". The conditional statement also allows a program to react to the results of its own calculations. An example would be the program that the I.R.S uses to detect tax fraud. This program first computes a person's tax liability and then decides whether to alert the police based upon how that person's tax payments compare to his obligations.
Babbage befriended Ada Byron, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron (Ada would later become the Countess Lady Lovelace by marriage). Though she was only 19, she was fascinated by Babbage's ideas and thru letters and meetings with Babbage she learned enough about the design of the Analytic Engine to begin fashioning programs for the still unbuilt machine. While Babbage refused to publish his knowledge for another 30 years, Ada wrote a series of "Notes" wherein she detailed sequences of instructions she had prepared for the Analytic Engine. The Analytic Engine remained unbuilt (the British government refused to get involved with this one) but Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer. Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping. Babbage himself went on to invent the
modern postal system, cowcatchers on trains, and the ophthalmoscope, which is still used today to treat the eye.
The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the representation of the states in Congress. While the very first census of 1790 had only required 9 months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown so much that the count for the 1880 census took 7.5 years. Automation was clearly needed for the next census. The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's punched cards for the purpose of computation.
Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count.
An operator working at a Hollerith Desk like the one below
Preparation of punched cards for the U.S. census
A few Hollerith desks still exist today [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]
The patterns on Jacquard's cards were determined when a tapestry was designed and then were not changed. Today, we would call this a read-only form of information storage. Hollerith had the insight to convert punched cards to what is today called a read/write technology. While riding a train, he observed that the conductor didn't merely punch each ticket, but rather punched a particular pattern of holes whose positions indicated the approximate height, weight, eye color, etc. of the ticket owner. This was done to keep anyone else from picking up a discarded ticket and claiming it was his own (a train ticket did not lose all value when it was punched because the same ticket was used for each leg of a trip). Hollerith realized how useful it would be to punch (write) new cards based upon an analysis (reading) of some other set of cards. Complicated analyses, too involved to be accomplished during a single pass thru the cards, could be accomplished via multiple passes thru the cards using newly printed cards to remember the intermediate results. Unknown to Hollerith, Babbage had proposed this long before.
Hollerith's technique was successful and the 1890 census was completed in only 3 years at a savings of 5 million dollars. Interesting aside: the reason that a person who removes inappropriate content from a book or movie is called a censor, as is a person who conducts a census, is that in Roman society the public official called the "censor" had both of these jobs.
Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous. Your gas bill would arrive each month with a punch card you had to return with your payment. This punch card recorded the particulars of your account: your name, address, gas usage, etc. (I imagine there were some "hackers" in these days who would alter the punch cards to change their bill). As another example, when you entered a toll way (a highway that collects a fee from each driver) you were given a punch card that recorded where you started and then when you exited from the toll way your fee was computed based upon the miles you drove. When you voted in an election the ballot you were handed was a punch card. The little pieces of paper that are punched out of the card are called "chad" and were thrown as confetti at weddings. Until recently all Social Security and other checks issued by the Federal government were actually punch cards. The check-out slip inside a library book was a punch card. Written on all these cards was a phrase as common as "close cover before striking": "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate". A spindle was an upright spike on the desk of an accounting clerk. As he completed processing each receipt he would impale it on this spike. When the spindle was full, he'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. You occasionally still see spindles at restaurant cash registers.
Two types of computer punch cards
Incidentally, the Hollerith census machine was the first machine to ever be featured on a magazine cover.
Click on the "Next" hyperlink below to read about the first computers such as the Harvard Mark 1, the German Zuse Z3 and Great Britain's Colossus...
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An Illustrated History of Computers Part 3
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002
IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial accounting and inventory accounting. One characteristic of both financial accounting and inventory accounting is that although you need to subtract, you don't need negative numbers and you really don't have to multiply since multiplication can be accomplished via repeated addition.
But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing as much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. Physicists could write the equations that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc. would determine the trajectory of the shell. But solving such equations was extremely laborious. This was the work performed by the human computers. Their results would be published in ballistic "firing tables" published in gunnery manuals. During World War II the U.S. military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the job of computing these tables. But not enough humans could be found to keep up with the need for new tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the battlefield without the necessary firing tables and this meant they were close to useless because they couldn't be aimed properly. Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to invest in even hair-brained schemes to automate this type of computation.
One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor. The Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting. To appreciate the scale of this machine note the four typewriters in the foreground of the following photo.
The Harvard Mark I: an electro-mechanical computer
You can see the 50 ft rotating shaft in the bottom of the prior photo. This shaft was a central power source for the entire machine. This design feature was reminiscent of the days when waterpower was used to run a machine shop and each lathe or other tool was driven by a belt connected to a single overhead shaft which was turned by an outside waterwheel.
A central shaft driven by an outside waterwheel and connected to each machine by overhead belts was the customary power source for
all the machines in a factory
Here's a close-up of one of the Mark I's four paper tape readers. A paper tape was an improvement over a box of punched cards as anyone who has ever dropped -- and thus shuffled -- his "stack" knows.
One of the four paper tape readers on the Harvard Mark I (you can observe the punched paper roll emerging from the bottom)
One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper found the first computer "bug": a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I and whose wings were blocking the reading of the holes in the paper tape. The word "bug" had been used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word "debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults.
The first computer bug [photo © 2002 IEEE]
In 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic". This language eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is designed to be more understandable by humans than is the binary language understood by the computing machinery. A high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler. Grace remained active as a Rear Admiral in the Navy Reserves until she was 79 (another record).
The Mark I operated on numbers that were 23 digits wide. It could add or subtract two of these numbers in three-tenths of a second, multiply them in four seconds, and divide them in ten seconds. Forty-five years later computers could perform an addition in a billionth of a second! Even though the Mark I had three quarters of a million components, it could only store 72 numbers! Today, home computers can store 30 million numbers in RAM and another 10 billion numbers on their hard disk. Today, a number can be pulled from RAM after a delay of only a few billionths of a second, and from a hard disk after a delay of only a few thousandths of a second. This kind of speed is obviously impossible for a machine which must move a rotating shaft and that is why electronic computers killed off their mechanical predecessors.
On a humorous note, the principal designer of the Mark I, Howard Aiken of Harvard, estimated in 1947 that six electronic digital computers would be sufficient to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States. IBM had commissioned this study to determine whether it should bother developing this new invention into one of its standard products (up until then computers were one-of-a-kind items built by special arrangement). Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were very few institutions (principally, the government and military) that could afford the cost of what was called a computer in 1947. He just didn't foresee the micro-electronics revolution which would allow something like an IBM Stretch computer of 1959:
(that's just the operator's console, here's the rest of its 33 foot length:)
to be bested by a home computer of 1976 such as this Apple I which sold for only $600:
The Apple 1 which was sold as a do-it-yourself kit (without the lovely case seen here)
Computers had been incredibly expensive because they required so much hand assembly, such as the wiring seen in this CDC 7600:
Typical wiring in an early mainframe computer [photo courtesy The Computer Museum]
The microelectronics revolution is what allowed the amount of hand-crafted wiring seen in the prior photo to be mass-produced as an integrated circuit which is a small sliver of silicon the size of your thumbnail .
An integrated circuit ("silicon chip") [photo courtesy of IBM]
The primary advantage of an integrated circuit is not that the transistors (switches) are miniscule (that's the secondary advantage), but rather that millions of transistors can be created and interconnected in a mass-production process. All the elements on the integrated circuit are fabricated simultaneously via a small number (maybe 12) of optical masks that define the geometry of each layer. This speeds up the process of fabricating the computer -- and hence reduces its cost -- just as Gutenberg's printing press sped up the fabrication of books and thereby made them affordable to all.
The IBM Stretch computer of 1959 needed its 33 foot length to hold the 150,000 transistors it contained. These transistors were tremendously smaller than the vacuum tubes they replaced, but they were still individual elements requiring individual assembly. By the early 1980s this many transistors could be simultaneously fabricated on an integrated circuit. Today's Pentium 4 microprocessor contains 42,000,000 transistors in this same thumbnail sized piece of silicon.
It's humorous to remember that in between the Stretch machine (which would be called a mainframe today) and the Apple I (a desktop computer) there was an entire industry segment referred to as mini-computers such as the following PDP-12 computer of 1969:
The DEC PDP-12
Sure looks "mini", huh? But we're getting ahead of our story.
One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or dynamic RAM). As far as its inventors were aware, it was also the first to employ binary arithmetic. However, the machine was not programmable, it lacked a conditional branch, its design was appropriate for only one type of mathematical problem, and it was not further pursued after World War II. It's inventors didn't even bother to preserve the machine and it was dismantled by those who moved into the room where it lay abandoned.
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer [photo © 2002 IEEE]
Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by Germany. Britain led the world in designing and building electronic machines dedicated to code breaking, and was routinely able to read coded Germany radio transmissions. But Colossus was definitely not a general purpose, reprogrammable machine. Note the presence of pulleys in the two photos of Colossus below:
Two views of the code-breaking Colossus of Great Britain
The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made important contributions. American and British computer pioneers were still arguing over who was first to do what, when in 1965 the work of the German Konrad Zuse was published for the first time in English. Scooped! Zuse had built a sequence of general purpose computers in Nazi Germany. The first, the Z1, was built between 1936 and 1938 in the parlor of his parent's home.
The Zuse Z1 in its residential setting
Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer. Without knowledge of any calculating machine inventors since Leibniz (who lived in the 1600's), Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his own to employ binary representation for numbers (Babbage had advocated decimal). The Z3 was destroyed by an Allied bombing raid. The Z1 and Z2 met the same fate and the Z4 survived only because Zuse hauled it in a wagon up into the mountains. Zuse's accomplishments are all the more incredible given the context of the material and manpower shortages in Germany during World War II. Zuse couldn't even obtain paper tape so he had to make his own by punching holes in discarded movie film. Because these machines were unknown outside Germany, they did not influence the path of computing in America. But their architecture is identical to that still in use today: an arithmetic unit to do the calculations, a memory for storing numbers, a control system to supervise operations, and input and output devices to connect to the external world. Zuse also invented what might be the first high-level computer language, "Plankalkul", though it too was unknown outside Germany.
Click on the "Next" hyperlink below to read about Eniac, Univac, IBM mainframes, and the IBM PC...
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An Illustrated History of Computers Part 4
___________________________________
John Kopplin © 2002
The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of what's visible.
Two views of ENIAC: the "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator" (note that it wasn't even given the name of computer
since "computers" were people) [U.S. Army photo]
To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange the patch cords that you can observe on the left in the prior photo, and the settings of 3000 switches that you can observe on the right. To program a modern computer, you type out a program with statements like:
Circumference = 3.14 * diameter
To perform this computation on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch cords and then locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4.
Reprogramming ENIAC involved a hike [U.S. Army photo]
Once the army agreed to fund ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert worked around the clock, seven days a week, hoping to complete the machine in time to contribute to the war. Their war-time effort was so intense that most days they ate all 3 meals in the company of the army Captain who was their liaison with their military sponsors. They were allowed a small staff but soon observed that they could hire only the most junior members of the University of Pennsylvania staff because the more experienced faculty members knew that their proposed machine would never work.
One of the most obvious problems was that the design would require 18,000 vacuum tubes to all work simultaneously. Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even twenty years later many neighborhood drug stores provided a "tube tester" that allowed homeowners to bring in the vacuum tubes from their television sets and determine which one of the tubes was causing their TV to fail. And television sets only incorporated about 30 vacuum tubes. The device that used the largest number of vacuum tubes was an electronic organ: it incorporated 160 tubes. The idea that 18,000 tubes could function together was considered so unlikely that the dominant vacuum tube supplier of the day, RCA, refused to join the project (but did supply tubes in the interest of "wartime cooperation"). Eckert solved the tube reliability problem through extremely careful circuit design. He was so thorough that before he chose the type of wire cabling he would employ in ENIAC he first ran an experiment where he starved lab rats for a few days and then gave them samples of all the available types of cable to determine which they least liked to eat. Here's a look at a small number of the vacuum tubes in ENIAC:
Even with 18,000 vacuum tubes, ENIAC could only hold 20 numbers at a time. However, thanks to the elimination of moving parts it ran much faster than the Mark I: a multiplication that required 6 seconds on the Mark I could be performed on ENIAC in 2.8 thousandths of a second. ENIAC's basic clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second. Today's home computers employ clock speeds of 1,000,000,000 cycles per second. Built with $500,000 from the U.S. Army, ENIAC's first task was to compute whether or not it was possible to build a hydrogen bomb (the atomic bomb was completed during the war and hence is older than ENIAC). The very first problem run on ENIAC required only 20 seconds and was checked against an answer obtained after forty hours of work with a mechanical calculator. After chewing on half a million punch cards for six weeks, ENIAC did humanity no favor when it declared the hydrogen bomb feasible. This first ENIAC program remains classified even today.
Once ENIAC was finished and proved worthy of the cost of its development, its designers set about to eliminate the obnoxious fact that reprogramming the computer required a physical modification of all the patch cords and switches. It took days to change ENIAC's program. Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC, which pioneered
the stored program. Because he was the first to publish a description of this new computer, von Neumann is often wrongly credited with the realization that the program (that is, the sequence of computation steps) could be represented electronically just as the data was. But this major breakthrough can be found in Eckert's notes long before he ever started working with von Neumann. Eckert was no slouch: while in high school Eckert had scored the second highest math SAT score in the entire country.
After ENIAC and EDVAC came other computers with humorous names such as ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, and, of course, MANIAC. ILLIAC was built at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, which is probably why the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke chose to have the HAL computer of his famous book "2001: A Space Odyssey" born at Champaign-Urbana. Have you ever noticed that you can shift each of the letters of IBM backward by one alphabet position and get HAL?
ILLIAC II built at the University of Illinois (it is a good thing computers were one-of-a-kind creations in these days, can you imagine being
asked to duplicate this?)
HAL from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey". Look at the previous picture to understand why the movie makers in 1968 assumed
computers of the future would be things you walk into.
JOHNNIAC was a reference to John von Neumann, who was unquestionably a genius. At age 6 he could tell jokes in classical Greek. By 8 he was doing calculus. He could recite books he had read years earlier word for word. He could read a page of the phone directory and then recite it backwards. On one occasion it took von Neumann only 6 minutes to solve a problem in his head that another professor had spent hours on using a mechanical calculator. Von Neumann is perhaps most famous (infamous?) as the man who worked out the complicated method needed to detonate an atomic bomb.
Once the computer's program was represented electronically, modifications to that program could happen as fast as the computer could compute. In fact, computer programs could now modify themselves while they ran (such programs are called self-modifying programs). This introduced a new way for a program to fail: faulty logic in the program could cause it to damage itself. This is one source of the general protection fault famous in MS-DOS and the blue screen of death famous in Windows.
Today, one of the most notable characteristics of a computer is the fact that its ability to be reprogrammed allows it to contribute to a wide variety of endeavors, such as the following completely unrelated fields:
the creation of special effects for movies, the compression of music to allow more minutes of music to fit within the
limited memory of an MP3 player, the observation of car tire rotation to detect and prevent skids in an anti-
lock braking system (ABS), the analysis of the writing style in Shakespeare's work with the goal of
proving whether a single individual really was responsible for all these pieces.
By the end of the 1950's computers were no longer one-of-a-kind hand built devices owned only by universities and government research labs. Eckert and Mauchly left the University of Pennsylvania over a dispute about who owned the patents for their invention. They decided to set up their own company. Their first product was the famous UNIVAC computer, the first commercial (that is, mass produced) computer. In the 50's, UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal Automatic Computer") was the household word for "computer" just as "Kleenex" is for "tissue". The first UNIVAC was sold, appropriately enough, to the Census bureau. UNIVAC was also the first computer to employ magnetic tape. Many people still confuse a picture of a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a picture of a mainframe computer.
A reel-to-reel tape drive [photo courtesy of The Computer Museum]
ENIAC was unquestionably the origin of the U.S. commercial computer industry, but its inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, never achieved fortune from their work and
their company fell into financial problems and was sold at a loss. By 1955 IBM was selling more computers than UNIVAC and by the 1960's the group of eight companies selling computers was known as "IBM and the seven dwarfs". IBM grew so dominant that the federal government pursued anti-trust proceedings against them from 1969 to 1982 (notice the pace of our country's legal system). You might wonder what type of event is required to dislodge an industry heavyweight. In IBM's case it was their own decision to hire an unknown but aggressive firm called Microsoft to provide the software for their personal computer (PC). This lucrative contract allowed Microsoft to grow so dominant that by the year 2000 their market capitalization (the total value of their stock) was twice that of IBM and they were convicted in Federal Court of running an illegal monopoly.
If you learned computer programming in the 1970's, you dealt with what today are called mainframe computers, such as the IBM 7090 (shown below), IBM 360, or IBM 370.
The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer [photo courtesy of IBM]
There were 2 ways to interact with a mainframe. The first was called time sharing because the computer gave each user a tiny sliver of time in a round-robin fashion. Perhaps 100 users would be simultaneously logged on, each typing on a teletype such as the following:
The Teletype was the standard mechanism used to interact with a time-sharing computer
A teletype was a motorized typewriter that could transmit your keystrokes to the mainframe and then print the computer's response on its roll of paper. You typed a single line of text, hit the carriage return button, and waited for the teletype to begin noisily printing the computer's response (at a whopping 10 characters per second). On the left-hand side of the teletype in the prior picture you can observe a paper tape reader and writer (i.e., puncher). Here's a close-up of paper tape:
Three views of paper tape
After observing the holes in paper tape it is perhaps obvious why all computers use binary numbers to represent data: a binary bit (that is, one digit of a binary number) can only have the value of 0 or 1 (just as a decimal digit can only have the value of 0 thru 9). Something which can only take two states is very easy to manufacture, control, and sense. In the case of paper tape, the hole has either been punched or it has not. Electro-mechanical computers such as the Mark I used relays to represent data because a relay (which is just a motor driven switch) can only be open or closed. The earliest all-electronic computers used vacuum tubes as switches: they too were either open or closed. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes because they too could act as switches but were smaller, cheaper, and consumed less power.
Paper tape has a long history as well. It was first used as an information storage medium by Sir Charles Wheatstone, who used it to store Morse code that was arriving via the newly invented telegraph (incidentally, Wheatstone was also the inventor of the accordion).
The alternative to time sharing was batch mode processing, where the computer gives its full attention to your program. In exchange for getting the computer's full attention at run-time, you had to agree to prepare your program off-line on a key punch machine which generated punch cards.
An IBM Key Punch machine which operates like a typewriter except it produces punched cards rather than a printed sheet of paper
University students in the 1970's bought blank cards a linear foot at a time from the university bookstore. Each card could hold only 1 program statement. To submit your program to the mainframe, you placed your stack of cards in the hopper of a card reader. Your program would be run whenever the computer made it that far. You often submitted your deck and then went to dinner or to bed and came back later hoping to see a successful printout showing your results. Obviously, a program run in batch mode could not be interactive.
But things changed fast. By the 1990's a university student would typically own his own computer and have exclusive use of it in his dorm room.
The original IBM Personal Computer (PC)
This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor. A microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC). Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971. The micro in the name microprocessor refers to the physical size. Intel didn't invent the electronic computer. But they were the first to succeed in cramming an entire computer on a single chip (IC). Intel was started in 1968 and initially produced only semiconductor memory (Intel invented both the DRAM and the EPROM, two memory technologies that are still going strong today). In 1969 they were approached by Busicom, a Japanese manufacturer of high performance calculators (these were typewriter sized units, the first shirt-pocket sized scientific calculator was the Hewlett-Packard HP35 introduced in 1972). Busicom wanted Intel to produce 12 custom calculator chips: one chip dedicated to the keyboard, another chip dedicated to the display, another for the printer, etc. But integrated circuits were (and are) expensive to design and this approach would have required Busicom to bear the full expense of developing 12 new chips since these 12 chips would only be of use to them.
A typical Busicom desk calculator
But a new Intel employee (Ted Hoff) convinced Busicom to instead accept a general purpose computer chip which, like all computers, could be reprogrammed for many different tasks (like controlling a keyboard, a display, a printer, etc.). Intel argued that since the chip could be reprogrammed for alternative purposes, the cost of developing it could be spread out over more users and hence would be less expensive to each user. The general purpose computer is adapted to each new purpose by writing a program which is a sequence of instructions stored in memory (which happened to be Intel's forte). Busicom agreed to pay Intel to design a general purpose chip and to get a price break since it would allow Intel to sell the resulting chip to others. But development of the chip took longer than expected and Busicom pulled out of the project. Intel knew it had a winner by that point and gladly refunded all of Busicom's investment just to gain sole rights to the device which they finished on their own.
Thus became the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor (uP). The 4004 consisted of 2300 transistors and was clocked at 108 kHz (i.e., 108,000 times per second). Compare this to the 42 million transistors and the 2 GHz clock rate (i.e., 2,000,000,000 times per second) used in a Pentium 4. One of Intel's 4004 chips still functions aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which is now the man-made object farthest from the earth. Curiously, Busicom went bankrupt and never ended up using the ground-breaking microprocessor.
Intel followed the 4004 with the 8008 and 8080. Intel priced the 8080 microprocessor at $360 dollars as an insult to IBM's famous 360 mainframe which cost millions of dollars. The 8080 was employed in the MITS Altair computer, which was the world's first personal computer (PC). It was personal all right: you had to build it yourself from a kit of parts that arrived in the mail. This kit didn't even include an enclosure and that is the reason the unit shown below doesn't match the picture on the magazine cover.
The Altair 8800, the first PC
A Harvard freshman by the name of Bill Gates decided to drop out of college so he could concentrate all his time writing programs for this computer. This early experienced put Bill Gates in the right place at the right time once IBM decided to standardize on the Intel microprocessors for their line of PCs in 1981. The Intel Pentium 4 used in today's PCs is still compatible with the Intel 8088 used in IBM's first PC.
If you've enjoyed this history of computers, I encourage you to try your own hand at programming a computer. That is the only way you will really come to understand the concepts of looping, subroutines, high and low-level languages, bits and bytes, etc. I have written a number of Windows programs which teach computer programming in a fun, visually-engaging setting. I start my students on a programmable RPN calculator where we learn about programs, statements, program and data memory, subroutines, logic and syntax errors, stacks, etc. Then we move on to an 8051 microprocessor (which happens to be the most widespread microprocessor on earth) where we learn about microprocessors, bits and bytes, assembly language, addressing modes, etc. Finally, we graduate to the most powerful language in use today: C++ (pronounced "C plus plus"). These Windows programs are accompanied by a book's worth of on-line documentation which serves as a self-study guide, allowing you to teach yourself computer programming! The home page (URL) for this collection of software is www.computersciencelab.com.
Bibliography:
"ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" by Scott McCartney.
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