A Short History of
Computation
My
educational background is in Chemical Engineering, and I got my degree in 1959,
before computers or even calculators were available. We did our engineering computations using the
slide rule – “accuracy to two decimal places”.
If you say “how primitive”, 15 years prior to 1959, I was doing homework
by kerosene lamplight. It was wartime,
and the electrical grid was interrupted before it reached my town.
Log-Log Duplex Decitrig Engineering Slide rule
Suffice it to say,
other than relatively primitive adding machines, not very many automated
computational tools were available through the 1950’s. Of course the ground work for future
computing had already been laid by Alan Turing, Johnny von Neumann, and others
in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
I
saw my first mechanical calculators in 1960 after I joined Caltex (then known
as the California Texas Oil Corporation) in New York City. These were Marchant and Monroe
calculators. They could divide!!! The Marchant was the more advanced.
Marchant
Marchant
The
first (pocket?) electronic calculators appeared in the early 1970’s and were
very expensive at first, over $400 for the first models. This would be $2500 in 2016 dollars.
This
first actual computer that I worked with was the IBM 704 in 1960. The 04 stood for a whopping 4k of
memory. We paid $600 per hour to use
it. It was easier for us engineers to
learn how to program and key punch the cards for our refinery simulations than
for computer programmers (if there were any then), to learn engineering.
The
IBM 704 used vacuum tubes and took half of a Manhattan skyscraper floor. It was housed on the 48th floor of
the Union Carbide Building, which I always thought of being at Vanderbilt and
47th street, but the actual address is 270 Park Avenue. This is the present corporate headquarters of
J.P. Morgan Chase, whom I later worked for in Dallas for nearly 10 years.
We
would carry large cans of pre-punched computer cards and magnetic tapes across the
street from our offices at 380 Madison Avenue.
A special “breadboard” would need to be inserted into the IBM 704 for
the “engineering” run to distinguish it from an “accounting” run. We would then carry heavy reams of computer
output back to our office for analysis and further action. Seemingly a lot of work, but it beat having
to do laborious manual “stock balances” of complex refineries by manual
iterations on large handwritten (and erased, and erased) sheets of paper.
https://www.google.com/search?q=von+neumann&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
The next computers that I worked with in New York were the IBM 7090 and 7094, successors to the 704, that employed transistors for the first time and were much faster and more powerful than the 704. (As powerful as a 2016 watch maybe, but no comparison can be made because the technology in my watch didn’t exist in the ‘60’s). These 709x mainframes were no longer in the Union Carbide or J.P. Morgan Chase Building, and they were less expensive for Caltex to use. I must admit that Caltex was not far behind using the latest computer technology, at least in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The next computers that I worked with in New York were the IBM 7090 and 7094, successors to the 704, that employed transistors for the first time and were much faster and more powerful than the 704. (As powerful as a 2016 watch maybe, but no comparison can be made because the technology in my watch didn’t exist in the ‘60’s). These 709x mainframes were no longer in the Union Carbide or J.P. Morgan Chase Building, and they were less expensive for Caltex to use. I must admit that Caltex was not far behind using the latest computer technology, at least in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Then
came the IBM 360 and 370 mainframe series and smaller offshoots like the 1400
series, System/3 series and other lower end main frame type computers. The IBM Series 360’s were very
successful. The following is an
interesting commentary on the capability of these mainframe computers.
“High performance models
came later. The 1967 System 360 Model 91 could do up to 16.6 million instructions per second.[3] The larger 360 models could
have up to 8 MB of internal main memory,[4] though main memory that big
was unusual—a more typical large installation might have as little as
256 KB of main storage, but 512 KB, 768 KB or 1024 KB was
more common. Up to 8 megabytes of slower (8 microsecond) Large Capacity Storage (LCS) was also available.”
Remember these were mainframes. My Iphone CPU runs at 1.4ghz, has 1gb of ram
and 120gb of storage, it also has cameras, voice and video recording and myriad
other features only dreamed about in the past.
Also, we put a man on the moon in 1969 using
this type of technology. Quoting from a
“Computer Weekly” article,
“The so-called Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) used a
real time operating system, which enabled astronauts to enter simple commands
by typing in pairs of nouns and verbs, to control the spacecraft. It was more
basic than the electronics in modern toasters that have computer controlled
stop/start/defrost buttons. It had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated
at 0.043MHz.”
High
end mainframes continued with the IBM 8000 series, 390 series, and finally the
Z series, Watson natural language machine and other current offerings.
I
had moved from engineering planning and supply disciplines to the computer
division of Caltex. It was not yet
called IT. I worked with mainframe and
mini computing for several years in New York, and then in Dallas. The first personal computer I used was the
IBM 5150 class, but it was actually a Wang knock-off. The first PC I bought/built in the mid 1980’s
was an IBM XT clone with a 20mb hard drive.
I didn’t think I could ever use 20mb, but I splurged. Cost was about $1500, and I built and sold
similar machines to my brother-in-law in Massachusetts and to a preacher friend
in East Texas. Another bookmaker friend
of mine in Dallas had already obtained an XT machine. These three individuals were pioneers of
personal computing. My brother-in-law
used the XT and primitive spreadsheets to represent his large volume gas
station business. My preacher friend
published a weekly church newspaper. My
bookie friend used the computer to streamline his dealings. All three saw the potential of personal
computing early on and made use of it at a time when one needed to be creative
just to effectively use a computer.
The first PC’s were
DOS based. They had no GUI (Graphical
User Interface). Also, there was no world
wide web as we now know it until the early 1990’s when Tim Berners-Lee and others at CERN in Switzerland proposed a new
protocol for information distribution. This protocol became the World Wide Web
in 1991. Almost simultaneously, Marc
Andreesen and a co-worker Eric Bina created a user-friendly browser with integrated
graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was
the Mosaic Web browser, later Netscape and later overrun by Microsoft and
others. I still remember being amazed hearing
Andreesen’s voice over the infant internet describing his Mosaic browser.
The Internet itself had been around since the
1960’s and I was aware of it early on.
In order to use it, one needed to learn Unix and pay a high rate to
connect to a central server that could run it.
In Texas, this would be UT Austin at $50 per month. Too rich for my blood at the time. The first dialup Internet service I had in
the late 1980’s was Delphi, which provided primitive early email service and
other DOS based bulletin board and other information services.
Some links on the history of the Internet:
I built an Intel 386
based machine in 1988 for personal use, and although not always chasing the
most recent technology, I managed to stay close, replacing and enhancing
computers as technology advanced. I had
started building computers from components in the late 1980’s, and I continued
for about 10 years. After that, it
became more economic to buy a system, enhance it and sell it at a markup. To some extent I still continue this process, but now mainly with
laptops rather than large desktop machines.
I still offer diagnostic and repair services mainly for friends and
family.
After taking early
retirement from Caltex in 1988, I entrepreneur-ed both in the computer field
and in non-computer fields until 1995. I
then consulted in IT support for several companies, including Denton County,
Texas, BancTec, LSG Sky Chefs and Chase Manhattan, who hired me in 2000. I left J.P. Morgan Chase in 1988 and
continued in the IT field in a semi-retired capacity.
Ray Gruszecki
March, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment