History of Computers and How They Changed the World.

What Was Stretch? RetroComputing
In 1954 IBM initiated a project "Datatron", with the intent of taking a "giant step" to secure their position as the preeminent vendor of high-performance computers. Later renamed Stretch, the project's primary objective was to produce a computer with 100 times the speed of the IBM 704 scientific computer. This goal was perhaps even more aggressive than it sounds, given that the performance of the logic circuits increased by only a factor of ten to twenty, and memory performance by only a factor of six. Architectural improvements such as extensive use of parallelism were required to meet (or even approach) the goal.

In  1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and set off the space race.
This timeline explores the history of computing from 1945 to 1990. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in hardware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial applications and artificial intelligence. When appropriate, biographical sketches of the pioneers responsible for the advances are included. Find Dan You may also enjoy PICTURES Timeline starting in 1937.

"Computer History"

Found buried deep in the catacombs, or basement, of the University of Kansas campus is an ancient technology artifact -- the university's first computer. The institution purchased the computer, an IBM 650, in 1957, according to The University Daily Kansan. It was one of only 2,000 made and is considered to be the first mass-produced computer. Unlike today's hand-held computers, this one was 6 feet tall and 5 feet deep, and that was considered small at the time compared with models that took up an entire floor. The university was fixing to trash the computer when a professor there realized the historical significance of the find. He has begun moving the machine and its multitude of vacuum tubes to his house for restoration. The university won't get much processing power from the machine, though. The computer's memory was only capable of holding 1,000 10-digit numbers.

ENIGMA CIPHER MACHINES, FIALKA, NEMA, OTHER CIPHER MACHINES, ANTIQUE COMPUTERS AND CALCULATORS, W1TP TELEGRAPH AND SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENT MUSEUMS. ( Other fun Soviet Gagets )

ENIAC a Computer was Built In WWII leading to the creation of The Internet

Read About The Dream Machine and about JCR Licklider then read The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution the Made Computing Personal" by Mitch Waldrop which reminds us that computing is a strategic/military technology .  "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff reminds us that LSD (also a military technology) and PCs were born in the same test-tube.
There were 6 Women Computers known as the "Programmers" of the ENIAC

• COMPUTER WONDER WOMEN PDF
• INTERNET PIONEERS 20 PAGE pdf
• Computer Wonder Women
• Women Special Edition

History of ENIAC - There were 6 Women Programmers of the ENIAC Kathleen Mauchly Antonelli (ne. McNulty), died Thursday, April 20, 2006.  Kathleen was one of the 6 women programmers of the ENIAC, a resident of the Philadelphia area and lecturer at Chestnut Hill College Philadelphia, PA and was an inspiration to many. Computer Wonder Women - 'WOMEN WANTED!' The Army wanted women with mathematics degrees to HAND CALCULATE the firing trajectories of artillery for the war effort. Snyder, Holberton, punchcard, mainframe, Eniac, Univac, Edvac, Ordvac, Brlesc-1, Cobal, Fortran Technology advances in the 1950's
[Recorded 1960] This humorous promotional film features J. Prespert Eckert and John Mauchly the 2 major figures in the creation of the ENIAC computer who left the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering at the end of WWII to found their own firm. They eventually sold their business to Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand) who incorporated it as the UNIVAC division of the company. Eckert remained with UNIVAC all his life but Mauchly left after a few years to become a private consultant. In 1955 the Sperry Corporation and Remington Rand merged forming Sperry Rand. Sperry Rand then eventually merged with Burroughs to from Unisys and is still in business.

FEB. 13 2006 ENIAC DEBUTS 60 YEARS AGO
ENIAC My Personal Memories - LISTEN

(Notice Robert Kahn in the Video He is also in 1972 ARPANET Film about Computer Networks )

In  1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and set off the space race. See Timeline of Computer History
This timeline explores the history of computing from 1945 to 1990. Each year features illustrated descriptions of significant innovations in hardware and software technology, as well as milestones in areas such as commercial applications and artificial intelligence. When appropriate, biographical sketches of the pioneers responsible for the advances are included. Find Dan
You may also enjoy PICTURES Timeline starting in 1937.

May 25, 2010 PLATO History Project Brian Dear brian@platohistory.org
This week and next mark the 50th anniversary of the PLATO computer system, when Dr. Daniel Alpert at the Coordinated Sciences Lab at the University of Illinois invited then 26-year-old Dr. Donald Bitzer, who'd just a few months earlier gotten his PhD in Electrical Engineering, to head up a new project to design, build, and deploy a computer that could teach.  Over the summer of 1960, the PLATO system was not only envisioned, but an early prototype was built to run on the ILLIAC I computer.   Over the next two and a half decades, PLATO would evolve, thanks to generous ARPA and NSF funding, into a large network with interconnected systems and users around the world, bolstered by Control Data Corporation which began commercial marketing of PLATO in 1976. 
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/listing/plato-at-50/
http://platohistory.org
http://friendlyorangeglow.com

Far-out Computing Capacity Remembering the Mainframe of the 1960s
A history article in the IBM Systems Magazine describes an IBM System/
360-50 used to support an on-line lookup system for telephoneinformation operators.  While the article is more about the computer than the telephone operators, it is interesting none the less.

From Hal Murray

I worked on that project. Boy does that bring back memories. Thanks for the reminder. (I still have my coffee cup from back then.) I was working for Computer Corporation of America in Cambridge MA. Today, we would call it a startup. There were 8-10 of us in the company. We had a data base system that ran on IBM 360s. That was long before SQL.
Bell Labs was working on computerizing directory assistance. Somehow, one of our guys got in touch with one of their guys. We claimed that we could do the data base lookup in under a second. They were rightly skeptical, but after a lot of discussion and simulation, they funded us to do a serious prototype. We busted our tails for a couple of weeks and gave them a great demo at the IBM data center in Philadelphia. (It was the nearest place to Boston (Homdel?) where we could rent time on a 360 with 2260 terminals.) The demo worked well enough that we got a contract for the system out in Oakland that the above article describes.
A big chunk of CCA moved to Oakland for several months. We were all young. I don't think anybody had kids so working long hours on a neat project was fun rather than disruptive to our life style. (Several wives/girlfriends came out for weekends. I got to Yosemite for a weekend in October. We had Half Dome to ourselves.)
The project covered the whole 415 area code, 1.5 million listings. I think the breakdown was (roughly):
3/4 million residential - 1/2 million business - 1/4 million government
Part of our job was to read the tapes that they sent to the printers for the phone books and extract the data to feed to our system. (The print tapes were full of quirks and special cases. I didn't work in that area.)
They didn't have room for us or the computer in the main PacBell building in downtown Oakland so they rented the basement floor of an office building a few blocks away. We were connected to the main building by a pair of 56 KB lines. Being the phone company, they understood about backhoe fade. One line went out the back of the main building and the other went out the front. I think they didn't converge until they got to our building.
One day, we got a tour of the normal directory assistance operation. There was a large room full of people. I'd guess 50 of them. Each operator was in a small booth with a row of phone books in front of her. When the operator said "What city please?", she really meant "What phone book?". I think the San Francisco directory assistance was shut down overnight and the calls forwarded over to Oakland.
The phone books were reprinted monthly. It took about 10 of them to cover 415. The schedule was staggered so a new one arrived every few days. New listings and changes since the last version sent to the customers had a big dot next to them so they were easy to find. The walls of the booth had the numbers for popular restaurants and movie theaters. Think of it as a cache. The hit rate was impressive. I don't remember any solid numbers, but I'd guess 10-30%.
There was also a small booklet with the changes since the phone books had been printed. I think it was updated nightly. It was 10 or 20 pages. At one end of the big room was a chalk board with today's screwups. If Joe's Pizza Parlor had a new phone and it got listed wrong or missed the cutoff and Joe called in to complain, his name and correct number would get up on that board where everybody could see it.
I think the trial setup had 8 stations connected to our system. There was some sort of minicomputer at their end of the 56Kb lines. I remember grumbling that we had to do a lot of processing that should have been done at their end. Back then, I didn't understand project management. In hindsight, letting us do all the work was probably the right decision. The API/protocol was pretty simple. I think it was only an afternoon to get things off the ground. After that, all the changes were in our code so fixing/tweaking something didn't take any coordination, negotiation, or memos. Somebody just told us what to do and we did it.

The goal was to deliver the first screen full of answers in under a second and have the answer be on that screen most of the time. The key idea is that the first 3 characters of the last name and the first 3 characters of the street name was enough information to get you down to a screen full most of the time. That's one seek for a hash table lookup, then another seek to get the first listing and a few more reads (maybe few short seeks) to get the other listings on that screen.
3 characters of first name and 3 characters of last name also gets you down to a single screen most of the time.
After a preliminary test, we started over with 3+4 and 4+3 in order to get slightly better first-screen statistics. The data base also had middle names/initials, street numbers, city, and whatever. They were only used occasionally.
WIL was the nasty case for names. That covered Wilson and Williams and probably a few other big clumps.
Overall, I think Bell Labs and PacBell were happy with the results. We were at the right place at the right time.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Less telcom related...

The only name I remember from PacBell was Al Aramburu. He was a VP(?) in PacBell and also a supervisor for Marin County (north across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco). I think he was on loan to Bell Labs when they started working on this and he made the west coast arrangements for the experiment.
From CCA, Bill Mann, Bob Kittredge, Dave Long and I moved out to Oakland for several months. Dave Long stayed out there as our man on the scene for a few months after it was up and working and the rest of us returned to the east coast. (Apologies if I overlooked anybody.)
PacBell provided an IBM 360/50 dedicated to this project. Until we got off the ground, it was available to us (CCA) for whatever we needed. It was an interesting example of throw-money-at-it for an experiment. We'll learn enough to make it worth while.
I don't remember when I learned about Moore's law. This was obviously long before it hit popular culture, even if you restrict your sample set to geeks.
PacBell obviously considered this to be an important project. We never had any foot-dragging type bureaucratic problems. I don't remember any names, but the guys/gals in the trenches supporting us were all good.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Our system was one of the first 360/50s on the west coast with 384K (yes K) of memory. We weren't sure everything would work in 256K and BellLabs/PACBell didn't want to pay for 512K, so we tried 384K.
The system had 3x 2314 disks, a few tape drives, and a printer and card reader. The 2314s had the dual channel option. Each 2314 had 9 drives, 8 could be online with the 9th was a spare. Each drive was 30 megabytes, 200 cylinders, 20 tracks per cylinder, 7294 bytes per track.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2314#IBM_2314.2F2319
The whole 2314 was about 5 ft tall, 12 feet wide, and 3 or 4 feet deep.
The I/O gear (tapes and disks) arrived long before the CPU. The IBM field service guys had plenty of time to play with their local diagnostics that ran on the CPU in the controller units. So the I/O gear was all tuned up long before the CPU arrived.
A couple of days after I got there, the CPU came down the freight elevator. The IBM guys swarmed around it. After they got everything all setup, they pushed the Power-On button. The main breaker popped. Those guys worked on 360/50s all day long. They knew it inside and out. After a quick huddle they found the bug in the directions from the factory. The next try got off the ground.
But it didn't get very far. One of the guys asked something like "Did we check for loose cards?". The response was several grumbles of "Not me.". They dumped power and started checking each individual plug in card. That involved opening the cover (air baffle) on each 8x10 inch section, and then tapping each card in there with the back of a screw driver to make sure it was properly seated. Several times, a card dropped out onto the floor when they opened the baffle/cover. I remember several cries of "Got another one!" when somebody found a card that wasn't well seated. After they reseated all the loose cards, the machine booted. I did the the SYSGEN that evening.
I browsed the web a bit but didn't find a good picture. The main part of a 360/50 was a T as viewed from above. The console was on the bottom of the T. The CPU was the stem. The top bar was the memory.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Odds and ends...

The 360/50 was used by a lot of banks. Bankers are stingy.
When they didn't have a serious problem to work on, the IBM field service guys used to hang out at our place. Aside from free coffee, we would give them occasional time on the system when it wasn't busy with real work. They would try their latest diagnostic software. (Bankers wouldn't give them the time of day, even at midnight.)
I remember at least one interesting event due to new diagnostics finding a problem the old ones didn't, but I've forgotten the details. When the computer was busy, we got to sit around and swap lies. I remember making a wise ass comment about a big hammer on top of an IBM tool box. It sure didn't look like anything you wanted near a computer. The response was: "That's our door fitting tool." :)
Our office manager had worked for PacBell in Nevada on a project that involved taking aerial pictures of all of their telephone poles. They contracted it out to somebody with an airplane and camera. They couldn't sell the pictures to recover some of their costs because they weren't tariffed for that. For the next round, they bought one set of pictures from the guy who took them with the understanding that he could/would sell them to other people.
At one point, PacBell used a lot of IBM 7044s for their billing. They were getting another one, maybe just in case since IBM was shutting down that refurbishing line. The CPU fell off the fork lift that was taking it out of the plane. When it hit the ground, the whole frame was bent slightly. A quick phone call kept them from taking the refurbishing line apart so they could run that machine through again.

Computer History

Computer History Museum CHM YouTube channel here:  www.youtube.com/computerhistory

1964 Timesharing: A Solution to Computer Bottlenecks
This vintage film from 1964 features MIT Science Reporter John Fitch at the MIT Computation Center in an extended interview with MIT professor of computer science Fernando J. Corbato. The film was co-produced by WGBH (Boston) and MIT. The prime focus of the film is timesharing, one of the most important developments in computing, and one which has come in and out of favor several times over the last several decades as the dichotomy between remote and centrally-managed computing resources played out; the latest incarnation for centrally-managed computing resources is known as cloud computing. Timesharing as shown in this film, was a novel concept in the early 1960s. Driven by a desire to more efficiently use expensive computer resources while increasing the interactivity between user and computer (man and machine), timesharing was eventually taken up by industry in the form of special timesharing hardware for mainframe and minicomputer computer systems as well as in sophisticated operating systems to manage multiple users and resources.

STEVE WOZNIAK, the co-inventor of the Apple Computer, still attends rock concerts frequently. THEN: he was Attending high school in Sunnyvale during the Summer of Love

Viola Is a Repository of Prior Art for The Web by Dale Dougherty 3/30/00
Viola's greatest value may yet to be realized; it represents a valuable repository of prior art with which to fight all kinds of Web-related patents. Pei has set up the Viola Archive, the world wide web hypermedia toolkit. The original Xwindows, independent, experimental, scriptable, object oriented, alternative, etc, web browser. which contains the source code and documentation. We want to provide whatever information we can to help others dispute web-related patents. Again, because Viola's browser development preceded even Mosaic, any feature we find in it can be said to be public knowledge -- and used to dispute any claim that any later arrival to the Web party invented it.email archives to find support for the fact that Viola was known to others and to create a timeline for when various features were introduced. Email from Pei Wei to Marc Andreessen -- 02/03/93.

The First Web Browser was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).

HISTORICAL DOCUMENT UP on RAND SITE "Willis H. Ware" @rand.org In the late 60s ARPA and then DSB sponsored a committee to write a doc on security controls. The report became very famous and often referred to as "the Ware Report".
In the late 60s I chaired a Defense Science Board Committee that produced a document: Security Controls for Computer Systems. Classified for 9 years, it was declassified and republished by RAND in 1979 [R-609-1]. Courtesy of John Young, who operates the very efficient and respected archive CRYPTOME, the document is now available, scanned and converted to HTML format.
1970 DSB report, "Security Controls for Computer Systems" (265K)
Have a look to see how thoroughly the committee understood the issue in those days; especially have a look at Appendix II SEE also the preface which explains why the original documents was classified; many people have commented on this.