For the past week or so, I have been reading the book Computers: The Life Story of Technology by Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro. It is actually quite an interesting book. Without reiterating the book word for word, so far the story has been mostly concentrating on the creation of the computer and how it came to be what it is today. The book starts before computer existed at all, and illustrates that before computers there was still a need for to be able to numerically count and keep order. Whether it was using an abacus, slide rules, or even notched bones, ever since people existed they seem to have always created ways to calculate and compute numbers. During the 1600’s, mechanical devices began to be invented for computation purposes, such as Napier’s Bones and Pascal’s calculator. The transition from mechanical to electronic computational devices seemed to be one of the largest and most grueling steps towards the computer. Such a great step in technological history would not have occurred without genius minds like that of Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage invented the Difference Engine and was working on his Analytic Engine, which would have been quite similar to the computers of today, when he died. I think Swedin and Ferro purposely told about his death as a way to illustrate how dedicated these scientists and engineers were to creating these instruments. They literally spent their entire lives on them. It would not be until the early 1900’s when the first completely electronic computer was created. After that, the rate at which computer technology progressed began speeding up greatly, moving from vacuum tubes to transistors and then from transistors to integrated circuits and microprocessors. It only took about sixty years for the computer to evolve from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, which is quite a small amount of time considering it took approximately three hundred years to transition from mechanical to electronic computational instruments. After that, it took very little time for the computer to get smaller and more commercially successful, which very quickly led to the personal computers we all know of today.
The authors, in an effort to explain the story of the computer, seem to very much relate the creation of the computer to the birth and growth of a human being. The authors split the life of a computer up into three generation: vacuum tubes, transistors, and then integrated circuits and microprocessors. These three generations can be related to childhood, teenage, and adulthood years of a human being. Also, considering that the authors make this connection between computers and people, it seems that he believe that the computer might be headed towards a decline in progression. This decline could also be related to the aging and inevitable death of a person. This seemed most prevalent to me when the authors stated that although Moore’s law says that after 1980 the density of components on an integrated circuit will continue to double every two years, “within a decade engineers fear that quantum effects will begin to substantially affect the ability of Moore’s Law to remain true”.(pg. 68) At least in terms of hardware capabilities, it seems that another transition is going have to be made from microprocessors, perhaps bringing computers into the “middle-aged” years of adulthood, or else the rapid progression we see today is going to run into a wall.
Just as the authors relate the life of a computer to the life of a person, he also seems to convey the message that as the computer grows up, so does its connection and grasp on American and worldwide culture. While reading through this book, it became very clear to me that parallel to the rapid progress of computer technology is the rapid progress of people’s dependence on them and their demand for them. When inventions of computational machines first began, their only purpose was to make complex calculations easier. The authors make it very clear that until recently government factions, such as the military, were the driving force behind the progress of the computer. The authors even state that during the 1940’s over half of the programmers in the United States were working on the Semi-automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system, which was funded by the U.S. Air Force. (pg. 49) Government and business funding was the only way people like John Atanasoff , John Eckert, and John Mauchly had the money to do their experiments and build their computers. Furthermore, the authors tell us that from 1960 to 1970, the amount of computers built worldwide rose from 7,000 to 130,000. (pg. 83) Swedin and Ferro made it a point in this book to show just how integrated into peoples lives computers became even in 1970. Also, at the end of the first half of this book, they imply that the computer will become pivotal in the lives of almost every single person once it becomes small enough to fit in a person's home. Just thinking about the world we all live in today and how rapidly things such as the internet have progressed in just a matter of a few years, I have to wholly agree with the authors and their arguments about our dependence on computers.
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