Recent History of Computers: Machines for Mass Communication Waseda University, SILS, Science, Technology and Society (LE202) The communication revolution ‚ In the first period of the history of computers, we see that almost all development is driven by the needs and the financial backing of large organizations: government, military, space R&D, large corporations. ‚ In the second period, we will notice that the focus is now shifting to small companies, individual programers, hobbyists and mass consumers. ‚ The focus in the first period was on computation and control. In the second period, it is on usability and communication. ‚ A mass market for computers was created, through the development of a user-friendly personal computer. Four generations of computers 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th Period 1940s–1955 1956–1963 1964–1967 1971–present ? Tech- vacuum transistors integrated micro- ? nology tubes circuits processors Size full room large desk sized desk-top, ? (huge) machine hand-held Software machine assembly operating GUI ? language language systems interface The microprocessor ‚ In 1968, the “traitorous seven” left Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel. ‚ In 1969, Busicom, a Japanese firm, commissioned Intel to make a microprocessor for a handheld calculator. ‚ This lead to the Intel 4004. Intel bought the rights to sell the chip to other companies. ‚ Intel immediately began the process of designing more and more powerful microchips. Schematic: The Intel 4004 ‚ This has lead to computers small enough to fit in our hands. Consumer electronics ‚ The microprocessor made it possible to create more affordable consumer electronics. ‚ The Walkman came out in 1979. Through the 1980s video players, recorders and stereos were marketed. ‚ In the 1980s-1990s, data storage moved from analog (paper tape, records) format to digital (cassette tape, VCR, CD, DVD). ‚ We now use watches, TVs, automobiles, mobile phones, Sony Walkman, 1979 microwave ovens, etc., all of which contain microprocessors. The Altair 8800 ‚ In 1975, the Altair was marketed as a “computer kit” and advertised in Popular Electronics. (Over 4,000 orders in the first month.) ‚ No keyboard, monitor, etc. ‚ The operating system was based on BASIC and written by Microsoft. ‚ It had an open architecture, which encouraged users and start-ups to make their own peripherals. ‚ (The first microcomputer was actually marketed in France, but did not catch on. Only 500 machines.) The Apple II ‚ The Apple I was built by Steve Wozniak, with the help of his friend Steve Jobs, in 1976. ‚ Jobs secured $300,000 in capital and they founded a company and brought out the Apple II. ‚ The Apple II came with a keyboard and could connect to a TV. It was the first personal computer for the ‘general’ market. ‚ In 1979, two Harvard MBA students wrote a spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, which became the first “killer app,” driving up sales. The Apple I, 1976 The IBM PC ‚ In 1981, “Big Blue” came out with its first personal computer (PC). ‚ In order to get into the market quickly, IBM decided not to do everything in-house: they used existing chipsets, an open architecture, and wrote complete documentation. ‚ They contracted with Microsoft to write the operating system (PC-DOS, MS-DOS). ‚ This made it acceptable for businesses to buy a PC. IBM PC Advertisement, 1981 ‚ “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” The NEC PC-98 Series, and MSX ‚ In the 1980s, Japanese hardware firms made their own PCs that ran MS-Basic or MS-Dos. ‚ The NEC PC-98 series of PC clones, which started shipping in 1982, were quite popular in Japan. ‚ MSX began shipping a PC clone that ran MS-Basic in 1983. They were probably the best selling PC in Japan. Xerox PARC, mouse, GUI and Eithernet ‚ Up to this point, computers relied on command line interfaces. ‚ At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), however, a group of talented computer experts had put together a system which was far ahead of anything else. ‚ They had created a computer, the Alto, with a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse and programs using the principle of “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG). Multiple computers were linked together over an Ethernet network sharing laser printers, etc. ‚ They had created an object-orientated language, SmallTalk, based on an earlier language developed in Norway. ‚ Xerox management, however, failed to exploit these innovations. (The Star sold for $40,000.) The Xerox Alto, with mouse and windowing GUI The Macintosh ‚ In 1979, Steve Jobs and some other Apple employees visited Xerox PARC and came away with a new vision of the future of computers. ‚ Apple’s first attempt at a GUI machine, the Lisa, was a commercial failure. (Too expensive and incompatible with anything else.) ‚ In 1984, the Mac was announced with a US Superbowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott. (It won many top commercial awards.) ‚ Aldus Pagemaker, 1985, became the killer app that drove Mac sales. ‚ Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985. He came back in 1996, on the condition that they buy NeXT Computer. The Macintosh, 1984 The Next, early 1990s PC clones and the rise of Microsoft ‚ It was possible to clone PCs for three reasons: 1) Intel could sell their microchips to anyone. 2) Microsoft could sell their operating system to anyone. 3) The read-only memory basic input/output system (ROM BIOS) chips could be reverse engineered, using “clean room design.” ‚ This lead to a host of knock-off companies like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, NEC, MSX, Toshiba, etc. ‚ Since Microsoft, and eventually, Windows was shipping on all of these machines, this contributed to the rise of Microsoft. ‚ This lead to IBM losing its market dominance and the new standard became “Wintel” (Windows OS running on an Intel chipset). ARPAnet ‚ The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), was started in the US, in 1958, in response to the launch of Sputnik 1, by the Soviet Union (USSR). ‚ The ARPAnet was designed to solve the technical issues — like packet switching, timesharing, terminal usage, etc. — involved in getting one computer to talk to another computer, or multiple computers. ‚ It was meant to be a research tool, allowing multiple users to share computer time and facilitating collaborative work. ‚ Faculty and graduate students at host universities wrote the protocols and software to enable the different computers to understand each other. (Email became the “killer app” — only used by small groups of researchers in the sciences.) ‚ The network was originally set up between 4 computers. Over the next decade, it rapidly expanded. ‚ There were similar networks developing in other countries. ARPAnet, 1969, diagram ARPAnet, 1969 ARPAnet, 1971 ARPAnet, 1977 The Internet ‚ In the 1970s, there were a number of large networks all over the world, but they could not be linked together. In 1974, Kahn and Cerf proposed the Transport Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as a way to link these various networks together. ‚ TCP/IP was an open protocol, available to anyone, and anyone could contribute through “requests for comments” (RFCs). ‚ In the late 1970s, ARPAnet switched over to TCP/IP. In 1981, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a network for US universities that were not on ARPAnet using TCP/IP. ‚ The TCP/IP functions using unique addresses for each machine, such as 192.168.34.2. In 1983, a domain name system (DNS) was established. ‚ The networks were linked internationally, using TCP/IP. In 1990, and 1995, the APRAnet and NSF net were dismantled. The Internet was now maintained by thousand of nodes. The World Wide Web (WWW) ‚ The early Internet organized information through electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs), listserves, and Usenet. (All text based.) ‚ The WWW was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (1955–) and Robert Cailliau (1947–) at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). ‚ Using a NeXT personal computer, they created hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), so that documents could be delivered over a network. ‚ They made a human-readable display language that they called hypertext markup language (HTML). ‚ They developed a system so that every document would be uniquely identified, universal resource location (URL). ‚ In 1991, Berners-Lee gave copies of these WWW programs to his colleagues and they gave them to their colleagues. The tools spread through academia. ‚ The first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was developed at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993. The first webpage, 1991 A copy of the page found on a Next machine. The first link is scrambled because Berners-Lee showed the live editing feature during his presentation. Search engines ‚ The WWW became useful to the average user with the development of search engines. ‚ The first were automated web-crawling programs — such as Webcrawler & Altavista — that prowled the internet trying to figure out the purpose of a webpage by analyzing the content. They often returned very strange results. ‚ Another type of search engine used human readers categorize pages. Yahoo!, started by two Stanford graduates, used a combination of both approaches. ‚ Larry Page (1971–) and Sergey Brin (1973–) developed an algorithm for ranking webpages based on how many other pages linked to them. This became the core of Google, which has become synonymous with web search in the English language, and the model for almost all modern search engines. The digital divide ‚ In the mid-1990s, people began to talk about a digital divide between the information rich and poor. ‚ In 2000, over 50% of all computers were in the US. ‚ Over 41% of US homes had internet access. Western Europe was also well connected, but 61% of Swedish homes were connected while 30% of Spanish homes were connected. In Asia on the whole 30% of homes had access, but the rate was much higher in Japan and S. Korea. ‚ In the US, 46% of White Americans had access, while 23% of African Americans and Hispanics had access.