Full-text source:
ABI_INFORM
100 years of
IT
Author: Hayes, Frank Source:
Computerworld v33n14, (Apr 5, 1999): p.74-78 (Length: 5
pages) ISSN: 0010-4841 Number: 01801917
Copyright: Copyright CW Publishing Inc 1999
What information technology products had the greatest impact on
our lives and businesses over this century? We asked for input
from people with a broad range of interests in technology
prominent CEOs, analysts, educators, attorneys and Computerworld
readers. Their verdict: The earliest vacuum tubes, rotary phones
and office copiers were as ingenious and significant and their
effects as unexpected - as today's smart phones, high-definition
TV, the Web and Pentium III chips. "The fundamentals of technology
advances are predictable -- circuits per inch, bits per second,
cost per megabyte - but the applications are not," says
International Data Corp. analyst John Gantz, a member of our
panel. "That's because human ingenuity is involved."
Big Iron
The Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) (1946)
was the first large-scale, general-purpose electronic computer.
Its offspring, the Univac I (1951), became a television star
during the 1952 U.S. presidential election. But the mainframe that
changed the face of computing and drew the most mentions from our
panel of experts was the IBM System 360 (1964).
Before IBM began work on the 360 in the early 1960s, every new
model required new hardware and software. But the 360 was designed
as a family of compatible machines. "The 360 provided broad-based
computing with standards," says Max Hopper, consultant and
president of Max D. Hopper Associates. And Kroger Co.'s Michael
Heschel, says the 360 "opened mainframe computing to the world."
But the 360 shares the spotlight with other key, large-scale
computing innovations. The Hollerith paper punch card (1887)
became a 20th-century mainstay of data storage - "the start of
business systems analysis," says author and Computerworld
columnist Paul A. Strassmann. The Manchester University Mark 1
(1948), affectionately known as "Baby," and John von Neumann's
Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC, 1947), the
first stored-program electronic computer, were early steps
forward.
The IBM 1401 (1959) was the first fully transistorized
commercial computer. Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP machines (1960)
and IBM's Series 1 (1976) made departmental computing a reality.
And Digital's VAX (1977) became the only real competitor to the
360 and its successors. Wang Laboratories Inc.'s word processing
system (1971) brought computing power beyond the data center for
the first time. Key storage innovations included magnetic storage
(1949), the IBM Ramac (1957) and the Winchester hard disk (1973).
Underlying them all was Alan Turing's 1936 conceptual model for
all stored-program computing, the Turing machine.
On the Desktop
If there was a single machine that made desktop computing a
reality, it would have to be the IBM Personal Computer (1981).
(Photograph Omitted)
Captioned as: A. The ENIAC, the first large-scale,
generalpurpose electronic computer
B. The precursor to the transistor, the vacuum tube
C. The IBM System 360 mainframe computer, Model 50
IBM engineers designed the PC in a skunk works project in Boca
Raton, Fla. -far from the center of IBM's mainframe-based universe
in Armonk, NY. Cobbled together from standardized parts and
borrowed ideas, the PC enjoyed instant success because of IBM's
brand name - and its impact is a lasting legacy.
The PC "put computing power on the business desktop," says MIT
research scientist Jeanne Ross. It ultimately "revolutionized
business information and its use," Heschel adds.
Although the IBM PC was the desktop device most often cited by
voters, there was no single machine that created desktop
computing. Half a decade before the PC, electronics hobbyists
could buy and build the MITS Altair (1975), the first
microprocessor-based computer. The Apple II (1977), from Apple
Computer Inc., was the first commercially successful off-the-shelf
desktop computer.
At Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), the Alto
(1972) and Star (1981) workstations pioneered the use of the mouse
and graphical user interfaces. They were "the foundation of
graphical user interface computing and graphic displays,"
Strassmann says. And a 1979 visit to Parc by Apple's cofounder and
now-interim CEO, Steve Jobs, led directly to Apple's Lisa (1983)
and Macintosh (1984).
The PC was built from standard parts - as was the Sun
Microsystems Inc. workstation (1982) - and that standardization
led to the creation of PC clones (1982).
Portable PCs led to laptop computers and handhelds, including
the nowubiquitous 3Com Corp. Palm (1996).
And home computers, including Atari Corp.'s Atari 2600 game
machine (1977) and the Commodore 64 (1982) from Commodore Business
Machines Inc., laid the groundwork for what would eventually be,
as Erich Bloch, a fellow at the Council on Competitiveness puts
it, "in every home and on every desktop - the universal
appliance."
Out of the Labs
The transistor (1947) may be tiny, but its importance dwarfs
nearly every other technological advance in this century. When
researchers at AT&T Corp.'s Bell Laboratories discovered that
a chip of semiconductor could replace a vacuum tube (1907), the
transistor became "the basis of all technologies in the second
half of this century," Bloch says.
The transistor was smaller, lighter, more durable and reliable
than tubes, and it generated far less heat. Without it, "we'd be
up to our ears in power plants to power all the triodes needed to
fuel the Information Age," jokes Mark Pesce, chairman of the
Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern
California.
And transistors just kept getting smaller -- first to form
integrated circuits (1959) and then microprocessors. The first
commercial microprocessor, the Intel Corp. 4004 (1971), was
designed to power a desktop calculator. Within a few years, a
successor, the Intel 8080 (1974), was the brains behind the first
desktop computer kit, the Altair.
While Motorola Inc. and other vendors competed with Intel, IBM
developed the first RISC processors (1974), whose offspring would
eventually power workstations from Sun, Digital, Hewlett-Packard
Co. and Silicon Graphics Inc. Gallium arsenide chips (1974)
promised blazing speed for communications applications, even
though they never cracked the mainstream processor market.
(Photograph Omitted)
(Photograph Omitted)
Lasers (1960), once imagined as sci-fi death rays, got smaller,
too - to become a core technology for both printers and
communications. And although nanotechnology hasn't delivered its
promise of molecular manufacturing, it may yet prove to be how a
future generation of transistors is put to work.
The New Gutenberg
It wasn't the first xerographic copier; that was the Model A in
1949. But when the Xerox 914 - the first automatic, plain-paper
office copier -- appeared in 1959, it changed the face of
information in businesses.
"Copying led to the standardization of paper. Fax and scanning
were based from the acceptance of photocopiers. It's the way we
think of record-keeping," says Peter G. W Keen, chairman of Keen
Innovations, a Computerworld columnist and one of many voters to
cite copiers. In Strassmann's words, the 914 "made everyone a
printer."
The fax machine itself, like the typewriter, dated from the
19th century. But both came into their own in 20th-century
business. The electric typewriter (1933) gave way to the IBM
Selectric (1961) and magnetic-card typewriters (1969). The
Teletype teletypewriter (1920) made it practical to send typed
information instantly across a wire and eventually found a place
as a time-sharing computer peripheral.
The first commercial laser printer, the Xerox 9700 (1978),
began a steady march toward the widespread use of laser printing.
And the flat-panel display offered the first step toward a screen
as convenient as the Xerox copy.
Information Everywhere
Is there any promise the World Wide Web can't fulfill? Ten
years ago, it didn't exist. Last year, "it accounted for onethird
of [U.S.] economic growth, according to the White House," says
Robert Kahn, president of the Corporation for National Research
Initiatives. "It has become telephone, loudspeaker, radio,
television, cinema, phonograph, doctor, village square and lover,"
USC's Pesce argues.
All this from an idea first suggested in August 1990 by
researchers Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at Switzerland's
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, who thought it
would be useful for "document registration, online help [and]
project documentation." By October, they had a prototype Web
browser. By early 1993, there were 50 Web servers worldwide.
Within 18 months, that number had increased thirtyfold and was
growing too fast to be counted accurately.
The nuts and bolts of the Web are now household words: HTML,
URLs, browsers --especially Netscape Communications Corp.'s
Navigator, which "made e-commerce serious business," Ross says.
Of course, without the Arpanet network (1968), created by the
U.S. Department of Defense to connect its researchers, and the
TCP/IP protocol (1975) that gave the Internet its name, the Web
would have no road to run on. But when the National Science
Foundation opened the Internet to commercial use in 1991, no one
could expect what the Web would ultimately become.
On the Air
Until the arrival of the Web, only one form of information
technology could claim to have revolutionized 20th-century life.
And broadcasting hardly seemed like a world beater in 1920 when
Westinghouse Electric Co.'s station KDKA in Pittsburgh reported
the U.S. presidential election returns during the first broadcast
of a regularly transmitting commercial radio station. By 1924,
there were 600 commercial radio stations - and the number grew so
quickly that in 1927 the Federal Communications Commission was
created to regulate them. Television began to come into its own in
1937, when the British Broadcasting Corp. began regular,
electronic television broadcasts. The first transistor radio
(1952) made portable wireless communications a practical reality
and proved a commercial use for transistors.
How far-reaching was broadcasting's effect? "It's how the
country got homogenized and information was transmitted," says
Gary Reback, an antitrust attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich
& Rosati. "This has enabled mass communications and changed
most people's living and learning habits in profound and subtle
ways," Kahn adds. "It brought world events to business and to the
home," Heschel says. The wireless Morse code transmissions that
Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated in 1901 were largely overwhelmed by
the voice radio demonstrated five years later by Reginald
Fessenden. Nonetheless, today wireless data networks and
spread-spectrum technology transmit more data than voice despite
the growth of mobile and cellular phones - "the fastest-adapted of
all innovations," Keen says.
Before the Internet
Telegraphs had sent messages across wires since the early 19th
century, and packet switching - a system for breaking messages
into pieces and routing them automatically - was first proposed in
1961. When Bolt, Beranek & Newman developed the IMPS packet
switch for Arpanet in 1968, modern networking became a
possibility. But with Ethernet (1973), networking became a
reality. Robert Metcalfe's system, tested at Xerox Parc, made it
possible to connect large numbers of devices to a local network
because each device "listened" before sending and detected when
its messages collided with those of another sender. Ethernet was
"the basis of a distributed computer architecture," Strassmann
says.
The 3Com EtherLink (1982) was the first network adapter card
for the IBM PC. The Cisco Systems Inc. router (1986) added
intelligence to the switches delivering messages between networks.
And Asynchronous Transfer Mode made it practical to mix
timesensitive traffic such as voice and video over the same
networks as ordinary data.
No More 'Number, Please' The telephone, mentioned in some way
by a third of our voters, was already having its impact on
business communication and information technology by 1900. So, in
fact, was the device that would launch the networking revolution
more than half a century later: the Strowger telephone switch
(1889).
The story almost seems like slapstick comedy: Almon Strowger, a
Kansas City, Kan., undertaker, hired several engineers to design
an automatic telephone switch when he suspected local operators
were steering business to his competitors. That switch - and a
telephone that could be dialed to operate it (1896) - were adopted
by AT&T in 1916, making it possible for businesses to dial
their own calls.
The Strowger switch "gave us the concept of switching," Keen
says. And the dial telephone itself "changed our reach and range,"
Ross says.
Although the dial telephone let businesses direct their own
switching, the Touch-Tone phone -- invented in 1941 but made
practical only by transistors in 1964 - "enabled the telephone to
become a data-entry device," says CIO Communications Inc.
publisher Joe Levy.
The four-prong telephone jack made it possible for customers to
use different telephones interchangeably. Answering machines and
voice mail let telephone users leave messages when no one could
answer the phone. Modems (1957) made the connection between phones
and computers, and the digital telephone network (1986) completed
that connection. Software
As software goes, e-mail may not seem like much. We don't turn
to it to produce something, as with a word processor or
spreadsheet. But e-mail may have had a greater impact - forcing
business executives to learn to type and encouraging grandparents
to climb aboard the Internet.
(Photograph Omitted)
Captioned as: D. The Xerox 914 copier E. Jimmy Smith, founder
of the Georgia Rural Telephone Museum in Leslie, Ga. F. The rotary
phone G. The transistor H. The Pentium III chip L A PC clone J.
HDTV
KAn early television L. A cellular phone
(Photograph Omitted)
Captioned as: M. Microsoft's Windows software
N. The IBM RS 6000
mainframe computer O. An early IBM Personal Computer
"I believe e-mail has changed how we communicate, who we
communicate with and what we communicate about. And maybe I'm an
IBM bigot, but I think PROFS [Professional Office system from IBM]
got it rolling," Ross says.
PROFS - which remained the king of e-mail for years after
PC-based mail systems were introduced - has been eclipsed by
Internet mail systems.
But other software innovations are still making their mark.
Relational databases, data compression, artificial intelligence
and digital imaging are so common - and crucial - that we don't
even notice them. And virtual reality has changed the way we
interact with computers. Among the many software products that
have been key to IT: Multics ("the first real operating system,"
Pesce says); Windows; Novell NetWare; Unix; Linux; CP/M; Mac OS;
Digital's VMS; the Oracle and DBase II databases; IBM's CICS
transaction monitor; Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets; word processors; and Cobol, C, C++, Java and Visual
Basic.
Beyond Bits and Bytes
When the first credit card hit New York in 1946, few people
would have identified it as information technology Even today,
"plastic money" usually seems more like a contributor to
electronic commerce than IT itself.
But credit cards "fundamentally transformed us to a symbol
economy," Keen argues. "Without that experience, we couldn't have
an information economy. The Internet rests on the credibility of
credit cards."
Our expert panel made other unconventional choices for key IT
products, too. The automobile "led to suburbanization of the
world," Bloch says. The elevator "made skyscrapers possible," says
Jim Ware, vice president of The Concours Group. The airplane made
Federal Express Corp.'s overnight package delivery possible - and
closed the speed gap between paper and electronic communications.
Gene-splicing and the human genome project are already changing
key information of a different sort.
But perhaps the most familiar of unconventional IT innovations
comes from, of all things, office furniture. In 1964, Herman
Miller Inc. rolled out its Action Office system, introducing
corporate America to "open-plan" offices intended to improve
communication and information flow. The result, says Duncan
Sutherland, chief technology officer at Wilmer, Cutler &
Pickering, "ultimately devolved into the now more or less
ubiquitous Dilbert cube!" 0
Sidebar:
When we surveyed a panel of experts along with visitors to
Computerworld's Web site to help identify the 20th century's most
significant information technologies, they brought us face to face
with an important reality: IT isn't just computers or software.
It's all the technologies that over the past hundred years have
changed the way we gather, move and use information. By Frank
Hayes
Sidebar:
The Panel of Experts
Sidebar:
To identify the top IT products and technologies of the
century, we surveyed experts with a broad range of interests.
Members of our 21-member panel ranged from the chairmen of large
technology companies to consultants and educators. We also
solicited input from everyday readers with an online survey at
Computerworlds Web site.
Special thanks to our expert panel: Paul Allaire, chairman and
CEO, Xerox Corp.
Sidebar:
Ruzena Bajcsy, assistant director, National Science Foundation
James Barksdale, CEO and president, Netscape Communications Corp.
C. Gordon Bell, senior researcher, Microsoft Bay Area Research
Center Erich Bloch, distinguished fellow, Council on
Competitiveness Lewis Branscomb, director emeritus, Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government
John Gantz, vice president, International Data Corp. Mark
Gembicki, president, WarRoom Research Inc. Michael Heschel,
executive vice president of information systems, Kroger Co.
Sidebar:
Max Hopper, president, Max D. Hopper Associates Robert Kahn,
president, Corporation for National Research Initiatives Peter G.
W. Keen, chairman, Keen Innovations
Joe Levy, president and CEO, CIO Communications Inc. Bob
Metcalfe, vice president of technology, International Data Group
Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Media Laboratory
Mark Pesce, chairman, Interactive Media Program, University of
Southern California
Sidebar:
Gary Reback, attorney, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Jeanne Ross, principal research scientist, MIT Center for
Information Systems Research Paul A. Strassmann, CEO, Software
Testing Assurance Corp. Duncan Sutherland, chief technology
officer, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering Jim Ware, vice president,
The Concours Group John F. Welch Jr., chairman, General Electric
Co.