Notes
Introduction
1. Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Chapter 1
1. Bernard O. Williams, “Computing with Electricity, 1935–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1984, University Microfilms 8513783), 310.
2. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers (New York: Walker, 1998).
3. Brian Randell, ed., The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag 1975); Charles and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age, New Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). Also note the founding of the Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Technology, in 1978.
4. Dag Spicer, “Computer History Museum Report,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 3 (2008): 76–77.
5. U.S. National Security Agency, “The Start of the Digital Revolution: SIGSALY: Secure Digital Voice Communications in World War II” (n.d.), available from the National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, MD.
6. Edison was one of several inventors who developed similar devices around 1870. The initial Morse telegraph printed the dots and dashes of the code, but that apparatus was abandoned after operators found that with training, they could transcribe the sounds more rapidly.
7. “Edward Kleinschmidt: Teletype Inventor,” Datamation (September 1977): 272–273.
8. Jo Ann Yates, Control through Communication (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); see also James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) .
9. Arthur L. Norberg, “High Technology Calculation in the Early Twentieth Century: Punched Card Machinery in Business and Government,” Technology and Culture (October 1990): 753–779; also James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
10. Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems in the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
11. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Chapter 2
1. Konrad Zuse, The Computer—My Life, English translation of Der Computer, Mein Lebenswerk (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 44. Originally published in German in 1962.
2. Ibid., p. 46.
3. Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2nd series, 42 (1936): 230–265.
4. Constance Reid, Hilbert (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1970), 74–83; Charles Petzold, The Annotated Turing (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2008), 35–53. Petzold traces (p. 31)Turing’s paper back to Hilbert’s “tenth problem,” the tenth in a list of twenty-three that in 1900 Hilbert suggested would challenge mathematicians of the coming century.
5. Petzold, Annotated Turing.
6. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London, 1864), reprinted in Charles Babbage Institute, Babbage’s Calculating Engines (Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1982), 170–171.
7. Zuse’s simultaneous discovery was little known until the publication of his memoir, Der Computer, Mein Lebenswerk, in 1962 in German. His pioneering hardware work was somewhat better known beginning in the 1950s, when he began manufacturing and selling commercial computers, mainly in West Germany.
8. William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of the Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 178–180.
9. It is difficult to avoid using anthropomorphic terms like memory or read, and these can be misleading. I use them sparingly in this chronicle.
10. Wallace J. Eckert, Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation (New York: Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, 1940).
11. Paul Ceruzzi, “Crossing the Divide: Architectural Issues and the Emergence of the Stored Program Computer, 1935–1955,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19, no. 1 (1997): 5–12.
12. Howard Aiken, “Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine,” written in 1937, and published in IEEE Spectrum (August 1964): 62–69.
13. Harvard University Computation Laboratory, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 1946).
14. Alice R. Burks and Arthur W. Burks, The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
15. Brian Randell, “The Colossus,” in N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, eds., A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 47–92.
16. Samuel S. Snyder, “Computer Advances Pioneered by Cryptologic Organizations,” Annals of the History of Computing 2 (1980): 60–70.
17. Perry Crawford Jr., “Instrumental Analysis in Matrix Algebra” (bachelor’s thesis, MIT, 1939); Perry Crawford Jr., “Automatic Control by Arithmetic Operations” (master’s thesis, MIT, 1942).
18. Claude E. Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions of the American Institution of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938): 713–723.
19. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).
20. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176 (1945): 101–108.
21. Burks and Burks, The First Electronic Computer.
Chapter 3
1. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” (Philadelphia, PA: Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, June 30, 1945).
2. Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, Project Whirlwind: the History of a Pioneer Computer (Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1980); also see Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
3. Alan Borning, “Computer Reliability and Nuclear War,” Communications of the ACM 30/2 (1987): 112–131.
4. Maurice V. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985; also Grace Murray Hopper, “Compiling Routines,” Computers and Automation 2 (May 1953): 1–5.
5. Ernest Braun and Stuart McDonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
6. Ibid.
7. Jamie Parker Pearson, ed., Digital at Work (Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1992), 10–11.
8. Ibid., 21.
9. Joseph November, Digitizing Life: The Rise of Biomedical Computing in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
10. Chigusa Kita, “J.C.R. Licklider’s Vision for the IPTO,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 3 (2003): 62–77.
Chapter 4
1. Mara Mills, “Hearing Aids and the History of Electronics Miniaturization,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 2 (2011): 24–44; James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists against Time (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1946).
2. Leslie Berlin, The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. T. A. Wise, “IBM’s $5,000,000,000 Gamble,” Fortune (September 1966), pp. 118–123, 224, 226, 228.
Chapter 5
1. The UNIVAC had about 5,000 vacuum tubes and several thousand solid-state diodes, capacitors, and resistors. It stored data as acoustic pulses in tubes of mercury.
2. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19, 1965, 114–117. The cartoon, which appears on page 116, is attributed to Grant Compton.
3. David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Hounshell points out that the Model T in fact did undergo a number of changes during its production run, but he does acknowledge the existence of a “Model T dilemma.”
4. Adi J. Khambata, Introduction to Large-Scale Integration (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1969), 81–82.
5. John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1990).
6. M .V. Wilkes, “The Best Way to Design an Automatic Calculating Machine,” in Computer Design Development: Principal Papers, ed. Earl E. Swartzlander Jr., 266–270 (Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1976).
7. Gordon E. Moore, “Microprocessors and Integrated Electronic Technology,” Proceedings of the IEEE 64 (1976): 837–841.
8. Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Hunter, and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1986), 505–513. IBM’s internal code name for the 1620 was “CADET,” which some interpreted to mean “Can’t Add; Doesn’t Even Try”!
9. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (Berkeley, CA: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984); also Ross Knox Bassett, To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
10. A KIM-1 was my first computer.
11. Bruce Newman, “Apple’s Third Founder Refuses to Submit to Regrets,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2010.
12. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
13. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101–108.
14. Robert M. Metcalfe, “How Ethernet Was Invented,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16 (1994): 81–88.
Chapter 6
1. Lawrence G. Roberts, “The ARPANET and Computer Networks,” in A History of Personal Workstations, ed. Adele Goldstine, 143–171 (New York: ACM Press, 1988); Daniel P. Siewiorek, C. Gordon Bell, and Allen Newell, Computer Structures: Principles and Examples (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 396–397, and their Computer Structures: Readings and Examples (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 510–512.
2. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
3. William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, eds., The Internet and American Business (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
4. U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Domain Names: U.S. Principles on the Internet’s Domain Name and Addressing System,” http://www.ntia.doc.gov/other-publication/2005/us-principles-internets-domain-name-and-addressing-system. (accessed December 29, 2011).
5. Alfred Glossbrenner, The Complete Handbook of Personal Computer Communications, rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), xiv.
6. Stewart Brand, ed., Whole Earth Software Catalog (New York: Quantum Press/Doubleday, 1984), 139.
7. Ibid., 140.
8. Ibid., 144.
9. CompuServe databases were handled by Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10s and its successor computers, which used octal arithmetic to address data. CompuServe users’ account numbers thus contained the digits 0 through 7 but never 8 or 9.
10. Glossbrenner, Complete Handbook, 68 (emphasis added).
11. Kara Swisher, AOL.COM: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and made Millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times Business Random House, 1998). chap. 2.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.; Alfred Glossbrenner, The Complete Handbook of Personal Computer Communications (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
14. Siewiorek et al., Computer Structures, 387–438; Brand, Whole Earth Software Catalog, 138–157.
15. Ibid. Quarterman states that the term is an acronym for “Because It’s Time NETwork”; other accounts say it stood for “Because It’s There NETwork,” referring to the existence of these large IBM installations already in place.
16. The Smithsonian Institution, for example, had BITNET accounts for its employees long before most of these employees had an Internet connection.
17. The initial NSF backbone used networking software called “fuzzball,” which was not carried over to the T1 network.
18. “NSFNET—National Science Foundation Network,” Living Internet, online resource, at <www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_nsfnet.htm> (accessed November 10, 2005); also Jay P. Kesan and Rajiv C. Shah, “Fool Us Once, Shame on You—Fool Us Twice, Shame on Us: What We Can Learn from the Privatization of the Internet Backbone Network and the Domain Name System,” Washington University Law Quarterly 79 (2001), p. 106.
19. Ed Krol, The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates,1992), appendix C.
20. Robert Kahn, personal communication with the author.
21. This information was taken from the official web page of Congressman Rick Boucher www.boucher.house.gov, accessed June 2006. Boucher has since left the House of Representatives, and the web page is no longer active. It may however be found through the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).
22. 42 U.S.C. 1862, paragraph g.
23. Stimson Garfinkel, “Where Streams Converge,” Hot Wired, September 11, 1996.
24. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999).
25. Ibid.
26. Shane Greenstein, “Innovation and the Evolution of Market Structure for Internet Access in the United States,” in The Internet and American Business, ed. William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, 47–103. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
27. “Martin Cooper: Inventor of Cell Phones says they’re now ‘Too Complicated,’” Huffington Post , March 18, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/06/martin-cooper-inventor-of_n_348146.html.
28. Joshua Cuneo, “`Hello Computer’: The Interplay of Star Trek and Modern Computing,” in Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains, ed. David L. Ferro and Eric G. Swedin, 131–147 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
29. Thomas Haigh, “The Web’s Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals,” in The Internet and American Business, ed. William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008), chap. 5.
30. C. Gordon Bell, ”What Happened? A Postscript,” in Edgar H. Schein, DEC is Dead: Long Live DEC: The lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003): 292–301.
31. Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973).
32. Terry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (New York: Academic Press, 1972).
33. Christine Ogan and Randall A. Beam, “Internet Challenges for Media Businesses,” in The Internet and American Business, ed. William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, chap. 9. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008).
34. Blaise Cronin, “Eros Unbound: Pornography and the Internet,” in The Internet and American Business, ed. William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, chap. 15 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
35. Brian Reid, quoted in Peter H. Salus, Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 147.
Chapter 7
1. Samuel H. Fuller and Lynette I. Millett, The Future of Computing: Game Over or Next Level? (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
2. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) chaps. 1 and 2.
Glossary
1. Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 1: Fundamental Algorithms (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969, 4).