Mapping Computer History

14 March 2000
It occurs to me that there are various ways to conceptualize and represent the evolution of computers, and that mapping (spatial and otherwise) is one worth exploring. What follows is a sketch toward an outine... dates are provisional, and so is order

The first digital computers were behemoths located in a few places. They knew not one another, and their users had to go to the computer to interact with it. Cards, paper tape, mag tapes, Operators, output bins, fanfold line-printer output... that was pretty much the universe through the 1960s, though TTY terminals and eventually CRT [video] terminals came along with "time sharing" during that decade. Time sharing extended the tentacles to pretty much wherever wires could reach; acoustic couplers made the phone lines practical conduits...

Digital's PDP series made 'minicomputers' practical, but the cost was such that individuals didn't own machines

ARPANet explored the possibility of connecting mainframes to one another... and was the environment within which e-mail was born

Desktop machines, free-standing and containing their own software, didn't really get going until the late 70s (though there's a dedicated word processor stream that's important to understand too). 'Microcomputers' and 'personal computers' became household words (and then appliances) in the 1980s, as freestanding entities.

MODEMs opened the possibility of using phone lines to connect personal computers to central units, and thus (in a way) to one another... dialup bulletin boards

Ethernet made it possible to link PCs to one another, and to set up servers and LANs

The evolution of protocols should be available someplace --the standards for information interchange that make it possible to realize the potentials of connectivity

"The Internet" as a term emerged at some point in time... but just when was it? [and how would we find that out? HOLLIS is slightly helpful, with a date of 1976 the earliest... not absolutely clear if it's really the same Internet, though). And people started to use as a repository.

ARCHIE and VERONICA and JUGHEAD... and other means to search ( http://www.cam.org/~intsci/infoser3.html and http://www.stemnet.nf.ca/~mcoady/mikehome/1160link.htm

USENET

Gopher

and the Web...

There's just so much to read, so much that crawls out whenever you turn a rock over... keeping up with it is difficult, and has to start with keeping up somehow with your own thought processes, how you proceed from one subject/question to the next. The rest of this page is stuff I tripped over as I hunted for more information today...

Some links:

The Altruistic Angle: Internet and WWW History (Jesper Vissing Laursen)

A Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks

Internet Histories (timelines and others)

Important dates in the history of commerce on the Internet

Important dates in Internet history

Demystifying the Internet

AltaVista's Computers/Internet/History

Short History of the Internet (Bruce Sterling)

CYHIST Community Memory Discussion list on the history of cyberspace (searchable)

A History of the Microprocessor (Intel version)

Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) "An Update on Moore’s Law"

Howard Rheingold --see especially Tools for Thought


late-breaking news from InfoWorld:

WIRELESS HIGH-SPEED, LAST-MILE TECHNOLOGY UNVEILED

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. -- A service provider on Monday unveiled a technology capable of sending and receiving data through the air at gigabits-per-second speeds, with the intention of resolving issues pertaining to last-mile broadband connectivity.

TeraBeam Networks took the wraps off both a device and the company's Fiberless Optical network service at the PC Forum show here. The device is a transceiver about the size of a small satellite dish that can be mounted in an office window, which helps tackle many of the current problems with deploying last-mile broadband services, such as digging permits, building riser wiring, rooftop lease management, and spectrum rights.

For the full story: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/en/xml/00/03/13/000313enterabeam.xml

REPORT: U.S. HIGH-TECH EXPORTS NOW LARGEST SEGMENT

FAIRFAX, VA. -- U.S. exports of high-technology products now represent about one-quarter of the total amount of U.S. exports of manufactured goods, making it the largest export segment, ahead of transportation-related products and chemicals, according to a report compiled by the American Electronics Association (AEA) and released Monday.

The U.S. high-technology industry exported $181 billion worth of manufactured products last year, or 26 percent of all U.S. goods exported, according to the report, which was highlighted by William Archey, president and CEO of the AEA, in a speech at an Internet conference here.

For the full story: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ec/xml/00/03/13/000313ecreport.xml