Written by Ian Peter
Download audio version here
In this section we are talking about the evolution of personal computers, modems and networks.
The most ancient processing device humans have invented would probably be the
abacus, dating back to about 3000BC. But more realistically we should look to
the 1940s for the origins of the computer.
During World War 2, both the UK government, in the form of a computer called
Colossus, and the US government in the form of ENIAC ( or the Electronic
Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer) developed precursors of todays
computers. The invention of the transistor in 1947 gave these developments a
great leap forward.
In the 1960s we saw the beginnings of companies that were to have a major
influence in the computing field - Texas Instruments, Fairchild computing, and
IBM, whose 360 computer was released in 1964.
The sort of computers ARPANET and the early research networks were dealing with
were monsters with very little power by today's standards. Only computer
scientists used them. Computers with the power of modern day pocket calculators
occupied whole floors of buildings. I think at the time IBM predicted the world
would only need 13 of them for planet Earth for all time!
These monsters, or mainframes as they are called where they still exist these
days, could only be afforded by large institutions.
Another big event happened in 1963 - the invention of the mouse by Douglas
Englebart. Engelbart was a very influential and visionary person, who also
helped develop early word processors and hypertext. However it would be almost
another 20 years before most of his inventions became popular or much used.
These had to wait for the personal computer to appear.
There might have been an Internet without personal computers, but it would have
been uninteresting, and probably confined to the research community and computer
scientists. The invention that gave the Internet a real chance to reach out to
over 600 million people, and to make it the sort of network it is today, was the
personal computer. Personal computers, networked over the global telephony
infrastructure, is what created the network we have today.
The first personal computer, the Altair 8800, cost 379 US dollars and was
shipped in January 1975. Over 1000 were sold. By 1977 The Radio Shack TRS 80,
Apple 2, and Commodore PET were also on the market. IBM got the idea by about
1981 and released the first IBM PC.
The company that dominated the market in the early days - at one stage they had
75% of all computers sold - was Apple Computer. Apple was founded by Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak just outside of San Francisco. Steve Jobs at the time was a
long haired vegetarian - Steve Wozniak was to lose a fortune on
back-to-Woodstock concerts. So the influences of the San Francisco flower power
hippy culture of the time were there.
The early computer programmers called themselves hackers. At one stage Bill
Gates would have been proud to be called a hacker. They called the software they
created "hacks".
The original Apple operating system was called AppleDOS, but by 1980 the CP/M
operating system had become a popular addition to the Apple 2+. It was very like the
competitor which was to overtake it and launch Bill Gates on the way to his
fortune, MSDOS. In fact, MS-DOS's predecessor was called "Q-DOS" - short for
"Quick and Dirty Operating System"..
Early computers featured a thing called a "command line". They didn't yet have a
mouse, although joysticks for games machines were starting to appear. We had to
wait for the 1990s before Windows became popular on the IBM operating system.
None of these computers - either the new PCs or the old mainframes - had been
designed to be communicating devices (the main objective was thought to be their
processing power). So a means had to be found to connect them to networks. Here
two more developments became important - the modem, which connected early
computers to telephone lines, and Ethernet, a standard which was developed for
"Local area networks" or LANs (where computers were really all in the same room
or area and could be "wired" together).
Modem is a term we are likely to forget soon in the digital age, but for most of
us modems were where internetworking began. Modem is short for
modulate-demodulate - that's where it got its name. Modems enable the digital
form of matter that a computer uses to communicate by the analogue form of
transmission of old style telephone systems.
There were apparently some early modems used by the US Air Force in the 1950's,
but the first commercial ones were made a decade later. The earliest modems were
75 bps (or bits per second). That's about 1/750th of the speed of current
modems, so they were pretty slow! But to early networking enthusiasts, modems
were 300 bps. Then came 1200, and by 1989 2400 bps modems.
By 1994, domestic modems had got to 28.8 kilobits per second - which was just as
well, because by then we were beginning to send more than text messages over the
Internet. This was thought to be an upper limit for phone line transmissions.
But along came the 56k modem, and a new set of standards, so the speeds continue
to push the envelope of the capacity of the telephone system.
So much so that many of have moved on, into wireless networks, and into
"broadband" systems, which allow much faster speeds. But modems made the first
critical link between computers and telephones, and began the age of
internetworking.
Another of the former Arpanet contractors, Robert Metcalfe, was responsible for
the development of Ethernet, which drives most local area networks.
Ethernet essentially made a version of the packet switching and Internet
protocols which were being developed for Arpanet available to cabled networks.
After a stint at the innovative Xerox Palo Alto laboratories, Metcalfe founded a
company called 3-Com which released products for networking mainframes and mini
computers in 1981, and personal computers in 1982.
With these developments in place, tools were readily available to connect both
old and new style computers, via wireless, cable, and telephone networks. As the
networks grew, other companies such as Novell and CISCO began to develop more
complex networking hubs, bridges, routers and other equipment. By the mid
1980's, everything that was needed for an explosion of internetworking was in
place.
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