Ask Bob -- Week 3 Q&A

Computers are essential to cybermedia. Where did they come from?

The World Wide Web component of the Internet seems to have come out of nowhere. Were there any antecedents? How did they differ from what we have today?

Read on....

When were computers invented?

Well, that depends on what you mean by invented. Here are some milestones that got us to where we are today:

1830s: The British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage worked out the principles of the modern digital computer. He conceived a number of machines, such as the Difference Engine, that were designed to handle complicated mathematical problems. Many historians consider Babbage and his associate, the British mathematician Augusta Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace, 1815-52), the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron, the true inventors of the modern digital computer. The technology of their time was not capable of translating their sound concepts into practice.

1930s: Alan Turing, in a 1936 paper, "On Computable Numbers," published while he was still a graduate student, introduced the concept of a theoretical computing device now known as a Turing machine. The mode of logical operation indicated the path of development that would later be followed in the creation of the digital computer.

1940s: John Von Neumann developed the architecture for storing instructions in memory. Prior to that the early computers were programming by "hard wiring" the circuits. Each new program required rewire the circuits. In 1952 he built the first computer using a flexible stored program, the MANIAC I.

1950s: Bell Labs developed the transistor. This solid state components quickly replaced vacuum tubes and lead to integrated circuits. This started us onto the path dubbed Moore's Law: the capacity of computer chips is doubling every 18 months.

You mentioned MANIAC I. What were other milestones in the evolution of real computers?

There was a huge push for computer development during WW II. Why? There were two great hopes for computers. One was for ballistics--help in aiming the huge guns on battleships and in the field. Second, for code breaking and our own encryption. We don't hear much about it, but the national Security Agency is one of the prime movers behind the great supercomputers.

1946: ENIAC was the first all-electronic computer, turned on in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania by the American engineer John Presper Eckert, Jr. Called ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, the device contained 18,000 vacuum tubes and had a speed of several hundred multiplications per minute (compared to millions per second in today's PCS).

1954: IBM 650 was the first commercial computers, installed for the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Weather Service in 1954. IBM thought he world wide market for computer might be six or seven.

early 1960s: Second generation computers built around transistors. Input was usually with punch cards. Output on tape and line printers.

late 1960s: Third generation computer, using integrated circuits. Best known was the IBM 360 series. These still require large rooms with raised floors (for access to wiring) and tons of air conditioning, to keep them cool.

1974: First PC: Altair 8800. You had to program it yourself. It had 4 k memory. This got Bill Gates and Paul Allen started.

1979: Apple II. My first computer . My II+ in 1981 came with 48 k memory. The external floppy held 160k. (Today's floppy's hold nearly 10 times as much).

1984: the original IBM PC. It came with 64k memory.

On this Tydeman stuff about videotext (or videotex -- which). I'm confused -- were they right about home information services or did they miss the mark?

Well, as someone has said, where you stand depends on where you sit. Tydeman and his group at the Institute of the Future clearly missed the boat on understanding the impact and development of the personal computer.

Back in the 1970s was the heyday of the main frame computer. That is the big "mother ship" of computers which did all the processing and storage. Connected to it were dumb terminals that merely displayed whatever the main frame sent down. Today, with desk top computers, most of the "smarts" are in the "client," that is the users, end.

Tydeman, as did most prognosticators then, focused on the TV set as the electronic appliance of choice. Prestel, the British granddaddy of the videotext services, was created by engineers at British telecom primarily out of a desire to use excess capacity of the telephone system -- not because they sensed any consumer demand for such a service.

Given the limited transmission and display technology of the time, many compromise had to be made around the limited display potential of the TV set, the slow transmission speeds, the and need to do all the work at the main frame (server) end. The French developed something dubbed Antiope as an alternative to the Prestel standard. In the U.S. several trials used NAPLPS as the display standard (I forget what this stands and it's not worth looking up. Probably something like North American Programing Language Protocol Standard).

Well, we know that none of these made it commercially. But what about the content expectations for videotext -- isn't it what the Web is becoming?

To the extent there are just so many different types of information, of course the Tydeman folks identified many of those that are popular on the Internet. Today the most used function of the Internet is e-mail. Look at how that is treated in Tydeman, Chapter 5. It's way down the list in Table 1. But it was the most important function at The Source, one of the early information services. And it doesn't even show up in Table 4.

There is also a big difference between what people say they want and what they will pay for. Everyone says they want news and weather but the only things they seem willing to pay for so far are sports (ESPN's Web site), sex (many sites), games, and e-mail (the motivation for many just to have an account somewhere). And e-mail is content we create ourselves.

So help me out. Why are we seeing a different response to day than in the early 80s

As happens often, innovation comes not from a single Eureka! idea of even a single invention. It is often a confluence of events and/or technologies. Videotext was too early. By relying on mainframe computers to service a large audience, by relying on the TV set as the display, and by relying on the 300 baud modems that were available, too many compromises had to be made to come up with a user-friendly service that could be priced for a mass audience. Even the Internet existed, but not graphical browsers. UNIX commands would have have worked for a consumer product.

The pieces were all available. But the economics were not. Computing power was available but too expensive for the home. Faster modems were avialable, but also too expensive. Dedicated telephone lines could handle greater bandwidth, but not at a price close to what you or I, or even most businesses, could justiufy.

The application of Moore's law has been the big difference. Capacity has come up while costs have gone down. Voila! Electronic information services to the home. The business model is still not clear (more on that later). But the technology model is much clearer than in 1980.

By the way, is it videotex or videotext?

For some reason, the writers and journalists of the early 80s dropped the "t" for videotex but left it for teletext. I've continued to write it as videotext. After all, it as "text" on a video tube. But who cares? Today it is spelled World Wide Web.

Okay, Dr. C. What should we be thinking about from all this?

There's lots of food for thought and substance for a Listserv discussion.

Why didn't videotext succeed, despite the push of lots of big companies (British Telecom, AT&T, Time Mirror , Knight-Ridder, among others) but the Web has taken off despite not being owned by any media company (or anyone else)?

What kind of content does make sense for this electronic medium: banking, current news, archival information, entertainment, etc. etc.? What do you use it for (other than required course work)?

Back to Week 3 assignments.

2/3/97