The History of Computing

Today we’re going to look at the history of the Palm. 

It might be hard to remember at this point, but once upon a time, we didn’t all have mobile devices connected to the Internet. There was no Facebook and Grubhub. But in the 80s, computer scientists were starting to think about what ubiquitous computing would look like. We got the Psion and the HP Jaguar (which ran on DOS). But these seemed much more like really small laptops. And with tiny keyboards. 

General Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 but missed the mark. Other devices were continuing to hit the market, some running PenPoint from Go Corporation - but none really worked out. But former Intel, GRiD, and then Tandy employee Jeff Hawkins envisioned a personal digital assistant and created Palm Computing to create one in 1992. He had been interested in pen-based computing and worked with pattern recognition for handwriting at UC Berkeley. He asked Ed Colligan of Radius and Donna Dubinsky of Claris to join him. She would become CEO.

They worked with Casio and Tandy to release the Casio Zoomer in 1993. The Apple Newton came along in 1993 and partially due to processor speed and partially due to just immaturity in the market, both devices failed to resonate with the market. The Newton did better, but the General Magic ideas that had caught the imagination of the world were alive and well. HP Jaguars were using Palm’s synchronization software and so they were able to stay afloat. 

And so Hawkins got to work on new character recognition software. He got a tour of Xerox PARC, as did everyone else in computing and they saw Unistrokes, which had been developed by David Goldberg. Unistrokes resembled shorthand and required users to learn a new way of writing but proved much more effective. Hawkins went on to build Graffiti, based on that same concept and as Xerox patented the technology they would go into legal battles until Palm eventually settled for $22.5 million. 

More devices were coming every year and by 1995 Palm Computing was getting close to releasing a device. They had about $3 million dollars to play with. They would produce a device that had less buttons and so a larger screen size than other devices. It had the best handwriting technology on the market. It was the perfect size. Which Hawkins had made sure of by carrying around a block of wood in his pocket and to meetings to test it. Only problem is that they ran out of cash during the R&D and couldn’t take it to market. But they knew they hit the mark. 

The industry had been planning for a pen-based computing device for some time and US Robotics saw an opening. Palm ended up selling to US Robotics, who had made a bundle selling modems, for $44 million dollars. And they got folded into another acquisition, 3Com, which had been built by Bob Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet. US Robotics banked on Ethernet being the next wave. And they were right. But they also banked on pen computing. And were right again!

US Robotics launched the Palm Pilot 1000 with 128k of RAM and the Palm Pilot 5000 with 518k of RAM in 1996. This was the first device that actually hit the mark. People became obsessed with Graffiti. You connected it to the computer using a serial port to synchronize Notes, Contacts, and Calendars. It seems like such a small thing now, but it was huge then. They were an instant success. Everyone in computing knew something would come along, but they didn’t realize this was it. Until it was! HP, Ericsson, Sharp, NEC, Casio, Compaq, and Philips would all release handhelds but the Palm was the thing. 

By 1998 the three founders were done getting moved around and left, creating a new company to make a similar device, called Handspring. Apple continued to flounder in the space releasing the eMate and then the MessagePad. But the Handspring devices were eerily similar to the Palms. Both would get infrared, USB, and the Handspring Visor would even run Palm OS 3. But the founders had a vision for something more.

They would take Handspring public in 2000. 3Com would take Palm public in 2000. Only problem is the dot com bubble. Well, that and Research in Notion began to ship the Blackberry OS in 1999 and the next wave of devices began to chip away at the market share. Shares dropped over 90% and by 2002 Palm had to set up a subsidiary for the Palm OS.

But again, the crew at Handspring had something more in mind. They released the Tree in 2002. The Handspring Treo was, check this out, a smart phone. It could do email, SMS, voice calls. Over the years they would add a camera, GPS, MP3, and Wi-Fi. Basically what we all expect from a smartphone today. 

Handspring merged with Palm in 2003 and they released the Palm Tree 600. They merged back the company the OS had been spun out into, finally all merged back together in 2005. Meanwhile, Pilot pens had sued Palm and the devices were then just called Palm. We got a few, with the Palm V probably being the best, got a few new features, lots and lots of syncing problems, when new sync tools were added. 

Now that all of the parts of the company were back together, they started planning for a new OS, which they announced in 2009. And webOS was supposed to be huge. And they announced the Palm Pre, the killer next Smartphone. 

The only problem is that the iPhone had come along in 2007. And Android was released in 2008. Palm had the right idea. They just got sideswiped by Apple and Google. 

And they ran out of money. They were bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 for 1.2 billion dollars. Under new management the company was again split into parts, with WebOS never really taking off, the PRe 3 never really shipping, and TouchPads not actually being any good and ultimately ending in the CEO of HP getting fired (along with other things). Once Meg Whitman stepped in as CEO, WebOS was open sourced and the remaining assets sold off to LG Electronics to be used in Smart TVs. 

The Palm Pilot was the first successful handheld device. It gave us permission to think about more. The iPod came along in 2001, in a red ocean of crappy MP3 handheld devices. And over time it would get some of the features of the Palm. But I can still remember the day the iPhone came out and the few dozen people I knew with Treos cursing because they knew it was time to replace it. In the meantime Windows CE and other mobile operating systems had just pilfered market share away from Palm slowly. The founders invented something people truly loved. For awhile. And they had the right vision for the next thing that people would love. They just couldn’t keep up with the swell that would become the iPhone and Android, which now own pretty much the entire market. 

And so Palm is no more. But they certainly left a dent in the universe. And we owe them our thanks for that. Just as I owe you my thanks for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to decided to listen in - you’re welcome back any time! Have a great day!

Today we’re going to look at the history of the Palm. 

It might be hard to remember at this point, but once upon a time, we didn’t all have mobile devices connected to the Internet. There was no Facebook and Grubhub. But in the 80s, computer scientists were starting to think about what ubiquitous computing would look like. We got the Psion and the HP Jaguar (which ran on DOS). But these seemed much more like really small laptops. And with tiny keyboards. 

General Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 but missed the mark. Other devices were continuing to hit the market, some running PenPoint from Go Corporation - but none really worked out. But former Intel, GRiD, and then Tandy employee Jeff Hawkins envisioned a personal digital assistant and created Palm Computing to create one in 1992. He had been interested in pen-based computing and worked with pattern recognition for handwriting at UC Berkeley. He asked Ed Colligan of Radius and Donna Dubinsky of Claris to join him. She would become CEO.

They worked with Casio and Tandy to release the Casio Zoomer in 1993. The Apple Newton came along in 1993 and partially due to processor speed and partially due to just immaturity in the market, both devices failed to resonate with the market. The Newton did better, but the General Magic ideas that had caught the imagination of the world were alive and well. HP Jaguars were using Palm’s synchronization software and so they were able to stay afloat. 

And so Hawkins got to work on new character recognition software. He got a tour of Xerox PARC, as did everyone else in computing and they saw Unistrokes, which had been developed by David Goldberg. Unistrokes resembled shorthand and required users to learn a new way of writing but proved much more effective. Hawkins went on to build Graffiti, based on that same concept and as Xerox patented the technology they would go into legal battles until Palm eventually settled for $22.5 million. 

More devices were coming every year and by 1995 Palm Computing was getting close to releasing a device. They had about $3 million dollars to play with. They would produce a device that had less buttons and so a larger screen size than other devices. It had the best handwriting technology on the market. It was the perfect size. Which Hawkins had made sure of by carrying around a block of wood in his pocket and to meetings to test it. Only problem is that they ran out of cash during the R&D and couldn’t take it to market. But they knew they hit the mark. 

The industry had been planning for a pen-based computing device for some time and US Robotics saw an opening. Palm ended up selling to US Robotics, who had made a bundle selling modems, for $44 million dollars. And they got folded into another acquisition, 3Com, which had been built by Bob Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet. US Robotics banked on Ethernet being the next wave. And they were right. But they also banked on pen computing. And were right again!

US Robotics launched the Palm Pilot 1000 with 128k of RAM and the Palm Pilot 5000 with 518k of RAM in 1996. This was the first device that actually hit the mark. People became obsessed with Graffiti. You connected it to the computer using a serial port to synchronize Notes, Contacts, and Calendars. It seems like such a small thing now, but it was huge then. They were an instant success. Everyone in computing knew something would come along, but they didn’t realize this was it. Until it was! HP, Ericsson, Sharp, NEC, Casio, Compaq, and Philips would all release handhelds but the Palm was the thing. 

By 1998 the three founders were done getting moved around and left, creating a new company to make a similar device, called Handspring. Apple continued to flounder in the space releasing the eMate and then the MessagePad. But the Handspring devices were eerily similar to the Palms. Both would get infrared, USB, and the Handspring Visor would even run Palm OS 3. But the founders had a vision for something more.

They would take Handspring public in 2000. 3Com would take Palm public in 2000. Only problem is the dot com bubble. Well, that and Research in Notion began to ship the Blackberry OS in 1999 and the next wave of devices began to chip away at the market share. Shares dropped over 90% and by 2002 Palm had to set up a subsidiary for the Palm OS.

But again, the crew at Handspring had something more in mind. They released the Tree in 2002. The Handspring Treo was, check this out, a smart phone. It could do email, SMS, voice calls. Over the years they would add a camera, GPS, MP3, and Wi-Fi. Basically what we all expect from a smartphone today. 

Handspring merged with Palm in 2003 and they released the Palm Tree 600. They merged back the company the OS had been spun out into, finally all merged back together in 2005. Meanwhile, Pilot pens had sued Palm and the devices were then just called Palm. We got a few, with the Palm V probably being the best, got a few new features, lots and lots of syncing problems, when new sync tools were added. 

Now that all of the parts of the company were back together, they started planning for a new OS, which they announced in 2009. And webOS was supposed to be huge. And they announced the Palm Pre, the killer next Smartphone. 

The only problem is that the iPhone had come along in 2007. And Android was released in 2008. Palm had the right idea. They just got sideswiped by Apple and Google. 

And they ran out of money. They were bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 for 1.2 billion dollars. Under new management the company was again split into parts, with WebOS never really taking off, the PRe 3 never really shipping, and TouchPads not actually being any good and ultimately ending in the CEO of HP getting fired (along with other things). Once Meg Whitman stepped in as CEO, WebOS was open sourced and the remaining assets sold off to LG Electronics to be used in Smart TVs. 

The Palm Pilot was the first successful handheld device. It gave us permission to think about more. The iPod came along in 2001, in a red ocean of crappy MP3 handheld devices. And over time it would get some of the features of the Palm. But I can still remember the day the iPhone came out and the few dozen people I knew with Treos cursing because they knew it was time to replace it. In the meantime Windows CE and other mobile operating systems had just pilfered market share away from Palm slowly. The founders invented something people truly loved. For awhile. And they had the right vision for the next thing that people would love. They just couldn’t keep up with the swell that would become the iPhone and Android, which now own pretty much the entire market. 

And so Palm is no more. But they certainly left a dent in the universe. And we owe them our thanks for that. Just as I owe you my thanks for tuning in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to decided to listen in - you’re welcome back any time! Have a great day!

Today we’re going to look at the history of the dial-up computer modem. 

Modem stands for modulate/demodulate. That modulation is carying a property (like voice or computer bits) over a waveform.  Modems originally encoded voice data with frequency shift keys, but that was developed during World War II. The voices were encoded into digital tones. That system was called SIGSALY. But they called them vocoders at the time. 

They matured over the next 17 years. And then came the SAGE air defense system in 1958. Here, the modem was employed to connect bases, missile silos, and radars back to the central SAGE system. These were Bell 101 modems and ran at an amazing 110 baud. Bell Labs, as in AT&T.  

A baud is a unit of transmission that is equal to how many times a signal changes state per second. Each of those baud is equivalent to one bit per second. So that first modem was able to process data at 110 bits per second. This isn’t to say that baud is the same as bitrate. Early on it seemed to be but the algorithms sku the higher the numbers. 

So AT&T had developed the modem and after a few years they began to see commercial uses for it. So in 1962, they revved that 101 to become the Bell 103. Actually, 103A. This thing used newer technology and better encoding, so could run at 300 bits per second. Suddenly teletypes - or terminals, could connect to computers remotely. But ma’ Bell kept a tight leash on how they were used for those first few years. That, until 1968.

In 1968 came what is known as the Carterphone Decision. We owe a lot to the Carterfone. It bridged radio systems to telephone systems. And Ma Bell had been controlling what lives on their lines for a long time. The decision opened up what devices could be plugged into the phone system. And suddenly new innovations like fax machines and answering machines showed up in the world. 

And so in 1968, any device with an acoustic coupler could be hooked up to the phone system. And that Bell 103A would lead to others. By 1972, Stanford Research had spun out a device, Novation, and others. But the Vladic added full duplex and got speeds four times what the 103A worked at by employing duplexing and new frequencies. We were up to 1200 bits per second. 

The bit rate had jumped four-fold because, well, competition. Prices dropped and by the late 1970s microcomputers were showing up in homes. There was a modem for the S-100 Altair bus, the Apple II through a Z-80 SoftCard, and even for the Commodore PET. And people wanted to talk to one another. TCP had been developed in 1974 but at this point the most common way to communicate was to dial directly into bulletin board services. 

1981 was a pivotal year. A few things happened that were not yet connected at the time. The National Science Foundation created the Computer Science Network, or CSNET, which would result in NSFNET later, and when combined with the other nets, the Internet, replacing ARPANET. 

1981 also saw the release of the Commodore VIC-20 and TRS-80. This led to more and more computers in homes and more people wanting to connect with those online services. Later models would have modems.

1981 also saw the release of the Hayes Smartmodem. This was a physical box that connected to the computer of a serial port. The Smartmodem had a controller that recognized commands. And established the Hayes command set standard that would be used to connect to phone lines, allowing you to initiate a call, dial a number, answer a call, and hang up. Without lifting a handset and placing it on a modem. On the inside it was still 300-baud but the progress and innovations were speeding up. And it didn’t seem like a huge deal. 

The online services were starting to grow. The French Minitel service was released commercially in 1982. The first BBS that would become Fidonet showed up in 1983. Various encoding techniques started to come along and by 1984 you had the Trailblazer modem, at over 18,000 bits a second. But, this was for specific uses and combined 36 bit/second channels. 

The use of email started to increase and the needs for even more speed. We got the ability to connect two USRobotics modems in the mid-80s to run at 2400 bits per second. But Gottfried Ungerboeck would publish a paper defining a theory of information coding and add parity checking at about the time we got echo suppression. This allowed us to jump to 9600 bits in the late 80s. 

All of these vendors releasing all of this resulted in the v.21 standard in 1989 from the  ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). They’re the ones that ratify a lot of standards, like x.509 or MP4. Several other v dot standards would come along as well. 

The next jump came with the SupraFaXModem with Rockwell chips, which was released in 1992. And USRobotics brought us to 16,800 bits per second but with errors. But we got v.32 in 1991 to get to 14.4 - now we were talking in kilobits! Then 19.2 in 1993, 28.8 in 1994, 33.6 in 1996. By 1999 we got the last of the major updates, v.90 which got us to 56k. At this point, most homes in the US at least had computers and were going online. 

The same year, ANSI ratified ADSL, or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines. Suddenly we were communicating in the megabits. And the dial-up modem began to be used a little less and less. In 2004 Multimedia over Coax Alliance was formed and cable modems became standard. The combination of DSL and cable modems has now all but removed the need for dial up modems. Given the pervasiveness of cell phones, today, as few as 20% of homes in the US have a phone line any more. We’ve moved on.

But the journey of the dial-up modem was a key contributor to us getting from a lot of disconnected computers to… The Internet as we know it today. So thank you to everyone involved, from Ma Bell, to Rockwell, to USRobotics, to Hayes, and so on. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

Today we’re going to look at the history of the dial-up computer modem. 

Modem stands for modulate/demodulate. That modulation is carying a property (like voice or computer bits) over a waveform.  Modems originally encoded voice data with frequency shift keys, but that was developed during World War II. The voices were encoded into digital tones. That system was called SIGSALY. But they called them vocoders at the time. 

They matured over the next 17 years. And then came the SAGE air defense system in 1958. Here, the modem was employed to connect bases, missile silos, and radars back to the central SAGE system. These were Bell 101 modems and ran at an amazing 110 baud. Bell Labs, as in AT&T.  

A baud is a unit of transmission that is equal to how many times a signal changes state per second. Each of those baud is equivalent to one bit per second. So that first modem was able to process data at 110 bits per second. This isn’t to say that baud is the same as bitrate. Early on it seemed to be but the algorithms sku the higher the numbers. 

So AT&T had developed the modem and after a few years they began to see commercial uses for it. So in 1962, they revved that 101 to become the Bell 103. Actually, 103A. This thing used newer technology and better encoding, so could run at 300 bits per second. Suddenly teletypes - or terminals, could connect to computers remotely. But ma’ Bell kept a tight leash on how they were used for those first few years. That, until 1968.

In 1968 came what is known as the Carterphone Decision. We owe a lot to the Carterfone. It bridged radio systems to telephone systems. And Ma Bell had been controlling what lives on their lines for a long time. The decision opened up what devices could be plugged into the phone system. And suddenly new innovations like fax machines and answering machines showed up in the world. 

And so in 1968, any device with an acoustic coupler could be hooked up to the phone system. And that Bell 103A would lead to others. By 1972, Stanford Research had spun out a device, Novation, and others. But the Vladic added full duplex and got speeds four times what the 103A worked at by employing duplexing and new frequencies. We were up to 1200 bits per second. 

The bit rate had jumped four-fold because, well, competition. Prices dropped and by the late 1970s microcomputers were showing up in homes. There was a modem for the S-100 Altair bus, the Apple II through a Z-80 SoftCard, and even for the Commodore PET. And people wanted to talk to one another. TCP had been developed in 1974 but at this point the most common way to communicate was to dial directly into bulletin board services. 

1981 was a pivotal year. A few things happened that were not yet connected at the time. The National Science Foundation created the Computer Science Network, or CSNET, which would result in NSFNET later, and when combined with the other nets, the Internet, replacing ARPANET. 

1981 also saw the release of the Commodore VIC-20 and TRS-80. This led to more and more computers in homes and more people wanting to connect with those online services. Later models would have modems.

1981 also saw the release of the Hayes Smartmodem. This was a physical box that connected to the computer of a serial port. The Smartmodem had a controller that recognized commands. And established the Hayes command set standard that would be used to connect to phone lines, allowing you to initiate a call, dial a number, answer a call, and hang up. Without lifting a handset and placing it on a modem. On the inside it was still 300-baud but the progress and innovations were speeding up. And it didn’t seem like a huge deal. 

The online services were starting to grow. The French Minitel service was released commercially in 1982. The first BBS that would become Fidonet showed up in 1983. Various encoding techniques started to come along and by 1984 you had the Trailblazer modem, at over 18,000 bits a second. But, this was for specific uses and combined 36 bit/second channels. 

The use of email started to increase and the needs for even more speed. We got the ability to connect two USRobotics modems in the mid-80s to run at 2400 bits per second. But Gottfried Ungerboeck would publish a paper defining a theory of information coding and add parity checking at about the time we got echo suppression. This allowed us to jump to 9600 bits in the late 80s. 

All of these vendors releasing all of this resulted in the v.21 standard in 1989 from the  ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). They’re the ones that ratify a lot of standards, like x.509 or MP4. Several other v dot standards would come along as well. 

The next jump came with the SupraFaXModem with Rockwell chips, which was released in 1992. And USRobotics brought us to 16,800 bits per second but with errors. But we got v.32 in 1991 to get to 14.4 - now we were talking in kilobits! Then 19.2 in 1993, 28.8 in 1994, 33.6 in 1996. By 1999 we got the last of the major updates, v.90 which got us to 56k. At this point, most homes in the US at least had computers and were going online. 

The same year, ANSI ratified ADSL, or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines. Suddenly we were communicating in the megabits. And the dial-up modem began to be used a little less and less. In 2004 Multimedia over Coax Alliance was formed and cable modems became standard. The combination of DSL and cable modems has now all but removed the need for dial up modems. Given the pervasiveness of cell phones, today, as few as 20% of homes in the US have a phone line any more. We’ve moved on.

But the journey of the dial-up modem was a key contributor to us getting from a lot of disconnected computers to… The Internet as we know it today. So thank you to everyone involved, from Ma Bell, to Rockwell, to USRobotics, to Hayes, and so on. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

Today we’re going to talk through the history of Cray Computers.

And really, this is then a history of supercomputers during Seymour Cray’s life. If it’s not obvious by his name, he was the founder of Cray. But before we go there, let’s back up a bit and talk about some things that were classified for a long time. The post-World War II spending by the US government definitely leveled up the US computer industry. And defense was the name of the game in those early years. 

Once upon a time, the computer science community referred to the Minneapolis/St Paul area as the Land of 10,000 Top Secret Projects. And a lot of things ended up coming out of that. One of the most important in the history of computing though, was Engineering Research Associates, or ERA. They built highly specialized computers. Those made for breaking Soviet codes. 

Honeywell had been founded in Minneapolis and as with Vannevar Bush, had gone from thermostats to computers. Honeywell started pumping out the DATAmatic 1000 in 1957. There was a computer shipping and Honeywell was well situated to capitalize on the growing mainframe computer market. 

ERA had some problems because the owners were embroiled in Washington politics and so they were acquired by Sperry Rand, today’s Unisys, but at the time one of the larger mainframe developers and the progeny of both the Harvard Mark series and ENIAC series of mainframes. Only problem is that the Sperry Rand crew were making a bundle off Univacs and so didn’t put money into forward looking projects. 

The engineers knew that there were big changes coming in computing. And they wanted to be at the forefront. Who wouldn’t. But with Sperry Rand barely keeping up with orders they couldn’t focus on R&D the way many former ERA engineers wanted to. So many of the best and brightest minds from ERA founded Control Data Corporation, or CDC. And CDC built some serious computers that competed with everyone at the time. Because they had some seriously talented engineers. One, who had come over from ERA, was Seymour Cray. And he was a true visionary. 

And so you had IBM and their seven biggest competitors, known as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Three of those dwarfs were doing a lot of R&D in Minneapolis (or at least the Minneapolis area). None are still based in the Twin Cities. But all three build ruggedized computers that could withstand nuclear blasts, corrosive elements, and anything you could throw at them. 

But old Seymour. He wanted to do something great. Cray had a vision of building the fastest computer in the world. And as luck would have it, transistors were getting cheaper by the day. They had initially been designed to use germanium but Seymour Cray worked to repackage those at CDC to be silicon and was able to pack enough in to make the CDC 6600 the fastest computer in the world in 1964. They had leapfrogged the industry and went to market, selling the machines like hotcakes. 

Now CDC would build one of the first real supercomputers in that 6600. And supercomputers are what Cray is known for today. But there’s a little more drama to get from CDC to Cray and then honestly from Cray to the other Crays that Seymour founded. CDC went into a big of a buying tornado as well. As with the Univacs, they couldn’t keep up with demand and so suddenly were focused too much on Development to look beyond fulfillment and shipping and into the Research part of R&D. Additionally shipping all those computers and competing with IBM was rough and CDC was having financial problems, so CEO William Norris wouldn’t let them redesign the 6600 from the ground up. 

But Cray saw massive parallel processing as the future, which is kinda’ what supercomputing really is at the end of the day, and was bitten by that bug. He wanted to keep building the fastest computers in the world. And he would get his wish. He finally left CDC in 1972 and founded Cray Research along with cofounding engineer Lester Davis. They went to Chippewa Falls Wisconsin.

It took him four years, but Cray shipped the Cray-1 in 1976, which became the best selling supercomputer in history (which means they sold more than 80 and less than a hundred). It was 80MhZ, or 200 gigaFLOPS. And that was vector processing. They would math faster by re-arranging the memory and registers to more intelligently process big amounts of data. He used Maxwell’s equations on his boards. He designed it all on paper. The first Cray-1 would ship to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Cray-1 was 5 and a half tons, cost around $8 million dollars in 1976 money and the fact that they were the fastest computer in the world combined with the fact that they were space age looking gave Seymour Cray instant star status. 

The Cray-1 would soon get competition from the ILLIAC IV out of the University of Illinois, an ARPA project. So Cray got to work thinkin’. He liked to dig when he thought, and he tried to dig a tunnel under his house. This kinda’ sums up what I think of Wisconsin. 

The Cray-2 would come in 1985, which was the first multiple CPU design by Cray. It came in at 1.9 Gigaflops. They rearranged memory to allow for more parallelization and used two sets of memory registers. It effectively set the stage for modern processing architectures in a lot of ways, offloading tasks for a dedicated foreground processor to main memory connected over the fastest channels possible to each CPU. But IBM wouldn’t release the first real multi core processor until 2001. And we see this with supercomputers. The techniques used in them come downmarket over time. 

But some of the biggest problems were how to keep the wires close together. The soldering of connecters at that level was nearly impossible. And the thing was hot. So they added, get this, liquid coolant, leading some people to call the Cray-2 “Bubbles.”

By now, Seymour Cray had let other people run the company and thee were competing projects like the Cray X-MP underway. Almost immediately after the release of the Cray-2 Seymour moved to working on the Cray-3 but the project was abandoned and again, Cray found himself wanting to just go do research without priorities shifting what he could do. 

But Seymour always knew best. Again, he’s from Wisconsin. So he left the company with his name and started another company, this one called Cray Computer, where he did manage to finish the Cray-3. But that Cold War war spending from the Cold War dried up. And while he thought of designs for a Cray-4, the company would go bankrupt in 1995. He was athletic and healthy, so in his 70s, why not keep at it?

His next company would focus on massively parallel processing, which would be the trend of the future, but Seymour Cray died from complications to a car accident in 1996. 

He was one of the great pioneers of the computing industry. He set a standard that computers like IBM’s Blue Gene then Summit or China’s Sunway TahuLight or Dell’s Frontera or Cray’s HPE or Fujitsu’s aBCI or Lenovo’s SuperMUC-NG carry on. Those run at between 20 gigaflops to close to 150 gigaflops. Today, the Cray X1E pays homage to it’s ancestor, the great Cray-1. 

But no one does it with style the way the Cray-1 did - and think about this, Moore’s Law says transistors will double every two years. Not to oversimplify things but that means that since the Cray-2 we should have had a 262 gigaflop machine by now. But I guess he’s not here to break down the newer barriers like he did with the von Neumann bottleneck. 

Also, think about this, those early supercomputers were funded by the departments that became the NSA. They even helped fund the development of Cray’s throughout history. So maybe we have hit 262 and it’s just classified. I swoon at that thought. But maybe it’s just that this is where the move from bits to qubits and quantum computing becomes the next significant jump. Who knows?

But hey, thanks for joining me on this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. Do you have a story you want to tell? I plan to run more interviews soon and while we have a cast of innovators that we’re talking to, we’d love even more weird and amazing humans. Hit us up if you want to! And in the meantime, thanks again for listening, we are so lucky to have you. 

Today we’re going to talk through the history of Cray Computers.

And really, this is then a history of supercomputers during Seymour Cray’s life. If it’s not obvious by his name, he was the founder of Cray. But before we go there, let’s back up a bit and talk about some things that were classified for a long time. The post-World War II spending by the US government definitely leveled up the US computer industry. And defense was the name of the game in those early years. 

Once upon a time, the computer science community referred to the Minneapolis/St Paul area as the Land of 10,000 Top Secret Projects. And a lot of things ended up coming out of that. One of the most important in the history of computing though, was Engineering Research Associates, or ERA. They built highly specialized computers. Those made for breaking Soviet codes. 

Honeywell had been founded in Minneapolis and as with Vannevar Bush, had gone from thermostats to computers. Honeywell started pumping out the DATAmatic 1000 in 1957. There was a computer shipping and Honeywell was well situated to capitalize on the growing mainframe computer market. 

ERA had some problems because the owners were embroiled in Washington politics and so they were acquired by Sperry Rand, today’s Unisys, but at the time one of the larger mainframe developers and the progeny of both the Harvard Mark series and ENIAC series of mainframes. Only problem is that the Sperry Rand crew were making a bundle off Univacs and so didn’t put money into forward looking projects. 

The engineers knew that there were big changes coming in computing. And they wanted to be at the forefront. Who wouldn’t. But with Sperry Rand barely keeping up with orders they couldn’t focus on R&D the way many former ERA engineers wanted to. So many of the best and brightest minds from ERA founded Control Data Corporation, or CDC. And CDC built some serious computers that competed with everyone at the time. Because they had some seriously talented engineers. One, who had come over from ERA, was Seymour Cray. And he was a true visionary. 

And so you had IBM and their seven biggest competitors, known as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Three of those dwarfs were doing a lot of R&D in Minneapolis (or at least the Minneapolis area). None are still based in the Twin Cities. But all three build ruggedized computers that could withstand nuclear blasts, corrosive elements, and anything you could throw at them. 

But old Seymour. He wanted to do something great. Cray had a vision of building the fastest computer in the world. And as luck would have it, transistors were getting cheaper by the day. They had initially been designed to use germanium but Seymour Cray worked to repackage those at CDC to be silicon and was able to pack enough in to make the CDC 6600 the fastest computer in the world in 1964. They had leapfrogged the industry and went to market, selling the machines like hotcakes. 

Now CDC would build one of the first real supercomputers in that 6600. And supercomputers are what Cray is known for today. But there’s a little more drama to get from CDC to Cray and then honestly from Cray to the other Crays that Seymour founded. CDC went into a big of a buying tornado as well. As with the Univacs, they couldn’t keep up with demand and so suddenly were focused too much on Development to look beyond fulfillment and shipping and into the Research part of R&D. Additionally shipping all those computers and competing with IBM was rough and CDC was having financial problems, so CEO William Norris wouldn’t let them redesign the 6600 from the ground up. 

But Cray saw massive parallel processing as the future, which is kinda’ what supercomputing really is at the end of the day, and was bitten by that bug. He wanted to keep building the fastest computers in the world. And he would get his wish. He finally left CDC in 1972 and founded Cray Research along with cofounding engineer Lester Davis. They went to Chippewa Falls Wisconsin.

It took him four years, but Cray shipped the Cray-1 in 1976, which became the best selling supercomputer in history (which means they sold more than 80 and less than a hundred). It was 80MhZ, or 200 gigaFLOPS. And that was vector processing. They would math faster by re-arranging the memory and registers to more intelligently process big amounts of data. He used Maxwell’s equations on his boards. He designed it all on paper. The first Cray-1 would ship to Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Cray-1 was 5 and a half tons, cost around $8 million dollars in 1976 money and the fact that they were the fastest computer in the world combined with the fact that they were space age looking gave Seymour Cray instant star status. 

The Cray-1 would soon get competition from the ILLIAC IV out of the University of Illinois, an ARPA project. So Cray got to work thinkin’. He liked to dig when he thought, and he tried to dig a tunnel under his house. This kinda’ sums up what I think of Wisconsin. 

The Cray-2 would come in 1985, which was the first multiple CPU design by Cray. It came in at 1.9 Gigaflops. They rearranged memory to allow for more parallelization and used two sets of memory registers. It effectively set the stage for modern processing architectures in a lot of ways, offloading tasks for a dedicated foreground processor to main memory connected over the fastest channels possible to each CPU. But IBM wouldn’t release the first real multi core processor until 2001. And we see this with supercomputers. The techniques used in them come downmarket over time. 

But some of the biggest problems were how to keep the wires close together. The soldering of connecters at that level was nearly impossible. And the thing was hot. So they added, get this, liquid coolant, leading some people to call the Cray-2 “Bubbles.”

By now, Seymour Cray had let other people run the company and thee were competing projects like the Cray X-MP underway. Almost immediately after the release of the Cray-2 Seymour moved to working on the Cray-3 but the project was abandoned and again, Cray found himself wanting to just go do research without priorities shifting what he could do. 

But Seymour always knew best. Again, he’s from Wisconsin. So he left the company with his name and started another company, this one called Cray Computer, where he did manage to finish the Cray-3. But that Cold War war spending from the Cold War dried up. And while he thought of designs for a Cray-4, the company would go bankrupt in 1995. He was athletic and healthy, so in his 70s, why not keep at it?

His next company would focus on massively parallel processing, which would be the trend of the future, but Seymour Cray died from complications to a car accident in 1996. 

He was one of the great pioneers of the computing industry. He set a standard that computers like IBM’s Blue Gene then Summit or China’s Sunway TahuLight or Dell’s Frontera or Cray’s HPE or Fujitsu’s aBCI or Lenovo’s SuperMUC-NG carry on. Those run at between 20 gigaflops to close to 150 gigaflops. Today, the Cray X1E pays homage to it’s ancestor, the great Cray-1. 

But no one does it with style the way the Cray-1 did - and think about this, Moore’s Law says transistors will double every two years. Not to oversimplify things but that means that since the Cray-2 we should have had a 262 gigaflop machine by now. But I guess he’s not here to break down the newer barriers like he did with the von Neumann bottleneck. 

Also, think about this, those early supercomputers were funded by the departments that became the NSA. They even helped fund the development of Cray’s throughout history. So maybe we have hit 262 and it’s just classified. I swoon at that thought. But maybe it’s just that this is where the move from bits to qubits and quantum computing becomes the next significant jump. Who knows?

But hey, thanks for joining me on this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. Do you have a story you want to tell? I plan to run more interviews soon and while we have a cast of innovators that we’re talking to, we’d love even more weird and amazing humans. Hit us up if you want to! And in the meantime, thanks again for listening, we are so lucky to have you. 

Today we’re going to talk about a company that doesn’t get a ton of credit for bringing computing to homes across the world but should: Radio Shack.

Radio Shack was founded by Theodore and Milton Deutschmann in 1921 in downtown Boston. The brothers were all about ham radio. A radio shack was a small structure on a ship that kept the radio equipment at the time. The name was derived from that slightly more generic term, given that one group of customers were radio officers outfitting ships.  

By 1939 they would print a catalog and ship equipment over mail as well. 

They again expanded operations in 1954 and would make their own equipment and sell it as well. But after too much expansion they ran into financial troubles and had to sell the company. When Charles Tandy bought the company for $300,000 in 1962, they had nine large retail stores. 

Tandy had done well selling leather goods and knew how to appeal to hobbyists. He slashed management and cut the amount of stock from 40,000 items to 2,500. The 80/20 rule is a great way to control costs. Given the smaller amount of stock, they were able to move to smaller stores. 

They also started to buy generic equipment and sell it under the Realistic brand, and started selling various types of consumer electronics. They used the locations that people bought electronics over the mail to plan new, small store openings. They gave ownership to store managers. And it worked. The growth was meteoric for the next 16 years. They had some great growth hacks. They did free tube testing. They gave a battery away for free to everyone that came in. They hired electronics enthusiasts. And people loved them. 

They bought Allied Radio in 1970.and continued to grow their manufacturing abilities. 

Tandy would pass away in 1978, leaving behind a legacy of a healthy company, primed for even more growth. Electronics continued to be more pervasive in the lives of Americans and the company continued its rapid growth, looking for opportunities to bring crazy new electronics products into people’s homes. One was the TRS-80. Radio Shack had introduced the computer in 1977 using an operating system from Microsoft. 

It sold really well and they would sell more than 100k of them before 1980. Although after that the sales would slowly go down with competition from Apple and IBM, until they finally sold the business off in the early 90s. But they stayed in computing. They bought Grid Systems Corporation to bring laptops to the masses in 1988. They would buy Computer City in 1991 and the 200 locations would become the Radio Shack Computer Centers. 

They would then focus on IBM compatible computers under the Tandy brand name rather than the TRS line. Computers were on the rise and clearly part of the Radio Shack strategy. I know I’ll never forget the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids that I’d come across throughout my adolescence. 

In the early 90s, Radio Shack was actually the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, building computers for a variety of vendors, including Digital Equipment Corporation and of course, themselves . Their expertise in acting as an OEM electronics factory turned out to be profitable in a number of ways. They also made cables, video tapes, even antennas. Primarily under the Tandy brand. This is also when they started selling IBM computers in Radio Shack stores. They also tried to launch their own big box retail stores. 

They sold the Radio Shack Computer Centers to a number of vendors, including CompUSA and Fry’s, during their explosive growth, in 1998. They would move from selling IBM to selling Compaq in Radio Shacks at that point. 

Radio Shack hit its peak in 1999. It was operating in a number of countries and had basically licensed the name globally. This was a big year of change, though. This was around the time they sold the Tandy leather side of the business to The Leather Factory, which continues on. They also got rid of the Realistic brand and inked a deal to sell RCA equipment instead. They were restructuring. And it would continue on for a long time and rarely for the better. 

Radio Shack began a slow decline in the upcoming millenia. The move into adjacencies alienated the hobbyists, who had always been the core Radio Shack shopper. And Radio Shack tried to move into other markets, cluing other companies into what their market was worth. 

They had forgotten the lessons learned when Tandy took over the company and had more and more parts in the warehouses. More and more complex sales. More and more bigger stores. Again, the hobbyists were abandoning Radio Shack. By 2004 sales were down. The company started a high pressure plan and started hammering on the managers at the stores, constantly pushing them and by 2004 they rebelled with thousands of managers filing a class action suit. 

And it wasn’t just internal employees. They were voted the worst overall customer experience amongst any retailer for 6 years in a row. Happy Cows make happy milk. And it wasn’t just about store managers. They went through six CEOs from 2006 to 2016.And 2006 was a tough year to kick such things off. They had to close 500 stores that year. 

And the computer business was drying up. Dell, Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, and others were eating their lunch. 

By 2009, they would rebrand as just The Shack and started to focus on mobile devices. Hobbyists were confused and there was less equipment on the shelves, driving even more of them online and to other locations. Seeing profit somewhere, they started to sell subscriptions to other services, like Dish Network. 

They would kick off Amazon Locker services in 2012 but that wouldn’t last but a year. They were looking for relevance. 

Radio Shack filed Chapter 11 in 2015 after nearly 3 years of straight losses. And big ones. That’s when they were acquired by General Wireless Inc for just over 26 million dollars. The plan was to make money by selling mobile phones and mobile phone plans at Radio Shacks. They would go into a big deal with Sprint, who would take over leases to half the stores, which would become Sprint stores, and sell mobile devices through Sprint, along with cell plans of course!

And there were law suits. From former debtors, leasers, and even people with gift cards.

Only problem is, General Wireless couldn’t capitalize on the Sprint partnership in quite the way they planned and they went bankrupt in 2017 as well!

I don’t envy Radio Shack CEO Steve Moroneso. Radio Shack was once the largest electronics chain in the world. But a variety of factors came into play. Big box retailers started to carry electronics. The Flavoradio was almost a perfect example of the rise and fall. They made it from the 70s, up until 2001 when they began their decline. It was unchanged throughout all of that growth. But after they got out of the radio business, things just… weren’t right. 

With 500 stores, he has a storied history. A 100 plus year old company, one that grew through multiple waves of technology: from ham radios to CB radios to personal computers in the 70s and 80s to cell phones. But they never really found the next thing once the cell phone market for Radio Shack started to dry up. They went from the store of the tinkerer with employees who cared, to a brand kinda’ without an identity. If that identity will succeed, they need the next wave. Unless it’s too late. 

But we owe them our gratitude for helping the world by distributing many waves of technology. Just as I owe you dear listeners, for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. 

Today we’re going to talk about a company that doesn’t get a ton of credit for bringing computing to homes across the world but should: Radio Shack.

Radio Shack was founded by Theodore and Milton Deutschmann in 1921 in downtown Boston. The brothers were all about ham radio. A radio shack was a small structure on a ship that kept the radio equipment at the time. The name was derived from that slightly more generic term, given that one group of customers were radio officers outfitting ships.  

By 1939 they would print a catalog and ship equipment over mail as well. 

They again expanded operations in 1954 and would make their own equipment and sell it as well. But after too much expansion they ran into financial troubles and had to sell the company. When Charles Tandy bought the company for $300,000 in 1962, they had nine large retail stores. 

Tandy had done well selling leather goods and knew how to appeal to hobbyists. He slashed management and cut the amount of stock from 40,000 items to 2,500. The 80/20 rule is a great way to control costs. Given the smaller amount of stock, they were able to move to smaller stores. 

They also started to buy generic equipment and sell it under the Realistic brand, and started selling various types of consumer electronics. They used the locations that people bought electronics over the mail to plan new, small store openings. They gave ownership to store managers. And it worked. The growth was meteoric for the next 16 years. They had some great growth hacks. They did free tube testing. They gave a battery away for free to everyone that came in. They hired electronics enthusiasts. And people loved them. 

They bought Allied Radio in 1970.and continued to grow their manufacturing abilities. 

Tandy would pass away in 1978, leaving behind a legacy of a healthy company, primed for even more growth. Electronics continued to be more pervasive in the lives of Americans and the company continued its rapid growth, looking for opportunities to bring crazy new electronics products into people’s homes. One was the TRS-80. Radio Shack had introduced the computer in 1977 using an operating system from Microsoft. 

It sold really well and they would sell more than 100k of them before 1980. Although after that the sales would slowly go down with competition from Apple and IBM, until they finally sold the business off in the early 90s. But they stayed in computing. They bought Grid Systems Corporation to bring laptops to the masses in 1988. They would buy Computer City in 1991 and the 200 locations would become the Radio Shack Computer Centers. 

They would then focus on IBM compatible computers under the Tandy brand name rather than the TRS line. Computers were on the rise and clearly part of the Radio Shack strategy. I know I’ll never forget the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids that I’d come across throughout my adolescence. 

In the early 90s, Radio Shack was actually the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, building computers for a variety of vendors, including Digital Equipment Corporation and of course, themselves . Their expertise in acting as an OEM electronics factory turned out to be profitable in a number of ways. They also made cables, video tapes, even antennas. Primarily under the Tandy brand. This is also when they started selling IBM computers in Radio Shack stores. They also tried to launch their own big box retail stores. 

They sold the Radio Shack Computer Centers to a number of vendors, including CompUSA and Fry’s, during their explosive growth, in 1998. They would move from selling IBM to selling Compaq in Radio Shacks at that point. 

Radio Shack hit its peak in 1999. It was operating in a number of countries and had basically licensed the name globally. This was a big year of change, though. This was around the time they sold the Tandy leather side of the business to The Leather Factory, which continues on. They also got rid of the Realistic brand and inked a deal to sell RCA equipment instead. They were restructuring. And it would continue on for a long time and rarely for the better. 

Radio Shack began a slow decline in the upcoming millenia. The move into adjacencies alienated the hobbyists, who had always been the core Radio Shack shopper. And Radio Shack tried to move into other markets, cluing other companies into what their market was worth. 

They had forgotten the lessons learned when Tandy took over the company and had more and more parts in the warehouses. More and more complex sales. More and more bigger stores. Again, the hobbyists were abandoning Radio Shack. By 2004 sales were down. The company started a high pressure plan and started hammering on the managers at the stores, constantly pushing them and by 2004 they rebelled with thousands of managers filing a class action suit. 

And it wasn’t just internal employees. They were voted the worst overall customer experience amongst any retailer for 6 years in a row. Happy Cows make happy milk. And it wasn’t just about store managers. They went through six CEOs from 2006 to 2016.And 2006 was a tough year to kick such things off. They had to close 500 stores that year. 

And the computer business was drying up. Dell, Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, and others were eating their lunch. 

By 2009, they would rebrand as just The Shack and started to focus on mobile devices. Hobbyists were confused and there was less equipment on the shelves, driving even more of them online and to other locations. Seeing profit somewhere, they started to sell subscriptions to other services, like Dish Network. 

They would kick off Amazon Locker services in 2012 but that wouldn’t last but a year. They were looking for relevance. 

Radio Shack filed Chapter 11 in 2015 after nearly 3 years of straight losses. And big ones. That’s when they were acquired by General Wireless Inc for just over 26 million dollars. The plan was to make money by selling mobile phones and mobile phone plans at Radio Shacks. They would go into a big deal with Sprint, who would take over leases to half the stores, which would become Sprint stores, and sell mobile devices through Sprint, along with cell plans of course!

And there were law suits. From former debtors, leasers, and even people with gift cards.

Only problem is, General Wireless couldn’t capitalize on the Sprint partnership in quite the way they planned and they went bankrupt in 2017 as well!

I don’t envy Radio Shack CEO Steve Moroneso. Radio Shack was once the largest electronics chain in the world. But a variety of factors came into play. Big box retailers started to carry electronics. The Flavoradio was almost a perfect example of the rise and fall. They made it from the 70s, up until 2001 when they began their decline. It was unchanged throughout all of that growth. But after they got out of the radio business, things just… weren’t right. 

With 500 stores, he has a storied history. A 100 plus year old company, one that grew through multiple waves of technology: from ham radios to CB radios to personal computers in the 70s and 80s to cell phones. But they never really found the next thing once the cell phone market for Radio Shack started to dry up. They went from the store of the tinkerer with employees who cared, to a brand kinda’ without an identity. If that identity will succeed, they need the next wave. Unless it’s too late. 

But we owe them our gratitude for helping the world by distributing many waves of technology. Just as I owe you dear listeners, for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. 

Today we’re going to celebrate an article called As We May Think and it’s author, Vannevar Bush.

Imagine it’s 1945. You see the future and prognosticate instant access to all of the information in the world from a device that sits on every person’s desk at their office. Microfiche wouldn’t come along for another 14 years. But you see the future. And the modern interpretations of this future would be the Internet and personal computing. But it’s 1945. There is no transistor and no miniaturization that led to microchips. But you’ve seen ENIAC and you see a path ahead and know where the world is going. And you share it. 

That is exactly what happened in “As We May Think” an article published by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic. 

Vannevar Bush was one of the great minds in early computing. He got his doctorate from MIT and Harvard in 1916 and went into the private sector. During World War I he built a submarine detector and went back to MIT splitting his time between academic pursuits, inventing, and taking inventions to market. He worked with American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD), made millions off an early thermostat company, and founded the American Appliance Company, now known as the defense contracting powerhouse Raytheon. 

By 1927 computing began to tickle his fancy and he built a differential analyzer, or a mechanical computer to do all the maths! He would teach at MIT penning texts on circuit design and his work would influence the great Claude Shannon and his designs would be used in early codebreaking computers. He would become a Vice President of MIT as well as the Dean of the MIT School of Engineering. 

Then came World War II. He went to work at the Carnegie Institute of Science, where he was exposed to even more basic research than during his time with MIT. Then he sat on and chaired the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA - helping you get the Ames Research Crnter and Glenn Research Center started. 

Seems like a full career? Nah, just getting started! 

 he went to President Roosevelt and got the National Defense Research Committee approved. There, they developed antiaircraft guns, radar, and funded the development of ENIAC. Roosevelt then made him head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development who worked on developing the proximity fuse. There he also recruited Robert Oppenheimer to run the Manhattan Project and was there in 1945 for the Trinity Test, to see the first nuclear bomb detonated. 

And that is when he lost a major argument. Rather than treat nuclear weapons like the international community had treated biological weapons, the world would enter into a nuclear arms race. We still struggle with that fallout today. 

He would publish As We May Think in the Atlantic that year and inspire the post World War II era of computing in a few ways. The first is funding. He was the one behind the National Science Foundation. And he advised a lot of companies and US government agencies on R&D through his remaining years sitting on boards, acting as a trustee, and even a regent of the Smithsonian. 

Another was inspiration. As We May Think laid out a vision. Based on all of the basic and applied research he had been exposed to, he was able to see the convergence that would come decades later. ENIAC would usher in the era of mainframes. But things would get smaller. Cameras and microfilm and the parsing of data would put more information at our fingertips than ever. An explosion of new information out of all of this research would follow and we would need to parse it using those computers, which he called a memex. The collective memory of the world.

But he warned of an arms race leading to us destroying the world first.

Ironically it was the arms race that in many ways caused Bush’s predictions to come true. The advances made in computing during the Cold War were substantial. The arms race wasn’t just about building bigger and more deadly nuclear weapons but brought us into the era of transistorized computing and then minicomputers and of course ARPANET. 

And then around the time that basic research was getting defunded by the government due to Vietnam the costs had come down enough to allow Commodore, Apple, and Radioshack to flood the market with inexpensive computers and for the nets to be merged into the Internet. And the course we are on today was set. 

I can almost imagine Bush sitting in a leather chair in 1945 trying to figure out if the powers of creation or the powers of destruction would win the race to better technology. And I’m still a little curious to see how it all turns out. 

The part of his story that is so compelling is information. He predicted that machines would help unlock even faster research, let us make better decisions, and ultimately elevate the human consciousness. Doug Englebart saw it. The engineers at Xerox saw it. Steve Jobs made it accessible to all of us. And we should all look to further that cause.

Thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so very lucky to have you.

Today we’re going to celebrate an article called As We May Think and it’s author, Vannevar Bush.

Imagine it’s 1945. You see the future and prognosticate instant access to all of the information in the world from a device that sits on every person’s desk at their office. Microfiche wouldn’t come along for another 14 years. But you see the future. And the modern interpretations of this future would be the Internet and personal computing. But it’s 1945. There is no transistor and no miniaturization that led to microchips. But you’ve seen ENIAC and you see a path ahead and know where the world is going. And you share it. 

That is exactly what happened in “As We May Think” an article published by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic. 

Vannevar Bush was one of the great minds in early computing. He got his doctorate from MIT and Harvard in 1916 and went into the private sector. During World War I he built a submarine detector and went back to MIT splitting his time between academic pursuits, inventing, and taking inventions to market. He worked with American Radio and Research Corporation (AMRAD), made millions off an early thermostat company, and founded the American Appliance Company, now known as the defense contracting powerhouse Raytheon. 

By 1927 computing began to tickle his fancy and he built a differential analyzer, or a mechanical computer to do all the maths! He would teach at MIT penning texts on circuit design and his work would influence the great Claude Shannon and his designs would be used in early codebreaking computers. He would become a Vice President of MIT as well as the Dean of the MIT School of Engineering. 

Then came World War II. He went to work at the Carnegie Institute of Science, where he was exposed to even more basic research than during his time with MIT. Then he sat on and chaired the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA - helping you get the Ames Research Crnter and Glenn Research Center started. 

Seems like a full career? Nah, just getting started! 

 he went to President Roosevelt and got the National Defense Research Committee approved. There, they developed antiaircraft guns, radar, and funded the development of ENIAC. Roosevelt then made him head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development who worked on developing the proximity fuse. There he also recruited Robert Oppenheimer to run the Manhattan Project and was there in 1945 for the Trinity Test, to see the first nuclear bomb detonated. 

And that is when he lost a major argument. Rather than treat nuclear weapons like the international community had treated biological weapons, the world would enter into a nuclear arms race. We still struggle with that fallout today. 

He would publish As We May Think in the Atlantic that year and inspire the post World War II era of computing in a few ways. The first is funding. He was the one behind the National Science Foundation. And he advised a lot of companies and US government agencies on R&D through his remaining years sitting on boards, acting as a trustee, and even a regent of the Smithsonian. 

Another was inspiration. As We May Think laid out a vision. Based on all of the basic and applied research he had been exposed to, he was able to see the convergence that would come decades later. ENIAC would usher in the era of mainframes. But things would get smaller. Cameras and microfilm and the parsing of data would put more information at our fingertips than ever. An explosion of new information out of all of this research would follow and we would need to parse it using those computers, which he called a memex. The collective memory of the world.

But he warned of an arms race leading to us destroying the world first.

Ironically it was the arms race that in many ways caused Bush’s predictions to come true. The advances made in computing during the Cold War were substantial. The arms race wasn’t just about building bigger and more deadly nuclear weapons but brought us into the era of transistorized computing and then minicomputers and of course ARPANET. 

And then around the time that basic research was getting defunded by the government due to Vietnam the costs had come down enough to allow Commodore, Apple, and Radioshack to flood the market with inexpensive computers and for the nets to be merged into the Internet. And the course we are on today was set. 

I can almost imagine Bush sitting in a leather chair in 1945 trying to figure out if the powers of creation or the powers of destruction would win the race to better technology. And I’m still a little curious to see how it all turns out. 

The part of his story that is so compelling is information. He predicted that machines would help unlock even faster research, let us make better decisions, and ultimately elevate the human consciousness. Doug Englebart saw it. The engineers at Xerox saw it. Steve Jobs made it accessible to all of us. And we should all look to further that cause.

Thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so very lucky to have you.