The History of Computing

Today we’re going to celebrate the birthday of the first real multi-purpose computer: the gargantuan ENIAC which would have turned 74 years old today, on February 15th. Many generations ago in computing. The year is 1946. World War II raged from 1939 to 1945. We’d cracked Enigma with computers and scientists were thinking of more and more ways to use them. The press is now running articles about a “giant brain” built in Philadelphia. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was a mouthful, so they called it ENIAC. It was the first true electronic computer. Before that there were electromechanical monstrosities. Those had to physically move a part in order to process a mathematical formula. That took time. ENIAC used vacuum tubes instead. A lot of them. To put things in perspective: very hour of processing by the ENiAC was worth 2,400 hours of work calculating formulas by hand. And it’s not like you can do 2,400 hours in parallel between people or in a row of course. So it made the previous almost impossible, possible. Sure, you could figure out the settings to fire a bomb where you wanted two bombs to go in a minute rather than about a full day of running calculations. But math itself, for the purposes of math, was about to get really, really cool. The Bush Differential Analyzer, a later mechanical computer, had been built in the basement of the building that is now the ENIAC museum. The University of Pennsylvania ran a class on wartime electronics, based on their experience with the Differential Analyzer. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert met in 1941 while taking that class, a topic that had included lots of shiny new or newish things like radar and cryptanalysis. That class was mostly on ballistics, a core focus at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. More accurate ballistics would be a huge contribution to the war effort. But Echert and Mauchly wanted to go further, building a multi-purpose computer that could analyze weather and calculate ballistics. Mauchly got all fired up and wrote a memo about building a general purpose computer. But the University shot it down. And so ENIAC began life as Project PX when Herman Goldstine acted as the main sponsor after seeing their proposal and digging it back up. Mauchly would team up with Eckert to design the computer and the effort was overseen and orchestrated by Major General Gladeon Barnes of the US Army Ordnance Corps. Thomas Sharpless was the master programmer. Arthur Burkes built the multiplier. Robert Shaw designed the function tables. Harry Huskey designed the reader and the printer. Jeffrey Chu built the dividers. And Jack Davis built the accumulators. Ultimately it was just a really big calculator and not a computer that ran stored programs in the same way we do today. Although ENIAC did get an early version of stored programming that used a function table for read only memory. The project was supposed to cost $61,700. The University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science in Philadelphia actually spent half a million dollars worth of metal, tubes and wires. And of course the scientists weren’t free. That’s around $6 and a half million worth of cash today. And of course it was paid for by the US Army. Specifically the Ballistic Research Laboratory. It was designed to calculate firing tables to make blowing things up a little more accurate. Herman Goldstine chose a team of programmers that included Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Kay McNulty, Fran Bilas, Marlyn Meltzer, and Ruth Lichterman. They were chosen from a pool of 200 and set about writing the necessary formulas for the machine to process the requirements provided from people using time on the machine. In fact, Kay McNulty invented the concept of subroutines while working on the project. They would flip switches and plug in cables as a means of programming the computer. And programming took weeks of figuring up complex calculations on paper. . Then it took days of fiddling with cables, switches, tubes, and panels to input the program. Debugging was done step by step, similar to how we use break points today. They would feed ENIAC input using IBM punch cards and readers. The output was punch cards as well and these punch cards acted as persistent storage. The machine then used standard octal radio tubes. 18000 tubes and they ran at a lower voltage than they could in order to minimize them blowing out and creating heat. Each digit used in calculations took 36 of those vacuum tubes and 20 accumulators that could run 5,000 operations per second. The accumulators used two of those tubes to form a flip-flop and they got them from the Kentucky Electrical Lamp Company. Given the number that blew every day they must have loved life until engineers got it to only blowing a tube every couple of days. ENIAC was modular computer and used different panels to perform different tasks, or functions. It used ring counters with 10 positions for a lot of operations making it a digital computer as opposed to the modern binary computational devices we have today. The pulses between the rings were used to count. Suddenly computers were big money. A lot of research had happened in a short amount of time. Some had been government funded and some had been part of corporations and it became impossible to untangle the two. This was pretty common with technical advances during World War II and the early Cold War years. John Atanasoff and Cliff Berry had ushered in the era of the digital computer in 1939 but hadn’t finished. Maunchly had seen that in 1941. It was used to run a number of calculations for the Manhattan Project, allowing us to blow more things up than ever. That project took over a million punch cards and took precedent over artillery tables. Jon Von Neumann worked with a number of mathematicians and physicists including Stanislaw Ulam who developed the Monte Method. That led to a massive reduction in programming time. Suddenly programming became more about I/O than anything else. To promote the emerging computing industry, the Pentagon had the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at The University of Pennsylvania launch a series of lectures to further computing at large. These were called the Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic Digital Computers, or just the Moore School Lectures for short. The lectures focused on the various types of circuits and the findings from Eckert and Mauchly on building and architecting computers. Goldstein would talk at length about math and other developers would give talks, looking forward to the development of the EDVAC and back at how they got where they were with ENIAC. As the University began to realize the potential business impact and monetization, they decided to bring a focus to University owned patents. That drove the original designers out of the University of Pennsylvania and they started the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1946. Eckert-Mauchley would the build EDVAC, taking use of progress the industry had made since the ENIAC construction had begun. EDVAC would effectively represent the wholesale move away from digital and into binary computing and while it weighed tons - it would become the precursor to the microchip. After the ENIAC was finished Mauchly filed for a patent in 1947. While a patent was granted, you could still count on your fingers the number of machines that were built at about the same time, including the Atanasoff Berry Computer, Colossus, the Harvard Mark I and the Z3. So luckily the patent was avoided and digital computers are a part of the public domain. That patent was voided in 1973. By then, the Eckert-Mauchly computer corporation had been acquired by Remington Rand, which merged with Sperry and is now called Unisys. The next wave of computers would be mainframes built by GE, Honeywell, IBM, and another of other vendors and so the era of batch processing mainframes began. The EDVAC begat the UNIVAC and Grace Hopper being brought in to write an assembler for that. Computers would become the big mathematical number crunchers and slowly spread into being data processors from there. Following decades of batch processing mainframes we would get minicomputers and interactivity, then time sharing, and then the PC revolution. Distinct eras in computing. Today, computers do far more than just the types of math the ENIAC did. In fact, the functionality of ENIAC was duplicated onto a 20 megahertz microchip in 1996. You know, ‘cause the University of Pennsylvania wanted to do something to celebrate the 50th birthday. And a birthday party seemed underwhelming at the time. And so the date of release for this episode is February 15th, now ENIAC Day in Philadelphia, dedicated as a way to thank the university, creators, and programmers. And we should all reiterate their thanks. They helped put computers front and center into the thoughts of the next generation of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers, who built the mainframe era. And I should thank you - for listening to this episode. I’m pretty lucky to have ya’. Have a great day! .

VMS and OpenVMS Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to talk through the history of VMS.

Digital Equipment Corporation gave us many things. Once upon a time, I used a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS. The PDP-11 had changed the world, introducing us to a number of modern concepts in computers such as time sharing. The PDP was a minicomputer, smaller and more modern than mainframes. But by 1977 it was time for the next generation and the VAX ushered in the 32-bit era of computers and through the evolutions evolve into the VaXServer, helping to usher in the modern era of client-server architectures. It supported Branch delay slots and suppressed instructions. The VAX adopted virtual memory, privilege modes, and needed an operating system capable of harnessing all the new innovations packed into the VAX-11 and on. That OS would be Virtual Memory System, or VMS. The PDP had an operating system called RSX-11, which had been released in 1972. The architect was Dan Brevik, who had originally called it DEX as a homonym with DEC. But that was trademarked so he and Bob Decker over in marketing wrote down a bunch of acronyms and then found one that wasn’t trademarked. Then they had to reverse engineer a meaning out of the acronym to be Real-Time System Executive, or RSX. But for the VAX they needed more and so Dave Cutler from the RSX team, then in his early 30s, did much of the design work. Dick Hustvedt and Peter Lipman would join him and they would roll up to Roger Gourd, who worked with DECs VP of engineering Gordon Bell to build the environment. The project began as Starlet, named because it was meant to support the Startlet family of processors. A name that still lives on in various files in the operating system. The VMS Operating System would support RISC instructions, support 32-bit virtual address extension, would work with DECnet, would have virtual memory of course, as the name implies. VMS would bring a number of innovations in the world of clustering. VMS would use a modified Julian Day system to keep track of system time, which subtracts the Julian Date from 2,400,000.5. Why? Because it begins on November 17th, 1858. THat’s not why, that the day it starts. Why? Because it’s not Y10,000 compliant only having 4 slots for dates. Wait, that’s not a thing. Anyway, how did VMS come to be? One of the killer apps for the system though, was that DECnet was built on DIGITAL Network Architecture, or DNA. It first showed up in RSX, where you could like two PDPs but you could have 32 nodes by the time VaX showed up and 255 with VMS 2. Suddenly there was a simple way to network these machines, built into the OS. Version 1 was released in 1977 in support of the VAX-11/780. Version 2 would come along in 1980 for the 750 and Version 3 would come in 1982 for the 730. The VAX 8600 would ship in 84 with version 4. And here’s where it gets interesting. The advent of what were originally called microcomputers but are now called personal computers had come in the late 70s and early 80s. By 1984, MicroVMS was released as a port for running on the MicroVAX, Digitals attempt to go down-market. Much as IBM had missed minicomputers initially, Digital had missed the advent of microcomputers though and the platform never took off. Bill Gates would adorn the cover of Time that year. Of course, by 84, Apple had AppleTalk and DOS was ready to plug in as well. Bill Joy moved BSD away from VAX in 1986, after having been with the PDP and then VAX for years, before leaving for Sun. At this point the platform was getting a bit long in the tooth. Intel and Microsoft were just starting to emerge as dominant players in computing and DEC was the number two software company in the world, with a dominant sales team and world class research scientists. They released ULTRIX the same year though, as well as the DECStation with a desktop environment called UW for ULTRIX Workstation. Ultrix was based on BSD 4 and given that most Unixes had been written on PDPs, Bill Joy knew many of the group launched by Bill Munson, Jerry Brenner, Fred Canter and Bill Shannon. Cutler from that OpenVMS team hates Unix. Rather than have a unified approach, the strategy was fragmented. You see a number of times in the history of computing where a company begins to fail not because team members are releasing things that don’t fit within the strategy but because they release things that compete directly with a core product without informing their customers why. Thus bogging down the sales process and subsequent adoption in confusion. This led to brain drain. Cutler ended up going to the Windows NT team and bringing all of his knowledge about security and his sincere midwestern charm to Microsoft, managing the initial development after relations with IBM in the OS/2 world soured. He helped make NT available for the Alpha but also helping make NT dominate the operating system from his old home. Cutler would end up working on XP, Server operating systems, Azure and getting the Xbox to run as a host for Hyper-V . He’s just that rad and his experience goes back to the mid 60s, working on IBM 7044 mainframes. Generational changes in software development, like the move to object oriented programming or micro services, can force a lot of people into new career trajectories. But he was never one of those. That’s the kind of talent you just really, really, really hate to watch leave an organization - someone that even Microsoft name drops in developer conference session to get ooohs and aaahs. And there were a lot of them leaving as DEC shifted into more of a sales and marketing company and less into a product and research company as it had founded to be back when Ken Olsen was at MIT. We saw the same thing happen in other areas of DEC - competing chips coming out of different groups. But still they continued on. And the lack of centralizing resources and innovating quickly and new technical debt being created caused the release of 5 to slip from a 2 year horizon to a 4 year horizon, shipping in 1988 with Easynet, so you could connect 2,000 computers together. Version 6 took 5 years to get out the door in 1993. In a sign of the times, 1991 saw VMS become OpenVMS and would make OpenVMS POSIX compliant. 1992 saw the release of the DEC Alpha and OpenVMS would quickly get support for the RISC processor which OpenVMS would support through the transition of Alpha to Itanium when Intel bought the rights for the Alpha architecture. Version 7 of OpenVMS shipped in 1996 but by then the company was in a serious period of decline and corporate infighting and politics killed them. 1998 came along and they practically bankrupted Compaq by being acquired and then HP swooped in and got both for a steal. Enterprise computing has never been the same. HP made some smart decisions though. They inked a deal with Intel and Alpha would become the HP Itanium and made by Intel. Intel then had a RISC processor and all the IP that goes along with that. Version 8 would not be released until 2003. 7 years without an OS update while the companies were merged and remerged had been too long. Market share had all but disappeared. DECnet would go on to live in the Linux kernel until 2010. Use of the protocol was replaced by TCP/IP much the same way most of the other protocols got replaced. OpenVMS development has now been licensed to VSI and is now run by vmssoftware, which supports many former DEC and HP employees. There are a lot of great, innovative, unique features of OpenVMS. There’s a common language environment, that allows for calling functions easily and independently of various languages. You can basically mix Fortran, C, BASIC, and other languages. It’s kinda’ like my grandmas okra. She said I’d like it but I didn’t. VMS is built much the same way. They built it one piece at a time. To quote Johnny Cash: “The transmission was a fifty three, And the motor turned out to be a seventy three, And when we tried to put in the bolts all the holes were gone.” You can of course install PHP, Ruby, Java, and other more modern languages if you want. And the System Services, Run Time Libraries, and language support make it easy to use whatever works for a task across them pretty equally and provides a number of helpful debugging tools along the way. And beyond debugging, OpenVMS pretty much supports anything you find required by the National Computer Security Center and the DoD. And after giving the middle finger to Intel for decades… As with most operating systems, VMS is finally being ported to the x86 architecture signaling the end of one of the few holdouts to the dominance of the x86 architecture in some ways. The Itatiums have shipped less and less chips every year, so maybe we’re finally at that point. Once OpenVMS has been ported to x86 we may see the final end to the chip line as the last windows versions to support them stopped actually being supported by Microsoft about a month before this recording. The end of an era. I hope Dave Cutler looks back on his time on the VMS project fondly. Sometimes a few decades of crushing an old employer can help heal some old wounds. His contributions to computing are immense, as are those of Digital. And we owe them all a huge thanks for the techniques and lessons learned in the development of VMS in the early days, as with the early days of BSD, the Mac, Windows 1, and others. It all helped build a massive body of knowledge that we continue to iterate off of to this day. I also owe them a thank you for the time I got to spend on my first DEC Alpha. I didn’t get to touch another 64 bit machine for over a decade. And I owe them a thanks for everything I learned using OpenVMS on that machine! And to you, wonderful listers. Thank you for listening. And especially Derek, for reaching out to tell me I should move OpenVMS up in the queue. I guess it goes without saying… I did! Hope you all have a great day!

Boolean algebra Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to talk a little about math. Or logic. Computers are just a bunch of zeroes and ones, right? Binary. They make shirts about it. You know, there are 10 types of people in the world. But where did that come from? After centuries of trying to build computing devices that could help with math using gears that had lots of slots in them, armed with tubes and then transistors, we had to come up with a simpler form of logic. And why write your own complicated math when you can borrow it and have instant converts to your cause? Technical innovations are often comprised of a lot of building blocks from different fields of scientific or scholastic studies. The 0s and 1s, which make up the flip-flop circuits computers are so famous for, are made possible by the concept that all logic can be broken down into either true or false. And so the mathematical logic that we have built trillions of dollars in industry off of began in 1847 in a book called The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, by George Boole. He would follow that up in a book called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. He was he father of what we would later call Boolean Algebra once the science of an entire mathematical language built on true and false matured enough for Charles Sanders Peirce wrote a book called The Simplest Mathematics and had a title called Boolian Algebra with One Constant. By 1913, there were many more works with the name and it became Boolean algebra. This was right around the time that the electronic research community had first started experimenting with using vacuum tubes as flip-flop switches. So there’s elementary algebra where you can have any old number with any old logical operation. Those operators can be addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. But in boolean algebra the only variables available are a 0 or a 1. Later we would get abstract algebra as well, but for computing it was way simpler to just stick with those 0s and 1s and in fact, ditching the gears from the old electromechanical computing paved the way for tubes to act as flip-flop switches, and transistors to replace those. And the evolutions came. Both to the efficiency of flip-flop switches and to the increasingly complex uses for mechanical computing devices. But they hadn’t all been mashed up together. So set theory and statistics were evolving. And Huntington, Jevons, Schröder, basically perfected Boolean logic, paving the way for MH Stone to provide that Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a field of sets by 1936. And so it should come as no surprise that Boolean algebra would be key to the development of basic mathematical functions used on the Berry-Attansoff computer. Remember that back then, all computing was basically used for math. Claude Shannon would help apply Boolean algebra to switching circuits. This involved binary decision diagrams for synthesizing and verifying the design of logic circuits. And so we could analyze and design circuits using algebra to define logic gates. Those gates would get smaller and faster and combined using combinational logic until we got LSI circuits and later with the automation of the design of chips, VLSI. So to put it super-simple, let’s say you are trying to do some maths. First up, you convert values to bits, which are binary digits. Those binary digits would be represented as a 0 or a 1, expressed in binary algebra as . There’s a substantial amount of information you can pack into those bits, with all major characters easily allowed for in a byte, which is 8 of those bits. So let’s say you also map your algebraic operators using those 0s and 1s, another byte. Now you can add the number in the first byte. To do so though, you would need to basically translate the notations from classical propositional calculus to their expression in Boolean algebra, typically done in an assembler. Much, much more logic is required to apply quantifiers. And simple true values are 0 and 1 but have a one step truth table to define AND (also known as a conjunction), OR (also known as a disjunction), and NOT XOR (also known as an exclusive-or). This allows for an exponential increase in the amount of logic you can apply to a problem. The act of deceasing if the problem satisfies the ability to translate into boolean capabilities is known as the Boolean satisfiability problem or SAT. At this point though, all problems really seem solvable using some model of computation given the amount of complex circuitry we now have. So the computer interprets information the functions and sets the state of a switch based on the input. The computer then combines all those trues and false into the necessary logic and outputs an answer. Because the 0s and 1s took too much the input got moved to punch cards, and modern programming was born. These days we can also add Boolean logic into higher functions, such as running AND for google searches. So ultimately the point of this episode is to explore what exactly all those 0s and 1s are. They’re complex thoughts and formulas expressed as true and false using complicated Boolean algebra to construct them. Now, there’s a chance that some day we’ll find something beyond a transistor. And then we can bring a much more complicated expression of thought broken down into different forms of algebra. But there’s also the chance that Boolean algebra sitting on transistors or other things that are the next evolution of boolean gates or transistors is really, well, kinda’ it. So from the Barry-Attansoff computer comes Colossus and then ENIAC in 1945. It wasn’t obvious yet but nearly 100 years after the development of Boolean algebra, it had been combined with several other technologies to usher in the computing revolution, setting up the evolution to microprocessors and the modern computer. These days, few programmers are constrained by programming in Boolean logic. Instead, we have many more options. Although I happen to believe that understanding this fundamental building block was one of the most important aspects of studying computer science and provided an important foundation to computing in general. So thank you for listening to this episode. I’m sure algebra got ya’ totally interested and that you’re super-into math. But thanks for listening anyways. I’m pretty lucky to have ya’. Have a great day

History of the punch card Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to cover the history of punch cards. A punch card is a piece of paper, or card stock, or card, that holds data. They look like two index cards next to each other with a bunch of holes in them. The data they hold is in those holes. It’s boolean, with a true or false represented by a hole in a predefined location, or the absence of a hole - simple as that. The logic is then interpreted by a language, often one that was specific to the machines that each ran. My grandma used to configure punch cards and I remember seeing some of these when I was a kid and being awestruck. So they’ve held a fascination for me since what seems like the beginning of time. But those punched cards didn’t start out used for processing data. Or did they? The weaver Basile Bouchon then built a loom that could be controlled by holes punched into a paper tape in 1725. He was storing the positions for colors and patters on the loom with cards. And so saving time for humans by using the positions of those holes. You can call this computational memory. The holes controlled how rods could move and the positions were stored in the cards. And so the first memory came in the form of cards of paper that stored data. Much as there was already data stored on paper, in books. And before that tablets and papyrus. The design was improved by his assistant Jean-Baptiste Falcon and by Jacques Vaucanson. And ultimately isn’t programming just putting data into storage. So let’s say the first programmers hacked language by putting data into temporary storage called our brains. And then written languages. But now we were putting data into storage using a machine. Not just moving gears to calculate. The merger of calculation and memory would some day prove to be a pretty fantastic combination. But we weren’t there yet. Although these improvements controlled the patterns woven, they still required a human to operate the loom. In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard took that next step from stored memory to adding a mechanism capable of automating the loom operation. And so the Jacquard Loom was born. A bunch of 9 inches by 1.25 inches by 1/16 inches of punched cards in stacks. They were linked into a chain and read to build patterns. Each card held the instructions for shedding, which is moving the warp up and down) and setting the shuttle for each pass. You recorded a set of instructions onto a card and the loom performed them. Then comes the computer. The originals had gears we set to run calculations but as they became capable of more and more complex tasks, we needed a better mechanism for bringing data into and getting data out of a computer. We could write programs and these cards became the way we input the data into the computers. We loaded a set of commands and the device printed the output. And then Semyon Korsakov comes along and brings punched cards to machines in 1832. Charles Babbage expanded on the ideas of Pascal and Leibniz and added to mechanical computing, making the difference engine, the inspiration of many a steampunk. Babbage had multiple engineers building components for the engine and after he scrapped his first, he moved on to the analytical engine, adding conditional branching, loops, and memory - and further complicating the machine. The engine borrowed the punchcard tech from the Jacquard loom and applied that same logic to math, possibly with a little inspiration from Korsakov. He called them “Number Cards.” Carl Engel adds to the concept around 1860. Come 1881, Jules Carpentier brought us the harmonium using punch cards, converting those little grooves to sound. And then. Well, then comes Herman Hollerith and the 1890 US census project. He’d tried out a number of ways to bring in all the data from the census to a tabulating machine and I think he knew that he was on to something. He then went on to work with the New York Central, Hudson, and the Pennsylvania Railroads to help automate their data processing needs using these punched cards. At this point, those cards were 12 rows by 36 punch positions and 7 3/8 inches wide by 3 1/4 inches high by .007 inches thick. He chose the size based on the standard size of banknotes in the US, so that he could store his cards in boxes that had been made for the Treasury Department Based on these early successes, he was able to successfully read the data on those cards into his tabulating machine and so he founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. The most important aspect of Hollerith’s contributions was actually bringing us machinery that could process the data stored on those cards. That company merged with a few other similar companies to join forces bringing in Thomas Watson to run the company, and in 1924 they became International Business Machine Company, or IBM. And so the era of unit recording machines begun. G. W. Baehne published Practical Applications of the Punched Card Method in Colleges and Universities in 1935 showed plenty of programming techniques and went through a variety of applications for use on the cards. As with any real industry there was competition. Remington Rand also began building punch cards and readers, along with others in the industry. And by 1937 IBM was running 32 presses at their Endicott plant where they print and sorted 10 million cards a day. By World War II, English cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park they ended up with over 2 million cards used to store decrypted messages, including those tabbed out of the Enigma. We were trying to automate as much as possible. Contracts, checks, bonds, orders out of the Sears catalog, airline ticket entry. And suddenly loading computers with punch card data for further processing was becoming critical to the upcoming need to automate the world. Punch cards had become a standard by 1950. Those IBM cards had said "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate” and many a bill would come with a card and potentially be used for processing when returning the bill with a check. Now, back in the 30s, Remington Rand and IBM had gotten in trouble for anti-trust by forcing their cards in their machines and by 1955, IBM was owning the market and you know, the innovation and automation of the country couldn’t be left to just one company. So Thomas Watson Jr was forced to sign a deal that IBM would drop to not any more than half of the manufacturing capacity of punched cards in the US. But we were already to go past the punch card. And computers couldn’t be programmed using jumper cables forever, so we started using punch cards. there were a lot of file formats and other conventions that were set in that era, that still trace their origins to the 80 column of text. And the programmers of those cards began to ask for cards to be printed that could support functions, to make their jobs easier. These were used for the GE 600 and other vendors, and Univac had a format, and with languages like FORTRAN and COBOL having come along, generic punched cards became popular. And the UNITYPER came along, giving us magnetic tape in the 50s. Then in the 60s we got an easy magnetic type encoder and it wouldn’t be long until we got computer terminals, light pens, and minicomputers. By then it would take years for older tech to be unnecessary. The dimensions would be set and standardized for the RS-292 punched card but the uses would be less and less and less and less. And so punch cards had survived the transistorization of computers. But not newer and better forms of input and output. Tape ribbons would sit in drawers in places like MIT and Stanford. In fact some of the first traffic to run over the Internet precursor DARPANet would be using those tape ribbons to write output. The last bastion of the punched card was electronic voting, which had begun in the 60s. But then, the State of Iowa basically banned punched cards in 1984. Their use had been shrinking over time but at this point it was time you could say that the punched cards are obsolete. That doesn’t mean they weren’t being used, more that they just weren’t being used to build much new tech. I suppose that’s how I ended up getting to play with some that my grandma brought home. I don’t think I had a clue what they were actually for at this point. The punch card then gave way to programming with paper where you filled in bubbles with a pencil, but that was a stop-gap for dealing with an era when computers were starting to become common, but there weren’t enough for entire classes to learn programming. So the punch cards gave us what we needed to get input and output to these early computing devices in a time before truly interactive computing. And the were useful for a time. But once keyboards became common-place, they just… weren’t needed as much. And it’s good because otherwise we might never have gotten object oriented programming. And loading large programs with cards was never very fun. But they had their uses and got us to a time when we didn’t need them any more. And so we owe them our thanks. Just as I owe you a thank you, listeners, for joining me on this episode of the history of computing podcast, to chat alllllll about punch cards. I hope you Have a great day!

Y2K Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to cover the y2k bug, millennium bug, or y2k scare as they called it in retrospect. Once upon a time, computers were young and the industry didn’t consider software that might be used beyond the next few years. Things were changing so fast. Memory was precious and the amount of time it took to commit a date to a database as a transaction. Many of the original big, complex software titles were written in the 1960s and 70s as mainframes began to be used for everything from controlling subways to coordinating flights. The Millennium Bug was a result of the year being used as two digits, not worrying about the 19 in the year. As the year 2000 got closer and closer, the crazy began because some systems wouldn’t interpret the year” 00" properly and basically the world would end. All because programmers didn’t plan on dates that spanned the century. And I had a job that had me on a flight to San Francisco so I could be onsite the day after the clock struck 1/1/2000. You know, just in case. The fix was to test the rollover of the year, apply a patch if there was a problem, and then test test test. We had feverishly been applying patches for months by y2k and figured we were good but you know, just in case, I needed to be on a flight. By then the electric grid and nuclear power plans and flight control and controls for buildings and anything else you could think of were hooked up to computers. There were computers running practically every business, and a ferver had erupted that the world might end because we didn’t know what might crash that morning. I still remember the clock striking midnight. I was at a rave in Los Angeles that night and it was apparent within minutes that the lights hadn’t gone off at the electric daisy carnival. We were all alive. The reports on the news were just silly headlines to grab attention. Or was it that we had worked out butts off to execute well planned tactics to analyze, patch, or replace every single piece of software for customers? A lot of both I suspect. It was my first big project in the world of IT and I learned a lot from seasoned project managers who ran it like a well oiled machine. The first phase was capturing a list of all software run, some 500 applications at the time. The spreadsheet was detailed, including every component in computers, device drivers, and any systems that those devices needed to communicate with. By the time it was done there were 5000 rows and a hundred columns and we started researching which were y2k compliant and which weren’t. My team was focused on Microsoft Exchange prior to the big push for y2k compliance so we got pulled in to cover mail clients, office, and then network drivers since those went quickly. Next thing we knew we were getting a crash course in Cisco networking. I can still remember the big Gantt chart that ran the project. While most of my tasks are managed in Jira these days I still fall back to those in times of need. We had weekly calls tracking our progress, and over the course of a year watched a lot of boxes get checked. I got sent all over the world to “touch” computers in every little office, meeting people who did all kinds of jobs and so used all kinds of software. By the time the final analysis tasks were done we had a list of patches that each computer needed and while other projects were delayed, we got them applied or migrated people to other software. It was the first time I saw how disruptive switching productivity software was to people without training. We would cover that topic in a post Mortem after the project wrapped. And it all happened as we watched the local news in each city we visited having a field day with everything from conspiracy theories to doomsday reports. It was a great time to be young, hungry, and on the road. And we nailed that Gantt chart two months early. We got back to work on our core projects and waited. Then the big day came. The clock struck midnight as I was dancing to what we called techno at the time and I pulled an all-nighter, making it to the airport just in time for my flight. You could see the apprehension about flying on the faces of the passengers and you could feel the mood relax when we landed. I took the train into the city and was there when everyone started showing up for work. Their computers all booted up and they got to work. No interruptions. Nothing unexpected. We knew though. We’d run our simulations. We’d flashed many a bios, watched many a patch install, with status bars crawling, waiting to see what kind of mayhem awaited us after a reboot. And we learned the value of preparation, just as the media downplayed the severity saying it was all a bunch of nothing. They called it a scare. I called it a crisis averted. And an education. So thank you to the excellent project managers for teaching me to be detail oriented. For teaching me to measure twice and cut once. And for teaching me that no project is too big to land ahead of time and on budget. And thank you, listeners, for joining me on this episode of the history of computing podcast. I hope you Have a great day!