Computers and the internet have fundamentally transformed society over the past several decades. The path to the powerful multimedia desktops, smartphones and cloud computing of today was paved by centuries of innovations by pioneering inventors, scientists and engineers. This article traces the fascinating history and evolution of computers, computing and the internet.
1. Early Precursors to Computing Devices (1600s-1800s)
Concepts now fundamental to computing arose much before electronic computers emerged in the 20th century.
In the 1600s, scientist Blaise Pascal built a mechanical calculator using gears to help his father who was a tax collector. Gottfried Leibniz greatly improved on Pascal‘s design and conceived the binary system for representing data.
In the early 1800s, Charles Babbage originated the concept of a programmable computer. His proposed Difference Engine was meant to produce mathematical tables automatically using mechanical calculation. Babbage designed functional computing hardware and processing fundamentals like loops, branching and sequential control that form the underpinnings of modern software.
Ada Lovelace wrote what is considered to be the first computer program while assisting Babbage. She visualized computers being used for purposes beyond just calculations like producing music.
2. The Advent of Electronic Computing (1930s-1945)
The first electronic general purpose computer called the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in 1937 using vacuum tubes for digital logic circuits.
In 1939, John V. Atanasoff also invented the Capacitance Matrix device, the first binary computer, which used capacitors fixed in a grid for data storage and calculation.
Alan Turing proposed an influential formalization of the concepts of algorithms and computation in 1936 with the Turing machine – an abstract model of computer hardware and software.
During WW2 in 1943-45, the first fully-electronic general purpose digital computer called Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was built for the US Army with vacuum tube circuitry and decimal representation of numbers. While ENIAC required manual rewiring to reprogram, it demonstrated the tremendous speed advantage of electronics.
3. The Rise of Personal Desktop Computers (1970s-1980s)
Advancements in microprocessor, memory and data storage technology enabled the introduction of affordable personal home computers in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Kenbak-1 unveiled in 1971 became the world‘s first personal computer with a central processing unit on a single chip. The Altair 8800 released in 1975 sparked widespread interest due to being purchasable by hobbyists for under $400 and influenced Bill Gates and Paul Allen to start Microsoft.
In 1977, the Apple II became one of the first mass-produced personal home computers. It could plug into an ordinary TV and came with a keyboard for typing and BASIC programming language built-in. Other popular PCs like Commodore PET followed a similar form factor using 8-bit microprocessors like the 6502 for the CPU and dedicated sound/video chips.
Intel‘s 16-bit processor enabled a new generation of advanced personal computers like the original IBM PC released in 1981. It established many standards like the x86 CPU architecture and DOS/Windows operating systems that still dominate the PC market several decades later. Apple further made PCs accessible with its pioneering Macintosh line of computers featuring an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse input device.
By the late 1980s, PCs with more powerful Intel 286 and 386 processors became commonplace. They were affordable enough for everyday office and home use with lots of software applications available for word processing, accounting, databases, games etc. Networking PCs also grew easier with the popularity of protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP.
4. Operating System and Software Evolution
Early computers relied on basic software coded via toggles and switches to make them operational. Programming languages were soon invented to make software authoring easier. Fortran (1957) became popular for scientific computing applications coded in an English-like language syntax. COBOL (1959) helped businesses implement data processing on computers for tasks like accounting, inventory and payroll.
Early computer operating systems were purely text-based like MS-DOS. The user typed commands to execute programs and file operations. Towards the mid-1980s, Apple introduced Mac OS employing a graphical user interface (GUI) with icons representing files and folders as well as utilities to manage them using a mouse pointer device. Over the next decade Microsoft Windows and Unix-based OS like Linux also adopted GUIs popularizing their widespread use. Features like overlapping app windows, desktop icons and graphical controls became standard across desktop computing.
Software applications soon covered every imaginable domain like documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, programming tools, multimedia editing suites etc. The growing internet further spurred development of apps focused on web browsing, email and networking. By late 1990s, software shifted towards being more user-friendly for average consumers desiring computers at home for education, office work and entertainment.
5. Evolution of Computer Networking and the Internet
Early research into computer networking began in the 1960s with the US Department of Defense funded ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) project to enable networking between computers at academic and defense research institutions via wide area links like telephone lines and satellite connections. It expanded to several nodes across the US by 1970 via packet switched network topology allowing reliable data connections using fast hardware interfaces and common protocols to pass digital data through intermediary links.
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn formulated the TCP/IP computer networking model in 1973 featuring standardized protocol stack to enable reliable end-to-end data transfer independent of the underyling network hardware technology. This paved the way towards large scale computer networks not limited to a single vendor or hardware platform. By 1983 with the adoption of TCP/IP as its foundation, ARPANET evolved into the what we now call the global Internet.
The development of the World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 was the next breakthrough that made the Internet truly accessible to the world. HTTP web page links combined with HTML markup integrated text, images and hyperlinks that could be accessed via browser software through easy to remember website addresses. This propelled the internet becoming central to modern communications and commerce.
As internet speeds increased through technologies like fibre optics and wireless broadband, networked applications grew in popularity with email and blogs now ubiquitous. Web 2.0 apps like social media, ecommerce marketplaces, streaming entertainment and more being native to the internet experience rather than as separate software. The push towards cloud computing since the early 2000s has seen much processing shift again to large data centers providing web/networked services, storage and computing power on-demand.
6. Hardware Advances Expand Capabilities and Accessibility
Early personal computers were quite limited in capabilities owing to microprocessors with clock speeds of only a few megahertz, tiny amounts of RAM, little onboard storage, small text-only displays and basic sound hardware. But performance doubled almost every couple of years in adherence to Moore‘s law – the empirical observation about the exponential rise in computing power through relentless miniaturization of hardware components.
This led to PCs by the early 2000s sporting processors with speeds over 1 GHz (1000 MHz), gigabytes of RAM, hard drives up to 100s of GB, accelerated 3D graphics support, widespread DVD drives and most peripherals integrated onto the motherboard itself. Display got crisper – evolving from lower resolution CGA/EGA to VGA and SVGA supporting 1280×1024 and even higher pixel counts. Sound hardware progressed towards CD quality built-in audio with multiple channel output. All this propelled multimedia, gaming and other demanding computing applications firmly into the mainstream.
Equally crucial was innovative industrial design making computers far more portable. Clamshell laptops with integrated keyboard and screen enabled mobile computing. Apple again spearheaded accessible design through 1998‘s iconic iMac with translucent bondi blue styling and focus on simplicity that appealed to wider demographics beyond technical users. This spirit continued with the company‘s subsequent disruptively successful products like the iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet that firmly established post-PC touchscreen computing.
7. Computers Become Ubiquitous Appliances through Entertainment and Media Capabilities
While business and scientific computing were the primary domains for early mainframes and PCs, a strong factor propelling computers towards indispensability in everyday modern life was entertainment capabilities. This significantly overlapped with advances in graphics, sound, multimedia and communications discussed earlier.
The 1980s saw gaming as one of the biggest applications on personal computers – first through text adventures and soon via graphics-rich experiences with early First Person Shooters like Doom leading the way. Microsoft Windows leveraged its multimedia capabilities for edutainment apps that got both children and adults acquainted to using PCs. CD-ROM encyclopedias like Encarta and Grolier multimedia encyclopedia made learning engaging through integration of text, sound and visuals. DVD video playback in late 1990s PCs further enhanced its home theatre capabilities.
The exponential rise of computer-based entertainment continues to date with photo/video editing apps, streaming music/video services, social networking platforms, digital distribution gaming storefronts, handheld consoles and online worlds like Second Life and Metaverse where real-world personas, commerce and creativity intersect. Powerful home computers also catalyzed content creation – making video production, art and 3D animation accessible to consumers.
8. Cloud and Parallel Computing Define the Bleeding Edge
Since the 2000s, Internet data centers powering leading web services transitioned from housing rack upon rack of traditional servers to leveraging custom hardware tuned for optimum performance per watt of energy consumed. This was crucial given their enormous scale – each data center housing over 50,000 servers that in aggregate amount to millions of computers when accounting for multiple locations distributed globally nearer to densely populated regions/cities.
The economics of power and cooling at this vast level necessitated efficiency only possible by designing application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) customized for the task represented by each massive service – search, social media, ecommerce etc rather than adopting one-size-fits all server hardware. This specially tuned hardware also lowers latency for the most frequent operations bringing speed improvements. On the software side, harnessing the aggregate power of so many commodity computers in parallel represented groundbreaking scalability. Challenges of distributed synchronization and fault-tolerance at never-seen-before levels required fundamental computer science innovations towards more resilient and performant large scale system architectures powering everything from search rankings to Facebook‘s networked intelligence recognizing faces and friends.
Modern demonstrations point to DNA based computing and quantum computing promising even greater exponential leaps in information processing capability compared to doubling transistor counts in microprocessors every couple years per Moore‘s law. These stand to be the most transformative platforms for the future.
Conclusion
The information age has transformed society in profound ways thanks to seminal contributions by computer science visionaries who conceived revolutionary ideas paired with technological stewardship by scientists and engineers towards realizing implementations matching those visions. Early foundations like algorithms, programming techniques and computational models were slowly but surely transformed into reality via electromechanical and later electronic hardware architected with sufficient capabilities and accessibility to find widespread adoption at monumental internet-wide scales as well as personal desktops and handheld devices.
With computing now indispensable for work and home applications as well as deeply ingrained in entertainment, social connectivity and commerce, the future points to even more immersive human-computer experiences. More personalized, predictive and increasingly fueled by artificial and quantum intelligence towards improving lives and solving grand challenges.
