Imagine a world where computers were mysterious machines hidden away in back rooms. Where people could only access them by physically traveling to their location and inputting calculations by flipping switches and transcribing blinking light patterns. That was the state of computing in the late 1930s when George Stibitz pioneered a radical breakthrough – accessing a computer remotely using only a teletype machine and telephone wires.
The Promise of Electronic Computers
In the early 20th century, scientists tackled complex mathematical calculations by hand or with basic mechanical adding machines. It was a slow and error-prone process. Pioneers like Alan Turing saw the potential for advanced computational devices employing electrical components, but early Eniac and Z3 computers in the 1940s took up entire rooms. While a huge leap ahead, they still required human operators physically present to utilize them.
Comparison of Early Electronic Computers
| Computer | Year | Developers | # of Vacuum Tubes | Processing Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Z3 | 1941 | Konrad Zuse | 2,600 | 5-10 operations/sec |
| Atanasoff-Berry Computer | 1942 | John Atanasoff & Clifford Berry | 300 | 30 operations/sec |
| Harvard Mark I | 1944 | Howard Aiken & IBM | 3,500 | 3 operations/sec |
| ENIAC | 1946 | John Mauchly & J. Presper Eckert | 17,468 | 5,000 operations/sec |
Enter George Stibitz, an ingenious Bell Labs researcher who pioneered several landmark innovations in computing during the 1930s and 1940s. Based on his 1937 idea for using telephone relays to perform binary arithmetic operations, Bell Labs built a special calculator Stibitz designed, completing the Complex Number Calculator in January 1940. Using just hundreds of relays rather than thousands of bulky vacuum tubes, it could carry out complex calculations at blazing speeds.
Linking Man and Machine Across Space
But Stibitz envisioned an even more groundbreaking innovation – controlling this high-speed calculating machine remotely using teleprinters and telephone lines. As mathematicians and computing pioneers gathered at Dartmouth College in September 1940, Stibitz seized the opportunity to demonstrate this capability.
[[insert photo of 1940 Dartmouth demonstration]]"We were thrilled when the machine suddenly started typing by itself, printing the answers to problems we had transmitted to it earlier from Hanover," recalled attendee Sam Leggett later. "Watching those remote calculations really brought home the incredible potential of these thinking machines Stibitz was building."
Stibitz had linked a teletype printer terminal at Dartmouth‘s McNutt Hall directly to his Complex Number Calculator back at Bell Labs in New York City over 300 miles away. The audience of luminaries including John von Neumann, John Mauchly and Norbert Wiener typed in mathematical problems on the Dartmouth teletype keyboard. These were then encoded into electrical signals racing through AT&T phone lines to electromechanical relays hundreds of miles distant. Moving at astonishing speed, those relays manipulated binary pulses to solve complex equations in seconds. Solutions then zapped back over phone lines to the stupefied Dartmouth audience in the form of neatly typed pages spitting out from Stibitz‘s remarkable remote computer.
This landmark feat for its era showed the potential to access computing power from across great distances. Stibitz himself foresaw where this could lead:
"If such computers and data processors could exchange information among themselves rapidly, one might be able to connect a complex network of them to solve very difficult problems," Stibitz wrote in his autobiography.
His 1940 demonstration was merely a 200 word-per-minute teletype link, but it sparked visions of lightning-fast global data networks and cloud computing capabilities we now take for granted in our hyper-connected world.
Laying the Groundwork for Distributed Computing
Stibitz continued improving relay computer designs through the 1940s, incorporating phone line connections so multiple people could access them simultaneously. This built on his early innovations using teletypes for remote interaction.
Others were also exploring networking concepts, like Paul Baran‘s theoretical work on distributed packet-switched networks starting in the 1960s. Step-by-step, researchers linked more powerful computers over greater distances, realizing Stibitz‘s early vision of remotely harnessing distributed computing power.
So much of what we do online today, leveraging smart devices and cloud data centers worldwide, originated from bold pioneers questioning assumptions during computing‘s early days. George Stibitz‘s drive to connect a fledgling calculating device remotely in 1940 opened exciting possibilities. By proving complex machines could interact across phone lines, he cleared a trail that later led to the globe-spanning Internet and a new digital era built atop insights from computing forefathers like Stibitz himself.
Next time your phone draws on planetary-scale computing resources for navigation, weather reports, or nearly any function, take a moment to appreciate computing pioneers who made concepts like a smart phone possible. Visionaries daring to ask "what if?" – like George Stibitz linking man and machine across hundreds of miles in 1940 via teletype and relays. His drive to experiment and connect foreshadowed our entire world now bound together through computing technology.
