Innovation in the computer industry

A learning-curve approach has been employed to study inventiveness in the computer industry. The appearance of new models as well as the appearance of new computer manufacturers have been following typical logistic S-curves over the last 26 years of computer history. Innovation seems to come in S-waves, and even though many of today's major manufacturers are close to exhausting their maximum innovation potential in their present S-wave, the overall computer market is rather “young”. In contrast, the personal computer market is already beyond its maturity phase. Remarkably invariant over the 26 years considered, and through the complete range of computer sizes, remains the fact that for every five new computer models appearing on the market, there is one new computer company emerging also.

Why we must teach computer history

Gary McNab, Code Show founder and computer history advocate, explains why teaching children the keyboard and mouse basics is essential in this tablet-focused world. He shares a little of his PC-passion with Johanna Hamilton AMBCS.

The Future of Computer History

Johannes Blobel is a PhD student at Paderborn University, Germany. Together with Jochen Vieho , the director of one of the largest computer museums worldwide, he wants to make computer history a vital part of every computer science degree.

Turing’s Zeitgeist

This chapter reviews the history of Alan Turing’s design proposal for an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) and how he came to write it in 1945, and takes a fresh look at the numerous formative ideas it included. All of these ideas resurfaced in the young computing industry over the following fifteen years. We cannot tell to what extent Turing’s unpublished foresights were passed on to other pioneers, or to what extent they were rediscovered independently as their time came. In any case, they all became part of the Zeitgeist of the computing industry. At some universities, such as ours in New Zealand, the main computer in 1975 was a Burroughs B6700, a ‘stack’ machine. In this kind of machine, data, including items such as the return address for a subroutine, are stored on top of one another so that the last one in becomes the first one out. In effect, each new item on the stack ‘buries’ the previous one. Apart from the old English Electric KDF9, and the recently introduced Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11, stack machines were unusual. Where had this idea come from? It just seemed to be part of computing’s Zeitgeist, the intellectual climate of the discipline, and it remains so to this day. Computer history was largely American in the 1970s—the computer was called the von Neumann machine and everybody knew about the early American machines such as ENIAC and EDVAC. Early British computers were viewed as a footnote; the fact that the first stored program in history ran in Manchester was largely overlooked, which is probably why the word ‘program’ is usually spelt in the American way. There was a tendency to assume that all the main ideas in computing, such as the idea of a stack, had originated in the United States. At that time, Alan Turing was known as a theoretician and for his work on artificial intelligence. The world didn’t know that he was a cryptanalyst, didn’t know that he tinkered with electronics, didn’t know that he designed a computer, and didn’t know that he was gay. He was hardly mentioned in the history of practical computing.