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Dawn of the digital
information era.
Successive waves of computing technology over the past 50 years have led
to huge changes in business and social life. But the internet revolution is
just beginning, writes Paul Taylor.
Thomas Watson, who founded one of
the giants of the information technology world, could not have been more
wrong. In 1946, the head of International Business Machines, said: "I
think there is a world market for maybe five
computers." Today, half a century later, as we head towards 1bn people with access to the internet, the
true scale of his miscalculation is apparent.
Computers, and the semiconductors
that power them, have invaded almost every aspect of our lives and become the
engine for perhaps the greatest changes since the industrial revolution - the
dawn of a digital information era based upon the ones and zeros of computer
binary code.
The last 50 years have seen at least three phases of computing, each
building on, rather than replacing, the last.
These "waves" have included mainframes and departmental
mini-computers, the PC era and client/server computing and, most recently, the
emergence of the internet computing model built around the standards and
technologies of the internet.
Each wave has enabled a shift in business processes: mainframes have
automated complex tasks, personal computers have provided users with personal
productivity tools and internet computing promises to deliver huge gains in
productivity and efficiency, as well as the ability to access huge volumes of
information.
The technological foundations for these changes began to be laid more
than 350 years ago by Blaise Pascal, the French scientist who built the first
adding machine which used a series of interconnected cogs to add numbers. Almost
200 years later, in Britain Charles Babbage, the "father of the
computer", begun designing the steam-powered analytical engine which would
have used punched cards for input and output and included a memory unit, had it
ever been completed.
But the modern computer age was really ushered in by Alan Turing who in
1937 conceived of the concept of a "universal machine" able to
execute any algorithm - a breakthrough which ultimately led to the building of
the code-breaking Colossus machine by the British during the second world
war.
In 1946, the Electronic Numeric Integrator and
Calculator (ENIAC) computer which contained 18,000 vacuum tubes was
built in the US. Two years later scientists at Manchester completed
"Baby", the first stored program machine and ushered in the
commercial computing era.
Since then, computer architecture has largely followed principles laid
down by John von Neumann, a pioneer of computer science in the 1940s who made significant
contributions to the development of logical design and advocated the bit as a
measurement of computer memory.
In 1964, IBM introduced the System/360, the first mainframe computer
family and ushered in what has been called the first wave of computing.
From a business perspective, the mainframe era enabled companies to cut
costs and improve efficiency by automating difficult and time consuming
processes.
Typically, the mainframe, based on proprietary technology developed by
IBM or one of a handful of competitors, was housed in an air-conditioned room which
became known as the "glasshouse" and was tended by white-coated
technicians.
Data were input from "green screen" or "dumb"
terminals hooked into the mainframe over a rudimentary network.
The mainframe provided a highly secure and usually reliable platform
for corporate computing, but it had some serious drawbacks. In particular, its
proprietary technology made it costly and the need to write custom-built
programs for each application limited flexibility.
The next computing wave was led by the minicomputer makers which built
scaled-down mainframe machines dubbed departmental minis or mid-range
systems. These still used proprietary technology, but provided much wider
departmental access to their resources via desktop terminals.
Among manufacturers leading this wave of computing was Digital
Equipment with its Vax range of machines and Wang which developed a widely used
proprietary word-processing system.
A key factor driving down the cost of computing power over this period
was significant advances in the underlying technology and in particular, semiconductors.
In 1947, scientists at Bell telephone laboratories in the US had
invented the "transfer resistance" device or "transistor"
which would eventually provide computers with a reliability unachievable with
vacuum tubes.
By the end of the 1950s, integrated circuits had arrived - a
development that would enable millions of transistors to be etched onto a
single silicon chip and collapse the price of computing power dramatically.
In 1971, Intel produced the 4004, launching a family of "processors
on a chip" leading to the development of the 8080 8-bit microprocessor
three years later and opening the door for the emergence of the first mass
produced personal computer, the Altair 8800.
The development of the personal computer and personal productivity
software - the third wave of computing - was led by Apple Computer and IBM in
conjunction with Microsoft which provided IBM with the operating system for
the first IBM PC in 1981.
This year, an estimated 108m PCs will be sold worldwide including a
growing number of sub - $500 machines which are expanding the penetration of
PCs into households which previously could not afford them.
Sometimes, however, software development has not kept pace. As Robert
Cringely, the Silicon Valley technology guru, notes: "If the automobile
had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today
cost $100, get a million miles per gallon and explode once a year, killing
everyone inside."
Nevertheless, for businesses the arrival of the desktop PCs built around
relatively low cost standard components put real computing power into the hands
of end-users for the first time. This meant Individual users could create,
manipulate and control their own data and were freed from the constraints of
dealing with a big IT department.
However, the limitations of desktop PCs as "islands of computing
power" also quickly became apparent. In particular, people discovered they
needed to hook their machines together with local area networks to share data
and peripherals as well as exchange messages.
By the start of the 1990s, a new corporate computer architecture called
client/server computing had emerged built around desktop PCs and more powerful
servers linked together by a local area network.
Over the past few years, however, there has been growing disatisfaction,
particularly among big corporate PC users, with the client/server model mainly
because of its complexity and high cost of lifetime ownership.
As a result, there has been a pronounced swing back towards a
centralised computing model in the past few years, accelerated by the growth of
the internet.
The internet has its origins in the 1970s and work undertaken by Vinton
Cerf and otters to design systems that would enable research and academic
institutions working on military projects to co-operate.
This led to the development of the Ethernet standard and TCP/ IP, the
basic internet protocol. It also led Bob Metcalfe to promulgate
"Metcalfe's Law" which states the value of a network is proportional
to the square of the number of nodes attached to it.
But arguably, it was not until the mid-1990s and the commercialisation
of the Internet that the true value of internetworking became apparent. The
growth of the internet and the world wide web in particular since then has been
astonishing.
With the help of tools like web browsers, the internet was transformed
in just four years from an arcane system linking mostly academic institutions
into a global transport system with 50m users. Today, that figure has swollen
to about 160m and estimates for the electronic commerce that it enables are
pushed up almost weekly.
According to the latest Gold-man Sachs internet report, the
business-to-business e-commerce market alone will grow to £l,500bn in
2004, up from $114bn this year and virtually nothing two years ago.
Two inter-related technologies have been driving these changes:
semiconductors
and network communications.
For more than 25 years, semiconductor development has broadly followed
the dictum of "Moore's Law" laid down by Gordon Moore, co-founder of
Intel.
This states that the capacity of semiconductor chips will double every
18 months, or expressed a different way, that the price of computing power will
halve every 18 months.
Moore's Law is expected to hold true for at least another decade but
around 20l2 scientists believe semiconductor designers will run into some
physical (atomic) roadblocks as they continue to shrink the size of the
components and lines etched onto of silicon chips.
At that stage, some computer scientists believe it will be necessary to
look for alternatives to silicon-based
computing. Research into new materials and computer architectures is
mostly focusing on the potential of quantum computing.
Meanwhile, the deadline keeps being pushed back by improvements to
existing processes. At the same time, there have been big leaps in
communications technologies and, in particular, fibre optics and IP-based
systems.
Today, one strand of Qwest's US network can carry all North America's
telecoms traffic and in a few years, the same strand of glass fibre will be
able to carry all the world's network traffic.
"We are going to have so much bandwidth,
we are not going-to know what to do with it," says John Patrick vice
president of internet technology at IBM.
"I am very optimistic about the future."
He believes this telecoms capacity will enable the creation of a wide
range of internet-based new services including digital video and distributed
storage and medical systems.
But
he cautions: "The evolution of the internet is based upon technical
things, but in the end it is not about technology itself, it is about what the
technology can enable."