Computers

Computers. Electronic computers came into widespread use during and after World War II. Analog and electromechanical computers, anticipated by the nineteenth‐century English mathematician Charles Babbage, had existed earlier, including the differential analyzer built by Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1928.

World War II and Early Postwar Developments.

Howard H. Aiken at Harvard constructed the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (called the Mark I), a behemoth at eight feet tall and fifty‐one feet long, in 1939–1944. Wartime electronic computers constructed to calculate tables of ballistic trajectories and to decipher enemy codes were anticipated by the experiments of John Atanasoff, Wallace Eckert, and Conrad Zuse. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania was the font of postwar computer development. Designed by J. Presper Eckert Jr. and John Mauchly and put into operation in 1946, it inspired the mathematician John von Neumann at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study to formulate a fundamental design, or architecture, of a stored‐program computer named EDVAC. This machine architecture became the standard for electronic digital computers.

Because of their great size and cost, computers required governmental or industrial support. Mauchly and Eckert's attempts to develop a commercial computer, the UNIVAC, succeeded only after they had won contractual support from the government. In 1951, their company was purchased by the Remington Rand Corporation, which also purchased Engineering Research Associates, a company spun out the navy's cryptographic establishment.

Early Governmental and Industrial Applications.

UNIVAC's success persuaded IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), a manufacturer of electromechanical office equipment, to invest heavily in a series of scientific and business computers in the 1950s, including the 700 series, the IBM 650, and the IBM 1401. IBM also won the contract to manufacture the networked computers of the air force's semiautomatic ground environment (SAGE) defense system. These were developed in MIT's Project Whirlwind. The SAGE system provided IBM with a large computer market, as well as access to the extensive software developments of the Systems Development Corporation, and the magnetic core computer memories developed by MIT. Going on to develop the SABRE airline ticket‐reservation system and the 360 series of computers, IBM soon dominated the computer marketplace. Among other industrial spin‐offs of Project Whirlwind was the minicomputer, developed by Kenneth Hogan of the Digital Equipment Corporation. It would eventually make computing power available to individuals who did not require the speed or power of a mainframe computer.

Early computers at military and nuclear laboratories solved scientific problems that had previously been intractable because of the time‐consuming calculations required. New techniques such as the Monte Carlo method provided numerical simulations when analytical solutions were not available. Large amounts of experimental data could be analyzed automatically by computer programs. Other computationally intensive fields such as fluid mechanics benefited enormously from the computer. In the aerospace industry, the use of computers grew rapidly in the 1950s, and computer modeling supplemented, and in some cases, replaced, more expensive and time‐consuming tests of aerodynamic design. The space program provided additional applications (and resources) for computers, as well as demands for miniaturization that inspired greater use of transistors and integrated circuits, developed in the late 1950s by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. By 1964, the number of individual circuits that could be integrated on a single silicon chip was doubling every eighteen to twenty‐four months (a fact noted by Gordon Moore in 1965 and later called “Moore's Law”). A spin‐off of the avionics and space electronic fields, very large integrated circuits would prove important for consumer electronics. Computer‐aided design and manufacture, important first in the aerospace industry and then in many other engineering applications, had by the 1990s largely replaced other design techniques.

The substitution of computers for clerical and accounting personnel appealed to federal agencies that processed large amounts of data or financial transactions. By 1958, three‐quarters of the Department of Defense computers, which accounted for half of all government machines, were devoted to supply and logistics functions such as cataloging; inventory control and distribution; requirements forecasting; and other management, budgetary, and financial processes. The federal government's need to process 25 billion individual pieces of paper annually increased demands for automation. Not only the Defense Department, but also the Social Security Administration's wage‐record operations; the Treasury Department's check accounting; the Department of Agriculture's commodity‐stabilization operations; the Census Bureau's statistical program; the Internal Revenue Service's tax collections; and the Department of Health and Human Services' massive medical and federal welfare record‐keeping all came to rely heavily on computers. Computers hastened the growth of government at all levels, especially the federal.

Social and Cultural Concerns.

The appearance of automated data‐processing facilities in government raised concerns about job loss and stimulated popular fears of invasion of privacy and control of government by these giant electronic brains. The democratic process found uses for computers in applications such as automated vote tabulation, but when UNIVAC accurately predicted the outcome of the 1952 presidential election on the basis of a small sample of the vote, the voice of the people seemed as amendable to computer analysis as any other process. Deepening apprehensions about the social implications of computers found expression in such works as Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1947) and The Human Uses of Human Beings (1950); Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason (1976); and science‐fiction stories by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and many others.

Commercial, Medical, and Academic Uses.

In the world of commerce, insurance, banking, and process industries led the way in adopting computers. Industrial‐process engineering, which planned flow‐intensive techniques such as those pioneered in the chemical, petroleum, andnuclear‐power industries, as well as in thenuclear‐weapons complex, found early applications for computers to synchronize and automatically adjust the flows of materials. Attempts in the machine‐tool industry to replace skilled laborers with the numerically controlled tools, however, showed computers' limits as labor‐replacing devices, since skilled laborers had to monitor computer performance to prevent errors.

In other industries where flow was important, industrial robotics proved more successful, for example, on assembly lines for automobiles and other mass‐produced goods, where the volume of output justified a heavy investment in computers and programming. As service and information industries eclipsed industrial manufacturing, the use of computers extended into almost every area of business, creating what many viewed as a Second Industrial Revolution. The invention of the laser and the universal product code enabled retailers to record sales, adjust inventories, and track markets automatically. The most dramatic displacement of labor by computers occurred in the telephone industry, where human operations were almost completely replaced by computerized switching facilities. Both the promise of vastly more leisure time and the early fears of widespread unemployment in the computer age, however, remained unrealized at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, productivity studies in service industries found little evidence for a positive impact by computers, while in the 1990s defects in computer programs that prevented them from recognizing the turn of a century—the so‐called Y2K phenomenon—cost much time and money to correct.

In medicine, computers transformed diagnostic procedures, enabled physicians and the general public to access information and research data more rapidly, and made possible new therepeutic and prosthetic devices. In education, their impact was mixed. Like the phonograph radio, and television before it, the computer was widely heralded as a revolutionary education technology. Although many colleges and universities added computer‐science programs in the 1960s, early attempts at computer‐aided instruction in primary and secondary education, such as the $2 billion Plato project, proved disappointing. Computer manufacturers routinely gave machines to schools at a discount or without cost, but adapting them to educational purposes proved difficult. As the twentieth century ended, the advent of worldwide computer networks via the Internet (itself an offspring of government support) reawakened enthusiasm for computer‐based education as well as skepticism about its value.

Miniturization and the Era of the Personal Computer.

The miniaturization of electronic components made possible the use of computers in automobiles, appliances, automatic teller machines (ATMs), card‐reader systems, digital recording and playback equipment, handheld computer games, and many other applications. As more and more control processes became automated, this “smart” technology, initially developed in military and space programs, pervaded many spheres of human activity, leading some to label the last quarter of the twentieth century the “information age.”

Computer‐related businesses exerted enormous economic clout as the twentieth century ended. In 1998, IBM had revenues of $81 billion; the computer‐based data provider Electronic Data Systems, $17 billion; and the Seattle‐based software giant Microsoft, founded by the now multibillionaire Bill Gates, $14 billion. The stock‐market boom of the 1990s was sustained largely by surging computer and information technology stocks.

The most visible feature of the computer revolution at century's end was the rapid spread of personal computers. By 1998, 47 percent of American households owned computers, and the rate was increasing every year. These computers had widespread applications, from video games, word processing, and record‐keeping to instant, worldwide communication via e‐mail and access to a vast array of information on the world wide web. Like the earlier mainframes, the ubiquitous personal computer gave rise to social concerns, from Internet pornography and the effects of video games on children to the disparity in computer access between the poor and the affluent. Whatever the apprehensions, the computer was clearly here to stay. Having so radically transformed American life in the later twentieth century, it seemed certain—in tandem with other communications technologies—to exert even greater influence in the twenty‐first.
See also Automation and Computerization; Business Cycle; Census, Federal; Cold War; Electronics; Federal Government, Executive Branch; Department of Defense; Intelligence Gathering and Espionage; Mass Marketing; Mass Production; Nuclear Strategy; Post–Cold War Era; Technology.

Bibliography

James W. Cortada , The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930 to 1960, 1993.
Martin Campbell‐Kelly and and William Aspray , The Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 1996.
Arthur L. Norberg and and Judy E. O'Neill , Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986, 1996.

Robert W. Seidel