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May 23 - October 21, 2019
In his classic 1986 paper, ‘No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering’, Fred Brooks writes that, “No other technology since civilisation began has seen six orders of magnitude price-performance gain in 30 years”.
by August 1982, 200,000 units had been produced.
IBM PC was one of the most important products in the history of the computer.
Mary Allen Wilkes
LINC is often hailed as the first personal computer.
the earliest documented example of remote operation of computing equipment was George Stibitz’s dazzling September 1940 demonstration in which he used the US telegraph network to connect a Teletype terminal at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to the Bell Labs Complex Number
Calculator located 200 miles away in New York.
Modems In 1949, a new device was invented to allow digital data to be transmitted efficie...
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The device was originally called a dataset but later became known as a modem, an abbreviation of modulator-demodulator.
In addition to linking the radar sites to the AN/FSQ-7 computers in each of the 24 SAGE Direction Centers, the modems were used to link these machines with AN/FSQ-8 computers in the 3 Combat Centers,
creating the world’s first computer network.
A US law which forbade the attachment to the public telephone network of any device not furnished by official network provider AT&T gave Western Electric, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T, an almost total monopoly in the US modem market. The market was only opened up to competition in June 1968 following a legal ruling known as the Carterfone Decision which permitted non-AT&T equipment to be connected to the telephone network providing that the equipment passed a series of stringent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tests.
this did not include connecting electrically therefore an indirect method of connection had to be used. Soon other firms
such as Codex Corporation were offering alternative products which connected to telephone lines by ...
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Hayes Microcomputer Products in their ‘Smartmodem’ model introduced in June 1981,
Voice messages were routinely digitised
construction never took place due to a fatal combination of strong resistance from AT&T and a lack of understanding within the Defense Communications Agency,
timesharing evangelist
In June 1966 he produced a comprehensive 33-page document which proposed the construction of an experimental system to serve as the prototype for a national digital communications network.
The document also introduced the term ‘packet’ to describe fixed-length message blocks.
In October 1967, Roberts outlined his initial plans for ARPANET at an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
The $500,000 contract was awarded to the Massachusetts consultancy firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the same company where Licklider had conducted his early timesharing activities. BBN’s remit was to develop and deliver the backbone network of 4 IMPs within a year. AT&T was also contracted to provide the dedicated long distance telephone lines necessary to connect the IMPs together.
modems which were capable of
duplex communication at a rate of 50,000 bps.
1969
the first communication between two computers over ARPANET took place on 29 October
when a UCLA student on a terminal connected to the university’s SDS Sigma 7 computer system remotely logged in to an SDS 940 computer at SRI on his second attempt.
Request for Comments (RFC) process, which was initiated by UCLA postgraduate student Stephen D Crocker in March 1969 as a means of documenting and sharing protocol developments.
development of protocols for three essential network services;
logging in to a remote host, transferring files from one host to another
and sending a message to another user on...
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‘Telnet’ in 1969,
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) which was developed at MIT in 1971.
the application which had the greatest impact was e-mail. In 1971 BBN programmer Raymond S Tomlinson adapted an existing electronic messaging system developed for timesharing computers, SNDMSG, to operat...
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The first e-mail message was a test message sent by Tomlinson to hims...
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By 2001, 31 billion e-mail messages per day w...
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1974 with the development of the Transmission Control Program.
The Transmission Control Program was conceived by IPTO scientist Robert E
Kahn in collaboration with Vinton G Cerf,
French engineer Louis Pouzin who led the CYCLADES Computer Network project which began in 1971
Pouzin also coined the term datagram, an amalgam of the words data and telegram.
In March 1982 TCP/IP was adopted by the US Department of Defense as the standard for all US military networking
by 1985
it had become the standard for networking throughout the ...
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a patent covering a critical part of the xerographic process was due to expire soon, exposing Xerox to the possibility of direct competition in the form of copycat products.
The first step towards this goal was the controversial $920 million acquisition of minicomputer
pioneer Scientific Data Systems in May 1969.
Xerox PARC opened for business in June 1970.
the first practical implementation of hypertext, where links could be embedded in files which, when the appropriate text was clicked on with the mouse cursor, automatically accessed related files.
Engelbart’s 90-minute presentation took the form of a live demonstration of NLS using a microwave communications link which had been set up between the conference centre and SRI 30 miles away. A video projector borrowed from NASA allowed the 2,000-strong audience to see what was happening on Engelbart’s terminal screen.
