A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi is a must-read for investors, entrepreneurs, executives, and anyone interested in understanding the technology that is embedded in the lives of most of the worlds population.
A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi
Haigh and Ceruzzi tackled the challenge of writing a definitive, comprehensive history of an ever-changing technology, by breaking the seventy-five years (1945-2020) of modern computing into about fifteen distinct themes, each focusing on a specific group of users and applications around which the computer is redefined with the addition of new capabilities. Along the way, they trace the transformation of computing from scientific calculations to administrative assistance to personal appliances to a communications medium, a constant reinvention that continues today.
Computers made an astounding variety of other technologies vanish into itself, write Haigh and Ceruzzi. We conceptualize this convergence of tasks on a single platform as a dissolving of those technologies, and in many cases, their business models, by a device that come ever closer to the status of a universal technological solvent.
In Silicon Valley parlance, dissolving is disrupting. In the dominant tech zeitgeist (to some extent since the 1950s, without exception since the 1990s), each computer transformation is a revolution. Which is why historyand understanding the actual (factual) details of past transformationsis typically of no interest to the denizens of the next big thing.
Haigh and Ceruzzi deftly demonstrate why it is important to understand the evolution of computing, why knowing where you came from is a foundation of success, why tradition is a key to innovation. Architectural advances pioneered by Cary supercomputers now help your phone to play Netflix video more effectively is one example highlighting the remarkable continuity of computing, as opposed to the make-believe disruptive innovations. Whenever the computer became a new thing, it did not stop being everything it had been before, Haigh and Ceruzzi sum up the real business of innovating while standing on the shoulders of giants.
Possibly reacting to the endless pronouncements that this or that new computing innovation is changing the world, Haigh and Ceruzzi remind us that the computers influence on our lives has so far been less fundamental than that of industrial age technologies such as electric light or power, automobiles or antibiotics. Armed with this useful historical perspective, they have tried to give a reasonably comprehensive answer to a more tractable question: How did the world change the computer?
Numerous inventors, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs and users have been responsible for the rapid and reliable change in the scale and scope of computing, not any inherent laws or some kind of inevitable, deterministic technology trajectory. In the process, they have changed the computer industry, what we mean by industry, and what we perceive as the essence of computing.
Just like the technology around which it has grown by leaps and bounds, the computer industry has gone through multiple transformations. From a handful of vertically integrated companiesprimarily IBM and DEC; to a number of companies focusing on horizontal industry segments such as semi-conductors, storage, networking, operating systems, and databasesprimarily Intel, EMC, Cisco, Microsoft, and Oracle; to companies catering mostly to individual consumersprimarily Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. To this latter group we may add Tesla, which Haigh and Ceruzzi discuss as a prime example of the convergence of computing and transportation. Just like computing technology, the ever-changing computer industry has not stopped being what it was earlier when it moved into a new phase of its life, preserving at least some elements of previous stages in its evolution.
Still, the new stages eventually dissolved the business models of the past, leading to todays reliance by many large and small computer companies on new (to the industry) sources of revenues such as advertising. Eating other industries, especially media businesses, brought on huge profits and, eventually, serious indigestion.
While swallowing other industries, the computer industry has also made the very term industry quite obsolete. The digitization of all analog devices and channels for the creation, communications, and consumption of information, spurred by the invention of the Web, shuttered the previously rigid boundaries of economic sectors such as publishing, film, music, radio, and television. In 2007, 94% of storage capacity in the world was digital, a complete reversal from 1986, when 99.2% of all storage capacity was analog.
I would argue that the data resulting from the digitization of everything is the essence of computing, of why and how high-speed electronic calculators were invented seventy-five years ago and of their transformation over the years into a ubiquitous technology, embedded, for better or worse, in everything we do. This has been a journey from data processing to big data.
As Haigh and Ceruzzi write early computers wasted much of their incredibly expensive time waiting for data to arrive from peripherals. This problem of latency, of efficient access to data, played a crucial role in the computing transformations of subsequent years, but it has been overshadowed by the dynamics of an industry driven by the rapid and reliable advances in processing speeds. Responding (in the 1980s) to computer vendors telling their customers to upgrade to a new, faster processor, computer storage professionals wryly noted they are all waiting [for data] at the same speed.
The rapidly declining cost of computer memory (driven by the scale economies of personal computers) helped address latency issues in the 1990s, just at the time business executives started to use the data captured by their computer systems not only for accounting and other internal administrative processes. They stopped deleting the data, instead storing it for longer periods of time, and started sharing it among different business functions and with their suppliers and customers. Most important, they started analyzing the data to improve various business activities, customer relations, and decision-making. Data mining became the 1990s new big thing, as the business challenge shifted from how to get the data quickly? to how to make sense of the data?
A bigger thing that decade, with much larger implications for data and its usesand for the definition of computingwas the invention of the Web and the companies it begat. Having been born digital, living the online life, meant not only excelling in hardware software development (and building their own clouds), but also innovating in the collection and analysis of the mountains of data produced by the online activities of millions of individuals and enterprises. Data has taken over from hardware and software as the center of everything computing, the lifeblood of tech companies. And increasingly, the lifeblood of any type of business.
In the last decade or so, the cutting edge of computing became big data and AI (more accurately labeled deep learning), the sophisticated statistical analysis of lots and lots of data, the merging of software development and data mining skills (data science).
As Haigh and Ceruzzi suggest, we can trace how the world has changed the computer rather than how computer technology has changed the world. For example, tracing the changes in how we describe what we do with computers, the prestige-chasing transformations from data processing to information technology (IT), from computer engineering to computer science, and from statistical analysis to data science. The computerand its datahave brought many changes to our lives, but has not changed much what drives us, what makes humans tick. Among many other things, it has not influenced at all, it could not have influenced at all, the all-consuming desire for prestige and status, whether as individuals or as nations.
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