The simple principle behind the first computer, called by its inventor the “Analytical Engine,” was that the same machine could process an infinite variety and types of calculations by reconfiguring its parts through a switching mechanism. The machine had a component for inputting numbers or instructions to the processor; the processor itself, which completed the calculations; a central control unit, or CPU, that organized and sequenced the tasks to make sure the machine was doing the right job at the right time; a memory area for storing numbers; and finally a component that output the results of the calculations to a type of printer: the same basic components you find in all computers even today.
The same machine could add, subtract, multiply, or divide and even store numbers from one arithmetical process to the next. It could even store the arithmetical computation instructions themselves from job to job. And Babbage borrowed a punch-card process invented by Joseph Jacquard for programming weaving looms. Babbage’s programs could be stored on series of punch cards and fed into the computer to control the sequence of processing numbers. Though this may sound like a startling invention, it was Industrial Revolution technology that began in the late eighteenth century for the purely utilitarian challenge of processing large numbers for the British military. Yet, in concept, it was an entirely new principle in machine design that very quietly started the digital revolution.
Because Babbage’s machine was hand powered and cumbersome, little was done with it through the nineteenth century, and by the 1880s, Babbage himself would be forgotten. However, the practical application of electricity to mechanical appliances and the delivery of electrical power along supply grids, invented by Thomas Edison and refined by Nikola Tesla, gave new life to the calculation machine. The concept of an automatic calculation machine would inspire American inventors to devise their own electrically powered calculators to process large numbers in a competition to calculate the 1890 U.S. Census. The winner of the competition was Herman Hollerith, whose electrically powered calculator was a monster device that not only processed numbers but displayed the progress of the process on large clocks for all to see. He was so successful that the large railroad companies hired him to process their numbers. By the turn of the century his company, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Company, had become the single largest developer of automatic calculating machines. By 1929, when Hollerith died, his company had become the automation conglomerate, IBM.
Right about the time of Hollerith’s death, a German engineer named Konrad Zuse approached some of the same challenges that had confronted Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier: how to build his own version of a universal computing machine that could reconfigure itself depending upon the type of calculation the operator wanted to perform. Zuse decided that instead of working with a machine that operated on the decimal system, which limited the types of arithmetic calculations it could perform, his machine would use only two numbers, 0 and 1, the binary system. This meant that he could process any type of mathematical equation through the opening or closing of a series of electromagnetic relays, switches that would act as valves or gates either letting current through or shutting it off. These relays were the same types of devices that the large telephone companies, like the Bell system in the United States, were using as the basis of their networks. By marrying an electrical power supply and electric switches to the architecture of Babbage’s Analytical Engine and basing his computations in a binary instead of a decimal system, Zuse had come up with the European version of the first electrical digital computer, an entirely new device. It was just three years before the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II.
In the United States at about the same time as Zuse was assembling his first computer in his parents’ living room, Harvard mathematics professor Howard Aiken was trying to reconstruct a theoretical version of Babbage’s computer, also using electromagnetic relays as switching devices and relying on a binary number system. The difference between Aiken and Zuse was that Aiken had academic credentials and his background as an innovative mathematician got him into the office of Thomas Watson, president of IBM, to whom he presented his proposal for the first American digital computer. Watson was impressed, authorized a budget for $1 million, and, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the project design was started up at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then moved to IBM headquarters in New York during the war.
Because of their theoretical ability to calculate large sets of numbers in a relatively short period of time, digital computers were drafted into the war effort in the United Kingdom as a code-breaking device. By 1943, at the same time that IBM’s first shiny stainless-steel version of Aiken’s computer was up and running in Endicott, New York, the British were using their dedicated cryptoanalytical Colossus computer to break the German codes and decipher the code-creating ability of the German Enigma—the code machine that the Nazis believed made their transmissions indecipherable to the Allies. Unlike the IBM-Aiken computer at Harvard and Konrad Zuse’s experimental computer in Berlin, the Colossus used radio vacuum tubes as relay switches and was, therefore, hundreds of times faster than any experimental computer using electromagnetic relays. The Colossus, therefore, was a true breakthrough because it married the speed of vacuum-tube technology with the component design of the Analytical Engine to create the first modern-era digital computer.
The British used the Colossus so effectively that they quickly felt the need to build more of them to process the increasingly large volume of encrypted transmissions the Germans were sending, ignorant of the fact that the Allies were decoding every word and outsmarting them at every turn. I would argue even to this day that the technological advantage the Allies enjoyed in intelligence-gathering apparatus, specifically code-breaking computers and radar, enabled us to win the war despite Hitler’s initial successes and his early weapon advantages. The Allies’ use of the digital computer in World War II was an example of how a superior technological advantage can make the difference between victory and defeat no matter what kinds of weapons or numbers of troops the enemy is able to deploy.
The American and British experience with computers during the war and our government’s commitment to developing a viable digital computer led to the creation, in the years immediately following the war, of a computer called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC. ENIAC was the brainchild of Howard Aiken and one of our Army R&D brain-trust advisers, the mathematician John von Neumann. Although it operated on a decimal instead of a binary system and had a very small memory, it relied on radio vacuum-tube switching technology. For its time it was the first of what today are called “number crunchers.”
When measured against the way computers developed over the years since its first installation, especially the personal computers of today, ENIAC was something of a real dinosaur. It was loud, hot, cumbersome, fitful, and required the power supply of an entire town to keep it going. It couldn’t stay up for very long because the radio tubes, always unreliable even under the best working conditions, would blow out after only a few hours’ work and had to be replaced. But the machine worked, it crunched the numbers it was fed, and it showed the way for the next model, which reflected the sophisticated symbolic architectural design of John von Neumann.
Von Neumann suggested that instead of feeding the computer the programs you wanted it to run every time you turned it on, the programs themselves could be stored in the computer permanently. By treating the programs themselves as components of the machine, stored right in the hardware, the computer could change between programs, or the routines of subprograms, as necessary in order to solve problems. This meant that larger routines could be processed into subroutines, which themselves could be organized into templates to solve similar problems. In complex applications, programs could call up other programs again and again without the need of human intervention and could even change the subprograms to fit the application. Von Neumann had invented block programming, the basis for the sophis
ticated engineering and business programming of the late 1950s and 1960s and the great, great grandmother of today’s object-oriented programming.
By 1947, it had all come together: the design of the machine, the electrical power supply, the radio vacuum-tube technology, the logic of machine processing, von Neumann’s mathematical architecture, and practical applications for the computer’s use. But just a few years shy of the midpoint of the century, the computer itself was the product of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking and technology. In fact, given the shortcomings of the radio tube and the enormous power demands and cooling requirements to keep the computer working, the development of the computer seemed to have come to a dead end. Although IBM and Bell Labs were investing huge sums of development money into designing a computer that had a lower operational and maintenance overhead, it seemed, given the technology of the digital computer circa 1947, that there was no place it could go. It was simply an expensive-to-build, expensive-to-run, lumbering elephant at the end of the line. And then an alien spacecraft fell out of the skies over Roswell, scattered across the desert floor, and in one evening everything changed.
In 1948 the first junction transistor—a microscopically thin silicon sandwich of n-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have an extra electron, and p-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have one less electron—was devised by physicist William Shockley. The invention was credited to Bell Telephone Laboratories, and, as if by magic, the dead end that had stopped the development of the dinosaur-like ENIAC generation of computers melted away and an entirely new generation of miniaturized circuitry began. Where the radio-tube circuit required an enormous power supply to heat it up because heat generated the electricity, the transistor required very low levels of powers and no heating-up time because the transistor amplified the stream of electrons that flowed into its base. Because it required only a low level of current, it could be powered by batteries. Because it didn’t rely on a heat source to generate current and it was so small, many transistors could be packed into a very small space, allowing for the miniaturization of circuitry components. Finally, because it didn’t burn out like the radio tube, it was much more reliable. Thus, within months after the Roswell crash and the first exposure of the silicon-wafer technology to companies already involved in the research and development of computers, the limitations on the size and power of the computer suddenly dropped like the removal of a roadblock on a highway and the next generation of computers went into development. This set up for Army R&D, especially during the years I was there, the opportunity for us to encourage that development with defense contracts calling for the implementation of integrated-circuit devices into subsequent generations of weapons systems.
More than one historian of the microcomputer age has written that no one before 1947 foresaw the invention of the transistor or had even dreamed about an entirely new technology that relied upon semiconductors, which were silicon based and not carbon based like the Edison incandescent tube. Bigger than the idea of a calculating machine or an Analytical Engine or any combination of the components that made up the first computers of the 1930s and 1940s, the invention of the transistor and its natural evolution to the silicon chip of integrated circuitry was beyond what anyone could call a quantum leap of technology. The entire development arc of the radio tube, from Edison’s first experiments with filament for his incandescent lightbulb to the vacuum tubes that formed the switching mechanisms of ENIAC, lasted about fifty years. The development of the silicon transistor seemed to come upon us in a matter of months. And, had I not seen the silicon wafers from the Roswell crash with my own eyes, held them in my own hands, talked about them with Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, or Hans Kohler, and heard the reports from these now dead scientists of the meetings between Nathan Twining, Vannevar Bush, and researchers at Bell Labs, I would have thought the invention of the transistor was a miracle. I know now how it came about.
As history revealed, the invention of the transistor was only the beginning of an integrated-circuit technology that developed through the 1950s and continues right through to the present. By the time I became personally involved in 1961, the American marketplace had already witnessed the retooling of Japan and Germany in the 1950s and Korea and Taiwan in the late 1950s through the early 1960s. General Trudeau was concerned about this, not because he considered these countries our economic enemies but because he believed that American industry would suffer as a result of its complacency about basic research and development. He expressed this to me on many occasions during our meetings, and history has proved him to be correct. General Trudeau believed that the American industrial economy enjoyed a harvest of technology in the years immediately following World War II, the effects of which were still under way in the 1960s, but that it would soon slow down because R&D was an inherently costly undertaking that didn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. And you had to have a good bottom line, General Trudeau always said, to keep your stockholders happy or else they would revolt and throw the existing management team right out of the company. By throwing their efforts into the bottom line, Trudeau said, the big American industries were actually destroying themselves just like a family that spends all its savings.
“You have to keep on investing in yourself, Phil,” the General would like to say when he’d look up from his Wall Street Journal before our morning meetings and remark about how stock analysts always liked to place their value on the wrong thing. “Sure, these companies have to make a profit, but you look at the Japanese and the Germans and they know the value of basic research,” he once said to me. “American companies expect the government to pay for all their research, and that’s what you and I have to do if we want to keep them working. But there’s going to come a time when we can’t afford to pay for it any longer. Then who’s going to foot the bill?”
General Trudeau was worrying about how the drive for new electronics products based upon miniaturized circuitry was creating entirely new markets that were shutting out American companies. He said that it was becoming cheaper for American companies to have their products manufactured for them in Asia, where companies had already retooled after the war to produce transistorized components, than for American companies, which had heavily invested in the manufacturing technology of the nineteenth century, to do it themselves. He knew that the requirement for space exploration, for challenging the hostile EBEs in their own territory, relied on the development of an integrated-circuit technology so that the electronic components of spacecraft could be miniaturized to fit the size requirements of rocket-propelled vehicles. The race to develop more intelligent missiles and ordnance also required the development of new types of circuitry that could be packed into smaller and smaller spaces. But retooled Japanese and German industries were the only ones able to take immediate advantage of what General Trudeau called the “new electronics.”
For American industry to get onto the playing field the basic research would have to be paid for by the military. It was something General Trudeau was willing to fight for at the Pentagon because he knew that was the only way we could get the weapons only a handful of us knew we needed to fight a skirmish war against aliens only a handful of us knew we were fighting. Arthur Trudeau was a battlefield general engaged in a lonely military campaign that national policy and secrecy laws forbade him even to talk about. And as the gulf of time widened between the Roswell crash and the concerns over postwar economic expansion, even the people who were fighting the war alongside General Trudeau were, one by one, beginning to die away. Industry could fight the war for us, General Trudeau believed, if it was properly seeded with ideas and the money to develop them. By 1961, we had turned our attention to the integrated circuit.
Government military weapons spending and the requirements of space exploration had already heavily funded the transistorized component circuit. The radars and missiles I was commanding at Red Canyon, New Mexico, in 1958 relied on miniaturized components for their reli
ability and portability. New generations of tracking radars on the drawing boards in 1960 were even more sophisticated and electronically intelligent than the weapons I was aiming at Soviet targets in Germany. In the United States, Japanese and Taiwanese radios that fit into the palm of your hand were on the market. Computers like ENIAC, once the size of a small warehouse, now occupied rooms no larger than closets and, while still generating heat, no longer blew out because of overheated radio vacuum tubes. Minicomputers, helped by government R&D funding, were still a few years away from market, but were already in a design phase. Television sets and stereophonic phonographs that offered solid-state electronics were coming on the market, and companies like IBM, Sperry-Rand, and NCR were beginning to bring electronic office machines onto the market. It was the beginning of a new age of electronics, helped, in part, by government funding of basic research into the development and manufacture of integrated-circuit products. But the real prize, the development of what actually had been recovered at Roswell, was still a few years away. When it arrived, again spurred by the requirements of military weapons development and space travel, it caused another revolution.
The history of the printed circuit and the microprocessor is also the history of a technology that allowed engineers to squeeze more and more circuitry into a smaller and smaller space. It’s the history of the integrated circuit, which developed throughout the 1960s, evolved into large-scale integration by the early 1970s, very large-scale integration by the middle 1970s, just before the emergence of the first real personal computers, and ultra large-scale integration by the early 1980s. Today’s 200-plus-megahertz, multigigabyte hard-drive desktop computers are the results of the integrated-circuit technology that began in the 1960s and has continued to the present. The jump from the basic transistorized integrated printed circuit of the 1960s to large-scale integration was made possible by the development of the microprocessor in 1972.
The Day After Roswell Page 21