This week’s milestones in the history of technology include the first demonstration of remote computing, the first integrated circuit, the first disk drive, and the launch of the Data Discman and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
September 11, 1940
In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College, George Stibitz of AT&T use a teletype terminal to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telegraph lines. It was the first demonstration of remote computation. Today, cloud computing is a $246.8 billion market and close to 4 billion people worldwide engage in remote access to computation, communications, and information.
September 12, 1958
Jack Kilby demonstrates the world’s first integrated circuit to his colleagues at Texas Instruments (TI). Kilby received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit."
September 12, 1991
Sony introduces the Data Discman, a handheld computer that can operate on small compact discs. Price: $550.
September 13, 1983
The Osborne Computer Corporation declares bankruptcy. The Osborne I, the first portable computer, was designed by company founder Adam Osborne. It weighed twenty-four pounds, had a five-inch display, 64KB of memory, a modem, two 5¼-inch floppy disk drives, and cost $1,795.
September 14, 1956
IBM announces the 305 and 650 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) “data processing machines,” incorporating the first-ever disk storage product. The 305 came with fifty 24-inch disks for a total capacity of 5 megabytes, weighed 1 ton, and could be leased for $3,200 per month.
In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better information storage medium than punch-cards. Visiting a number of customers, Critchlow learned that punch-card equipment performed well when the processing of information could be done in batches or sequentially stored information but became problematic when random access was needed.
Inventory control was such an activity. In warehouse operations, for example, each order typically required several cards to be manually located, removed from a stack of cards, the inventory information updated, and the updated cards returned to their original locations. To facilitate this activity, drawers of cards were set out on work tables so that several people could access cards from the same file. This manner of organizing and processing information, widely known as the “tub file,” was time consuming and error-prone.
The IBM project’s staff evaluated every existing storage technology in an attempt to find the best technological solution to the loss of productivity and poor quality associated with “tub files.” In addition to superior capacity and reliability, the storage technology eventually selected, magnetic disks, could provide random access to information. A new method (encoded in software) for finding stored information when its physical location on the disk was unknown, ensured the success of the new way to store, organize, and share business records.
Announced on September 4, 1956, the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit came with fifty 24-inch disks and a total capacity of 5 megabytes; its first customer was United Airlines’ reservations system. Incorporated into the 305 and 650 RAMAC (announced ten days later), it promised, as the IBM press release said, “that business transactions will be completely processed right after they occur. There will be no delays while data is grouped for batch processing. People running a business will be able to get the fresh facts they need, at once. Random access memory equipment will not only revolutionize punched card accounting but also magnetic tape accounting.” Later, it was exhibited at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, where visitors could query “Professor RAMAC” using a keyboard and get answers in any of ten languages. This public relations coup heralded a day when millions of people would access and retrieve information from the largest tub file ever assembled – the World Wide Web.
The RAMAC became obsolete within a few years of its introduction as the vacuum tubes powering it were replaced by transistors. Today, disk drives still serve as the containers for almost all digital information, but solid-state drives (flash memory) used in mobile devices are increasingly replacing disk drives even in today’s successors of the RAMAC, serving large enterprises.
Whatever form the storage takes, IBM created in 1956 new markets and businesses based on fast access to digital data. As Seagate’s Mark Kryder argued in 2006: “Instead of Silicon Valley, they should call it Ferrous Oxide Valley. It wasn’t the microprocessor that enabled the personal video recorder, it was storage. It’s enabling new industries.”
September 15, 1947
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery at a meeting at Columbia University in New York. The notice for the first meeting of the association stated: "The purpose of this organization would be to advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information."
