[...]... enhancements) that are made and sold for other applications Artificial Intelligence spans a wide range—from fairly prosaic applications in daily commercial use to philosophical questions about the nature of humanity What defines AI research is constantly changing: cheap pocket chess-playing machines are not AI, for example, but advanced chess playing by computer still is To paraphrase Alan Turing, the history. .. Edward Cannon of the U.S National Bureau of Standards in 19 48 Aiken made that remark as a member of a National Research Council committee that had just recommended that the Bureau of Standards not support J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly’s proposal to make and sell electronic computers (figure 1. 1) In Aiken’s view, a commercial market would never develop; in the United States there was a need for perhaps... chapters that follow it appears with more frequency In the 19 50s computer companies supplied system software as part of the price of a computer, and customers developed their own applications programs More than one purchaser of an early computing system winced at the army of systems analysts, programmers, and software specialists that had to be hired into the company to manage a machine that was supposed... only had the ENIAC but also the EDVAC, the ORDVAC (both electronic computers), an IBM Card Programmed Calculator (described next), and the Bell Labs Model V, a very large programmable relay calculator .14 The Card-Programmed Calculator The Aberdeen Relay Calculators never became a commercial product, but they reveal an attempt to adapt existing equipment to post–World War II needs, rather than take a revolutionary... hobbyists and enthusiasts transformed it into a personal appliance Around 19 80, it was transformed The Advent of Commercial Computing, 19 45 19 56 15 from a piece of specialized hardware to a standardized consumer product defined by its now-commercialized software In the 19 90s it is going through another transformation, turning into an agent of a worldwide nexus, a communications medium The ‘‘computer age’’—... too rich and complex to be summarized here, but a few aspects are particularly relevant to the history of computing One is that ‘‘inventors’’ include people who innovate in social, political, and economic, as well as in technical, arenas Sometimes the inventor of a piece of hardware is also the pioneer in these other arenas, and sometimes not Again and again in the history of computing, especially in... camp we find a glut of books and magazine articles about personal computer software companies, especially Microsoft, and the fortunes made in selling the DOS and Windows operating systems for PCs Some chronicle the history of UNIX, an influential operating system that has also had success in the commercial marketplace These accounts lack balance Readers are naturally interested in the enormous sums of. .. Mauchly’s background in physics and engineering That is, the flow of instructions and data in the UNIVAC mirrored the way humans using mechanical calculators, books of tables, and pencil and paper performed scientific calculations.3 Although the vacuum tube circuits might have appeared novel, a scientist or engineer would not have found anything unusual in the way a UNIVAC attacked a problem 16 Chapter... suppressed One was the unusually active role played by scientists and university researchers in supporting the effort .19 Another was the unique role that information, and by implication, information-handling machines, played Information or ‘‘intelligence’’ has been a crucial part of all warfare, but as a means to an end In the Cold War it became an end in itself This was a war of code-breaking, spy satellites,... through a machine were reduced to ‘ a batch of one [card], which was awkward.’ 18 In other words, with cables connecting the machines, the installation became one that executed instructions sequentially and was programmable in a more flexible way than plugging cables IBM later marketed a version of this ensemble as the CardProgrammed Calculator (CPC) .19 Perhaps several hundred in all were installed between . ‘‘Computer’’ 1 1 The Advent of Commercial Computing, 19 45 19 56 13 2 Computing Comes of Age, 19 56 19 64 47 3 The Early History of Software, 19 52 19 68 79 4 From Mainframe to Minicomputer, 19 59 19 69 10 9 5 The. Ada: A Life and a Legacy John Vardalas, The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence, 19 45 19 80 Maurice V. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer A History of Modern. class="bi x0 y0 w1 h0" alt=""