Chapter 1 - A Mad Dash Through History

Before we start, let’s consider a highly compressed synopsis of the computer industry’s self-immolating and resurrecting history to set the book’s timeline and a few overarching trends. Information Technology began modestly enough in 1822 when Charles Babbage introduced a forerunner to the computer with his beautifully handcrafted electromechanical calculator. Herman Hollerith pushed the still-fuzzy concept a key step closer to what we now know as the computer with his punch-card tabulating equipment. First used in the 1890 census, punch cards were gradually adopted for business use. Two decades later, Hollerith was able to sell his tabulating business for the then princely sum of $1 million, assuring his comfortable retirement.

Heading up the group of entrepreneurs that made Hollerith a wealthy man in 1911 was the pioneering Charles Flint, who merged a time-clock company and a scales company with the tabulating business to form the Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R. It was this entity that CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. would rechristen as International Business Machines in 1924. And when James Rand Jr. bought Porter Punch, a small tabulating company, a year later, he initiated a nose-to-nose sparring match between his Remington Rand and Watson’s IBM that would survive for sixty years.

Though Hollerith punch cards became indispensable to various business operations, the decks were prone to flightiness as cards were lost, missorted, and otherwise abused. One well-traveled tale concerned cards soaked in a water-pipe break and then dried in the oven of a friendly pizza joint.

The first actual computers were built from vacuum tubes during World War II; the Brits built the Colossus, and two fellows from the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, came up with the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). Meanwhile, IBM was sponsoring Howard Aiken’s construction of the Mark I at Harvard. Essentially a giant electromechanical tabulating device, the Mark I’s first programmer was Grace Murray Hopper, a phenomenon in her own right.

Hopper was a mathematician, physicist, serial innovator, and U.S. Navy Captain, a rank attained after she joined the Naval Reserve to support her country in wartime. During these early days, when even one of her multiple accomplishments was considered unusual for a woman, Hopper recalled a summer evening in Cambridge when the lab doors had been left open to dissipate the day’s heat. When the computer choked the next morning, a moth was found caught in one of its electromechanical switches—“the first bug,” she later quipped, and, indeed, she is widely credited with discovering exactly that.