Computational Mind, Part 3

Note: This series of posts isn't meant to be a technical computers for dummies guide. Quite the opposite. The conclusion will be very non-technical. I just need to get a few details out of the way first.

This is a picture of The ENIAC.

ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was the first fully electronic computer. It was built in 1946 to calculate artillery firing tables for the Army. It had over 17,000 vacuum tubes and it weighed 27 tons. It took 36 vacuum tubes to represent one digit in a number. After the system had been optimized, vacuum tubes failed an average of once every two days and were generally replaced within 15 minutes. A lot of starting over went on. It was advertised that ENIAC could do in two hours what it took engineers two years to do with pencil and paper. I guess it depends on the problem, but that sounds a little far-fetched to me. In any case, a simple pocket calculator can do more work in a fraction of a second than ENIAC could do in a day.

This is a picture of an IBM System 360, circa 1965.

It was built with a combination of transistors and integrated circuits. It had 1/8000th as much memory as your 8GB iPhone. It could do about 35,000 mathematical operations in one second. Your laptop, assuming it was built in the last five years, can do several billion in a second. Recent high end processors can do several trillion. It cost over a million dollars to buy a System 360.

In the late 1960s, people began to talk about having computers in the home. At that point, it verged on science fiction. Obviously, it was beyond the reach of the common man to have something that cost over a million dollars and was the size of a Volkswagen beetle in his living room. The closest anyone could come was buying time from the owner of the computer. It was called time sharing, not to be confused with its despicable namesake. You had to use one of these to connect to it.

And one of these to talk to it.

Still not very practical for Joe Sixpack, and time on a computer was expensive. Home computers would have to stay in the realm of imagination for a while to come.

In 1971, a California semiconductor startup company called Intel introduced the first microprocessor. The processor, sometimes called the CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the computer's "brain." It does all of the mathematical operations that make a computer compute. The ENIAC had one. The IBM System 360 had one. In the ENIAC, it took up most of a room. In the System 360, it was the size of a small refrigerator. Intel's first microprocessor was about the size of a quarter.

Granted, the use of a computer built with one or two of these was very limited, but in 1972, Intel introduced the 8008 microprocessor, which was a fully functional 8 bit processor. Add some memory and a way to get in and out of it, and you had a pretty decent little computer. It still wasn't as fast as a System 360, but it cost a minuscule fraction of its bigger cousin. It also consumed a minuscule fraction of the power. About the same amount of power as all of the light bulbs in your house combined.

Now, you could build a fully functional computer that took up about as much space as your microwave. The idea of having a computer in your house just left the realm of science fiction and entered the realm of "real soon now." Several other venerable electronics companies jumped in to the world of microprocessors with both feet.

Backing up a bit, there were desktop computers around before the advent of the microprocessor, but they were expensive and not very functional. The actual home computer had to wait for the microprocessor.

In 1977, Commodore began selling its PET personal computers, the first "home" computer.

Very shortly after that, a company that started in the basement of one of the partners' grandmother introduced the Apple II. Bringing up the rear, IBM introduced its PC, or personal computer. For a couple thousand dollars, you could have a fully functioning, reasonably powerful computer in your home. By the way, that's almost $8,000 in 2014 dollars.

Fast forward to today, and the landscape is very, very different. First, Intel owns all but a fraction of the commercial microprocessor market. Second, the company that created the system that made the IBM PCs go, Microsoft, owns the vast majority of the home computer software market. Intel makes this, the Xeon processor.

It's about half the size of a credit card. It has more processing power than a million ENIACS and several tens of thousands of IBM System 360s. Hundreds of these are combined into supercomputers that have processing power completely outside the realm of imagination of ENIAC's creators. Supercomputers that can solve complex problems in under a second that would have taken the IBM System 360 hours, days, or even weeks to solve. Processors like these solve engineering problems like flying to Mars in hours. Humanity can "think" faster than it has ever been able to.

Except that we can't, really.

Up next: Artificial intelligence.