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Or the more tragic and infuriating question: "What would current computing be like if Alan Turing hadn't been driven to suicide?"
by Sangermaine 8y ago
Or the more tragic and infuriating question: "What would current computing be like if Alan Turing hadn't been driven to suicide?"
- Animats 8y agoProbably like the IBM 600 series of business computers. One step at a time. IBM 601 (1936) - mechanical multiplication, punched card I/O IBM 602 (1946) - mechanical multiply and divide IBM 603 (1946) - first commercial electronic arithmetic, a vacuum tube-based 602 IBM 604 (1948) - Next-gen 603, a limited computer programmed with a plugboard board IBM 605 (1949) - a bigger 604 IBM CPC (1949) - An IBM 605 with peripherals - card reader, card punch, memory units, printer. IBM 607 (1953) - The CPC in more compact packaging with more memory. IBM 650 (1953) - First real computer in this series. First mass-produced computer. Drum main memory. First disks. Knuth learned on one of those. IBM 1401 (1957) - Transistorized, core memory computer. Not much memory, but good tape drives. Mass produced. This was cost-effective computing for business. There was other stuff going on in parallel, but most of it was military-funded. These machines ran business and had to pay. The big problem was memory cost. Everybody knew more memory would make more things possible, but memory was a million dollars a megabyte well into the 1960s.