There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early el

There used to be a fairly standard history that started with Jacquard loom punched cards, moved along to Hollerith's census processor, then through the early electronic versions of same, perhaps via a flashback to the telegraph. Then the first valve-based stored program computers after WWII ("incredibly unreliable"), and the transistor revolution which made reliable computing possible, via punched cards and DECtape. Then command-line timesharing, graphic systems, workstations, GUIs, and the rest, through to the 90s. It felt like a very logical and connected progression. Anyone in the business would be familiar with it, if only in overview. The UK had a preview of commodity computing with its cheap 8-bit micro scene in the early 80s. In the US computers remained far too expensive to be widely used. That seemed to change in the late 90s. Computing came to mean desktop and eventually handheld devices connected to the Internet. There were - still are - supercomputers, but they're a tiny niche. It became about commodity hardware appliances for commodity users with commodity software and tooling. The software also became appliance-ised. In a sense computing stopped having a history, in the same way other consumer goods like fridges, cars, and microwaves don't have a history. (Of course they do, but no one thinks about it while using them or buying them.) It was a huge and under-noted cultural shift. The next shift - AI - is already happening, and I'll guess we'll see the same lack of interest in "manual" computing history from the 1990s to the 2020s when AI-assisted computing becomes mundane and pervasive.