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The Birth of Atari, Modern Computer Design, And The Software Industry: This Week In Tech History

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June 27, 1846

The first telegraph link is established between New York City and Boston. From the AP Archives:

In the spring of 1846, Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), publisher of The New York Sun, establishes a pony express to deliver news of the Mexican War.  His pony express speeds dispatches ahead of the Great Southern Mail from Mobile to Montgomery, Alabama, where the mail coaches carry them 700 miles to the nearest telegraph point near Richmond, Virginia. In offering an equal interest in the express venture to the major New York City daily papers (four of whom accept), Beach effectively organizes what soon became known as The Associated Press. The papers that joined Beach’s venture were: The Journal of Commerce, The Courier and Enquirer, The New York Herald, and The Express. The first dispatches from the Mexican War are carried by the Sun on May 29, 1846.

Telegraphic communications between Washington and New York are established on June 5; the New York-Boston line goes into operation on June 27; and by summer’s end, the telegraph extends from New York to Albany and Buffalo, and from Philadelphia west to Harrisburg, creating a telegraph network. Editors now actively collect news as it breaks, rather than gather already published news.

As Richard John points out in Network Nation, the establishment in 1846 of the New York Associated Press (not the Associated Press, which descended from the Western Associated Press, a Chicago-based rival of the NYAP), was a reaction to the  New York and Offing Telegraph Association (Offing was the furthest point on the Atlantic horizon that was visible by telescope), a corporation with a special telegraph charter from the New York state legislature, owned and managed by Samuel Colt (of later small arms fame) and William Robinson. Richard John: “By publicizing the news gathering potential of the electric telegraph, [Colt and Robinson] challenged two powerful institutions: the Post Office Department and the New York City newspaper press.” And he quotes from a promotional pamphlet published by Colt and Robinson: “It is evident that the system of telegraphing news is destined to supersede, in a great degree, the publication of commercial newspapers in this and other northern cities.”

Newspapers survived the telegraph and the telephone, partly because of successful monopolistic business practices (as exemplified, among many other examples, by the NYAP in the 1880s), and mostly because of the invention of mass advertising. Will they survive the Internet?

June 27, 1972

Atari, Inc. a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers, is founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.

Harry McCracken in “Atari at 40: Catching Up with Founder Nolan Bushnell,” TIME, June 27, 2012:

At first, when Bushnell and Dabney were trying to turn Spacewar! into a commercial product, their plans involved trying to use Data General’s Nova, a minicomputer which started at a remarkably low $3,995. “The epiphany moment in the quest,” he explains, “was when I discovered that I could do these games without using a minicomputer.”

“I’ll bet I can do this whole game in hardware,” he remembers telling himself. He could, and did. It’s inaccurate to call Computer Space, Pong, Breakout and other early Atari arcade machines “computer games”–no computer was involved. Instead, they used dedicated chips and discrete logic. (Midway’s 1975 Gun Fight was the first arcade game to use a microprocessor.)

Videogames have gotten far more grandiose since the early days of Atari, but it’s not entirely clear whether they’ve gotten any more entertaining. Decades later, the industry is still milking the same concepts, except with fancier graphics and more levels…

During Atari’s peak years, it wasn’t just synonymous with videogames. It was the archetypal Silicon Valley success story, period. An entire category of tech-savvy politicians, such as vice-president-to-be Al Gore, were known as Atari Democrats. The company basked in Apple-like fame before Apple was famous.

And if it weren’t for Atari, there might not have been an Apple, at least in the form we know. Steve Jobs’ first real job after he dropped out of Reed College was at Atari; he worked there off and on from 1974 until he and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976. His time there was the closest thing he had to a business education, and Bushnell–an idea machine and a showman as much as a technologist–was a role model…

Atari was also a prototype for Apple and other Silicon Valley startups in another way: It boomed despite Bushnell’s youth, inexperience and lack of resources. He was 29 when he and Dabney started it, and his background consisted of his engineering degree, a stint as a journeyman employee at legendary Silicon Valley firm Ampex and the ill-fated Computer Space adventure. Legend has it that the founders’ initial investment was $500. (Dabney left Atari one year after its founding.)

“Atari showed that young people could start big companies,” Bushnell argues. “Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.”

June 29, 1888

Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, makes a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London, of a 3016-person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the phonograph. It was the first “field” recording outside of a studio.

June 29, 1969

IBM announces that it will begin to charge for software and services that were previously included in the price of leasing or buying its computers. This is how IBM describes the decision in the IBM Archives:

IBM adopts a new marketing policy that charges separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This "unbundling" gives rise to a multibillion-dollar software and services industry.

Watts S. Humphrey, an IBM executive at the time of IBM’s momentous decision, recalled in a talk to the Charles Babbage Institute conference on unbundling on September 23, 2000: “Management had decided that unbundling was needed for competitive reasons as well as to prevent an antitrust lawsuit.” Humphrey concluded:

Throughout my career as a computer architect, system designer, and software development manager, our system design decisions have steadily moved system control functions from the software into the hardware. As the cost and performance of hardware has improved, these hardware-software tradeoff decisions have changed. With unbundling, such tradeoffs are potentially more difficult. By unbundling systems programs, we have imposed an artificial barrier to the advancement of technology.

As long as the same organization offers the hardware and system software, and as long as the two are procured and used together, unbundling will not likely cause technical problems. However, the purpose of unbundling is to create separable markets and thereby inject economic and competitive considerations into the suppliers’ and users’ engineering and business decisions. If this was not the intent, then unbundling was unnecessary and should not have been done. While this separation was almost certainly IBM’s intent at the time of unbundling, in retrospect, I do not believe that the implications were clearly understood.

It will likely take some time for the full consequences of this unbundling decision to become evident. When they are, I believe that the decisions to unbundle application programs and systems engineering will be seen as positive but that unbundling systems programs will ultimately be recognized as a mistake.

Not “unbundling systems programs” has certainly worked well for Apple. But I’m not sure it would have worked for IBM when it entered the PC market.

June 30, 1945

“A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” is published.  Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray call it in Computer: A History of the Information Machine “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In The History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi says it “is often cited as the founding document of modern computing.”

More recently, Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope describe it in ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer as “the most influential document in the history of computer design.” They write:

[Herman] Goldstein circulated a mimeographed version of the report in June, taking advantage of its unclassified status to distribute it quite widely. Initially, 31 copies were sent out… The circulated version had von Neumann’s name and a date of June 30 on the cover and gave no credit to other members of the EDVAC team… Rather than reading the First Draft as the presentation of a single “stored program concept,” we see in it three distinct clusters of ideas… Each of these paradigms can be seen as a fairly direct response to ENIAC’s shortcomings: its size and complexity, its small temporary storage capability, and the difficulty of setting it up for new problems… John von Neumann was not aesthete, but his intellectual response to ENIAC might be likened to that of a Calvinist zealot who, having taken charge of a gaudy cathedral, goes to work whitewashing frescos and lopping off ornamental flourishes.

The Calvinist approach to computer design, what became to be known as the “von Neumann Architecture,” separated the processing of information from its storage, leading to an ongoing imbalance between the speed of the computer’s storage unit and the speed of its processing unit, each advancing along different technological trajectories. From the rise of computer storage-focused companies such as EMC to the invention of the Google File System (later inspiring “big data” foundational technologies MapReduce and Hadoop), the history of the computer industry has revolved around the trade-offs between where and how data is stored and where and how it is processed and manipulated. 

July 1, 1886

The first Linotype machine in the U.S. is installed at the Tribune newspaper in New York City. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a Linotype machine could produce five lines per minute compared to the one line per minute typically produced by typesetters. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Mark Twain, who lost a great deal of money investing in an automatic typesetting machine, suggested its value when he wrote that a Linotype ‘could work like six men and do everything but drink, swear, and go out on strike.’”

July 1, 1890

Two thousand clerks begin processing the results of the 1890 U.S. Census, employing ninety-six of Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines, using a punched card system where a hole punched in a specific place on the card signified a fact about an individual. The information on the population of the United States (62,947,714 in 1890) was processed in one year, compared to the eight years it took to process the 1880 Census. Kevin Maney in Making the World Work Better: “Hollerith gave computers a way to sense the world through a crude form of touch... amazingly, for six more decades computers would experience the outside way no other way.”

Reactions to the improved sensing—and quantifying—of the world have also remained the same for a long time, at least as far as politicians were concerned.

In 1891, the Electrical Engineer reported:

The statement by Mr. Porter [the head of the Census Bureau, announcing the initial count of the 1890 census] that the population of this great republic was only 62,622,250 sent into spasms of indignation a great many people who had made up their minds that the dignity of the republic could only be supported on a total of 75,000,000. Hence there was a howl, not of ‘deep-mouthed welcome,’ but of frantic disappointment.  And then the publication of the figures for New York! Rachel weeping for her lost children and refusing to be comforted was a mere puppet-show compared with some of our New York politicians over the strayed and stolen Manhattan Island citizens.

In 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau delivered “New York’s 2010 Census population totals, including first look at race and hispanic origin data for legislative redistricting.” In response to the census data showing that New York had about 200,000 less people than originally thought, Sen. Chuck Schumer said, “The Census Bureau has never known how to count urban populations and needs to go back to the drawing board. It strains credulity to believe that New York City has grown by only 167,000 people over the last decade.” Mayor Bloomberg called the numbers “totally incongruous,” Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz said “I know they made a big big mistake.”

 

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