Member-only story
How Software Systems are Just Like They Were 80 Years Ago
Mainframes -> PCs -> Cloud
The First Mechanized “Computers”
A history lesson on computers would be remiss without mentioning who the first computers were.
Women.
Women who were very good at doing complicated math by hand. These women would compute things like the trajectories of spacecraft or ordinance fired by military craft. If you haven’t seen Hidden Figures, it’s worth it because it gets at the divide between the “scientists” (men) and the “computers” (women, and black women in this specific instance).
While these women were effective, there was always the desire to go faster, and advances in machines resulted in the first mechanized computers.
Warehouse sized computers, like ENIAC and the Mark II. Their logic units were these big boxy elements called vacuum tubes, a pre-silicon transistor that allowed these computers to simply do what the women computers before them had done, albeit a bit faster.
They worked with an existing input/output system, the punch card. This hard to use piece of technology is why standard terminal sizes are only 80 characters, as this was the number of columns a punch card had.
