Code_ The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold [90]
It wasn't until the mid-1950s that magnetic core memory was developed. Such memory consisted of large arrays of little magnetized metal rings strung with wires. Each little ring could store a bit of information. Long after core memory had been replaced by other technologies, it was common to hear older programmers refer to the memory that the processor accessed as core.
John von Neumann wasn't the only person doing some major conceptual thinking about the nature of computers in the 1940s.
Claude Shannon (born 1916) was another influential thinker. In Chapter 11, I discussed his 1938 master's thesis, which established the relationship between switches, relays, and Boolean algebra. In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously.
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard at the age of 18, is most famous for his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948). He coined the word cybernetics (derived from the Greek for steersman) to identify a theory that related biological processes in humans and animals to the mechanics of computers and robots. In popular culture, the ubiquitous cyber-prefix now denotes anything related to the computer. Most notably, the interconnection of millions of computers through the Internet is known as cyberspace, a word coined by cyberpunk sciencefiction novelist William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer.
In 1948, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (later part of Remington Rand) began work on what would become the first commercially available computer—the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC. It was completed in 1951, and the first one was delivered to the Bureau of the Census. The UNIVAC made its prime-time network debut on CBS, when it was used to predict results of the 1952 presidential election. Walter Cronkite referred to it as an "electronic brain." Also in 1952, IBM announced the company's first commercial computer system, the 701.
And thus began a long history of corporate and governmental computing. However interesting that history might be, we're going to pursue another historical track—a track that shrank the cost and size of computers and brought them into the home, and which began with an almost unnoticed electronics breakthrough in 1947.
Bell Telephone Laboratories was for many years a place where smart people could work on just about anything that interested them. Some of them, fortunately, were interested in computers. I've already mentioned George Stibitz and Claude Shannon, both of whom made significant contributions to early computing while working at Bell Labs. Later on, in the 1970s, Bell Labs was the birthplace of the influential computer operating system named Unix and a programming language named C, which I'll describe in upcoming chapters.
Bell Labs came about when American Telephone and Telegraph officially separated