9781422283240

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oday, when many people carry Internet-en- abled smartphones in their pockets, it’s hard to imagine a time when computers were massive, room-sized machines used only by select uni- versities and government agencies. That era, however, was not all that far in the past. In 1936, Alan Tur- ing thought of what he characterized as a “universal ma- chine,” later called the Turing machine, which would be ca- pable of computing anything. Building on that concept less than a decade later, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, designed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), which took up an entire large room. Jump to the early 1960s when a prototype computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface that might

seem familiar to modern consumers is intro- duced by Stanford Research Institute engi- neer Douglas Engelbart. Suddenly, it seemed as though computers might one day be ac- cessible to the general public, rather than just to scientists and mathematicians working in academia or government posts. In the mid-1970s, desktop-sized per- sonal computers, including the wild- ly popular Radio Shack TRS-80, hit the market. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics talks about the Altair 8080, which came in ready-to-

Computers have come a long way!

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Black Achievement in Science: Computer Science