John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their team built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1946, the first modern stored-program electronic computer. They built it primarily to design weapons during the Second World War. Since then, computers have entered every facet of our daily life. Nowadays, we use computers extensively to process data in banks, government offices, and commercial establishments. We use them to book train tickets, airline tickets, and hotel rooms. They control systems such as satellites and moon landers in real-time. They create complex graphics and animation. They synthesize speech and music. They write essays and draw pictures. They control Robots. Publishers use them as tools. They are used to play video games. Many devices, such as audio and video tape recorders and film cameras, have died and been replaced by digital devices. They have eliminated many jobs, such as type-setters, and created new jobs, such as programmers, requiring better skills. It is fascinating to trace this history. This book recounts the history of modern computing as a sequence of seventy-two anecdotes, beginning with how engineers at the University of Pennsylvania built the modern stored program computer ENIAC in 1946 and ends with the story of the evolution of ChatGPT and Gemini, the generative large language model neural network released between 2022 and 2024 that give natural language answers to natural language questions, write essays, compose poems, and write computer programs. The anecdotes in this book are short. Each anecdote is between 1500 and... See more
John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their team built ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1946, the first modern stored-program electronic computer. They built it primarily to design weapons during the Second World War. Since then, computers have entered every facet of our daily life. Nowadays, we use computers extensively to process data in banks, government offices, and commercial establishments. We use them to book train tickets, airline tickets, and hotel rooms. They control systems such as satellites and moon landers in real-time. They create complex graphics and animation. They synthesize speech and music. They write essays and draw pictures. They control Robots. Publishers use them as tools. They are used to play video games. Many devices, such as audio and video tape recorders and film cameras, have died and been replaced by digital devices. They have eliminated many jobs, such as type-setters, and created new jobs, such as programmers, requiring better skills. It is fascinating to trace this history. This book recounts the history of modern computing as a sequence of seventy-two anecdotes, beginning with how engineers at the University of Pennsylvania built the modern stored program computer ENIAC in 1946 and ends with the story of the evolution of ChatGPT and Gemini, the generative large language model neural network released between 2022 and 2024 that give natural language answers to natural language questions, write essays, compose poems, and write computer programs. The anecdotes in this book are short. Each anecdote is between 1500 and 2500 words and recounts the story of an important invention in the evolution of modern computing and the people who innovated. There are seventy-two anecdotes in this book. The anecdotes cover the history of computer hardware, software, applications, computer communications, and artificial intelligence. The set of anecdotes on hardware systems describes, among others, the history of the evolution of computers, such as the IBM 701, CDC 6600, IBM 360 family, Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series, Apple – the early personal computer, and Atlas – a pioneering British computer, IBM PC, Connection Machine, Cray series supercomputers, computing cluster Beowulf, IBM Roadrunner – the fastest and the most expensive ($ 600 million) computer in the World in 2022, Raspberry Pi – the cheapest ($35) computer. The group of anecdotes on software describes the evolution of Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Compatible Time-shared systems, Unix, CP/M OS, MS-DOS, Project MAC, and open-source software movement, among others. Some anecdotes are on computer applications, such as Data Base Management Systems (DBMS), spreadsheets, cryptography, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The anecdotes on computer communications recount the evolution of computer communication networks, such as ALOHAnet, Ethernet, ARPANET, and the Internet, among others. The anecdotes on Artificial Intelligence (AI) start with "Who coined the word Artificial Intelligence?" and recounts early chess-playing programs, the evolution of neural networks, Expert Systems, and the history of chatbots and Robots. These anecdotes are similar to a short story collection. A reader may read them in any order. Each anecdote is self-contained, and readers may read the one that interests them. The language used in the book is simple, with no jargon. Anyone with a high school education can understand the material in this book.
