Lars Nielsen - Computing: A Business History

"Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics."
- Stewart Brand, "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," fifth anniversary issue of Rolling Stone , December 7, 1972

The years since 1946 have seen one of the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind. In less than seven decades, computer technology has advanced from the primitive and cumbersome ENIAC mainframe to the compact and elegant PC, thence to the extensive personal and business use of the Internet, and finally to a point where things digital have become a fundamental part of society's DNA. "Computing is not about computers anymore," writes Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. "It is about living."

During these years, the speed of digital innovation grew in step with its ambition and - no small thing - excellence. It also moved at the speed of Moore's Law (first articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in 1965). According to Moore's Law - which proved to be a quite accurate prediction - the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years going forward. This exponential improvement in processing capacity, which only grew more rapid with the adoption of the silicon chip in the 1970s, has provided the vital foundation on which all digital innovation (requiring ever-increasing processing speed and memory capacity) has been based.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and most other great innovators of the new digital era had not yet even been born as of 1949, the year Popular Mechanics breathlessly and ambitiously predicted: "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Coming into the world during the mid-1950s, these future technologists and entrepreneurs grew up during the period of America's greatest historical prosperity - a time of profound excellence in education, and a time of robust corporate growth (in part enabled by, and in part itself enabling the development and broad-based adoption of early business data systems). Indeed the greatest looming corporate success story of the 1950s and 1960s was IBM. Despite Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate being advised to go into "plastics," most young people coming of age in educated households during the 1960s were actually advised to look toward something quite different: computers.

The revolution was on , and no number of nay-sayers could stop it. "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processings [sic] is a fad that won't last out the year." So said Prentice-Hall's editor-in-chief for business books in 1957. "But what ... is it good for?" asked an engineer at IBM's Advanced Computing Systems Division when confronted with the idea of the microchip in 1968. As late as the 1980s, technologist Ken Olsen, cofounder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was heard to insist: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

In the end, the greatest of all digital innovations - the personal computer - evolved from without the corporate culture, rather than within - a product of the Woodstock generation. "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you,'" recalls Steve Jobs. "And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" And so it went.

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Ultimately, the history of business computing is characterized by great successive creative leaps of [informed] imagination: of thinking outside the veritable box; of intellectual bootstrapping from one paradigm to another, the latter always (or nearly always) an improvement. (It is prudent to remember Woody Allen's famous comment with reference to comedy: "If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.")

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower," notes Jobs. To this, Bill Gates adds: "Never before, in history, has innovation offered the promise of so much to so many in so short a time." And that innovation is nowhere near over. "The Web as I envisaged it," writes its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, "we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past."

In chronicling the first six and a half decades of the digital revolution, this volume comprises what will be, in the final analysis, but the beginning in a far longer tale than we can today imagine. Shakespeare told us that what is past is but prologue. Here, then, is one man's version of that prologue.

Lars Nielsen, 1 July 2011

Amsterdam, Holland