The Dawn of the Computer Age

SINCE PAST IS PROLOGUE, I begin this look at the contemporary reception of IT with a view from the year 1941, the beginning of an era full of promise, but also rich with concerns when it came to the new “thinking machines.” We begin in this year because, as the reader will recall, it was the year in which Konrad Zuse completed his Z3 in Germany — “the first fully-automatic, program driven and freely programmable computer that used binary floating point computation” (Dietz 21). Zuse's computer was followed in close succession by the British mathematician Alan Turing's universal machine, realized in the form of Colossus — the machine hero of the Second World War — in 1943. And in the United States, two years later, John von Neumann, John Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, and their colleagues at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering defined the state of the art with the thirty-ton ENIAC — a grotesquely monstrous and slow machine by today's standards. This computer consisted of thirty separate units made of nearly 1,500 transistors, more than one hundred thousand resistors, inductors and capacitors, and 18,000 vacuum tubes, all of which provided a speed of logical switching never before seen in the nascent world of computing.