of high repute in their own field accidentally encounter a group of telephone engineers, of all people… and they found the one really enthusiastic expert in the form of Flowers, who had a good team with him, and made these jobs possible, with I think a lot of mutual respect on both sides. And the Post Office was able to supply the men, the material and the maintenance, without any trouble, which is a great tribute to the men and the organization.48
Turing’s biographer and fellow-mathematician, Andrew Hodges, records that Colossus was built with extraordinary speed and worked almost perfectly, first time: ‘an astonishing fact for those trained in the conventional wisdom. But in 1943 it was possible both to think and do the impossible before breakfast.’49 The GPO team worked so fast that much of the first Colossus ended up being paid for, not by the government, but by Flowers himself, out of his own salary.50
But as soon as the War was over these men were sent back to their regular work and could make no further contribution to computing, or even talk about what they had done, until the secret finally emerged in the 1970s. As Flowers later told Randell: ‘It was a great time in my life – it spoilt me for when I came back to mundane things with ordinary people.’
…BUT TOOK COMPUTING DOWN THE WRONG PATH
The ENIAC was nearly a dead end for almost the opposite reason. Its designers, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, were so intent on being successful capitalists that they nearly buried the project themselves. Unlike Colossus, ENIAC gained public recognition but, as the Dutch computer scientist and historian Maarten van Emden has argued, the rapid commercialization that its makers had in mind could have turned it into a ‘revolution that didn’t happen’51 had it not been for the fortuitous and somewhat unwelcome involvement of the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann who (by further fortuitous connections, including discussions years earlier with Alan Turing in Cambridge) was able to relate what he saw to other, apparently quite unrelated and abstruse areas of mathematics and logic.
Eckert and Mauchly seem not to have understood von Neumann’s idea which, nonetheless, von Neumann was able to publish, to their annoyance, free of patent restrictions, in the widely circulated report on ENIAC’s successor, the EDVAC. This report effectively kept computer development alive, and out of the hands of normal capitalist enterprise, which (as Van Emden argues) would then have smothered it. He writes that:
Without von Neumann’s intervention, Eckert and Mauchly could have continued in their intuitive ad-hoc fashion to quickly make EDVAC a success. They would also have entangled the first stored-program computer in a thicket of patents, one for each ad hoc solution. Computing would have taken off slowly while competitors chipped away at the initial monopoly of the Eckert-Mauchly computer company. We would not have experienced the explosive development made possible by the early emergence of a design that, because of its simplicity and abstractness, thrived under upheaval after upheaval in electronics.
Von Neumann’s idea – the ‘von Neumann architecture’ – specified a central unit for doing arithmetic; a memory store shared by the program instructions, the data to be worked on and intermediate results; and a control unit to initiate each step of the program, copying data and instructions alternately from and back to memory in a ‘fetch-execute cycle’, as well as receiving input from a keyboard (or other input) and passing it back to a printer (or other output). The system is robust and comprehensible because it does just one thing at a time, in step with a timing pulse or ‘clock’. This turned out to have surprisingly expensive consequences, as computers began to be applied to tasks never envisaged in the 1940s: taking photographs and movies, playing music, and so on… as we shall see later on, in Chapter 11.
Von Neumann’s design is still the basis of nearly all modern computers, and the whole computer revolution might not have happened, had it not been for his freakishly broad interests, his unwanted intervention in Eckert and Mauchly’s business, and then his airy disregard of commercial propriety in circulating his specification. This proved a lucky break for capitalism, despite itself.
More and more powerful machines became possible thanks to von Neumann’s disruptive presence, but capitalist firms still resolutely had nothing to do with their development unless all of the costs were underwritten by governments. As for using computers themselves, they had to be coaxed endlessly, like recalcitrant children, before they would even try what was good for them. Computer development remained utterly dependent on government support for decades.
In his 1987 study for the Brookings Institute, Kenneth Flamm estimated that in 1950 more than 75 per cent of US computer development funding had come from the government, and any commercial investments were largely made in anticipation of lucrative defense contracts. One such contract financed development of IBM’s 701 machine – originally known as ‘The Defense Calculator’. IBM’s commitment to computers was built on guaranteed returns from military projects. A decade later, in 1961, the US government was still funding twice as much computer research as the private sector did, and this remained largely the pattern through the Cold War era. Another historian, Paul Edwards, has wondered whether digital computers would even have survived had it not been for the Cold War.52
Personal computers (from which iPhones and their like are descended) might have remained a quaint, hobbyist idea had today’s commercial norms been in place in the 1970s. The idea was shaped to a great extent by political activists opposed to big business and the military,53 and the world of business scorned them until the first computer spreadsheet (the ‘magic piece of paper’ that recalculates your sums for you, when you change any of the figures) appeared in 1979. This was Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, which he wrote for the Apple II computer, giving it a desperately needed foothold in the business market. Bricklin did not patent the spreadsheet idea – and could not have done until two years later, by which time the idea had been picked up by other software companies. The excitement about spreadsheets contributed to IBM’s hurried but decisive decision to enter the personal computer market in 1981.
When firms finally discovered the computer’s benefits, there was a competitive frenzy. As I will argue in later chapters, this led to a wholesale restructuring and concentration of the economy that somehow yielded very little beneficial effect on standards of living, but a great increase in human inequalities and impacts.
Many firms fell by the wayside along with whole areas of employment. So, too, did whole areas of technical possibility. As firms started to make money from selling computers, competitive development proceeded at such breakneck speed that attempts to open up new architectural possibilities were bypassed before they could be made ready for general use. We will look at some of these in later chapters.
Market forces effected a swift and radical simplification of what people thought of as ‘the computer’, forcing its development to be channelled along a single, very narrow path. As we will see, von Neumann architecture became the ‘only show in town’ – a development that would have made von Neumann himself despair, and which has had surprising environmental consequences. The rich diversity of technologies that characterized computing before that time evaporated, leaving a single, extremely inefficient technology to serve everything from mobile phones to audio equipment to financial markets. The computer revolution, which promised to enrich human lives and reduce human impacts, and could certainly have done so, in the event did the exact opposite.
1 ‘Another suicide at Foxconn after boss attempts damage control’, China Labour Bulletin, 27 May 2010, nin.tl/FoxconnCLB (retrieved 01/06/2010).
2 Nick Cohen, ‘How much do you really want an iPad?’ The Observer, 30 May 2010.
3 Milanovic, Williamson and Lindert, ‘Measuring Ancient Inequality’, NBER working paper, October 2007.
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