MAKING THE MODERN WORLD

During the late 20th century there was a dramatic shift from expensive mainframe computers which occupied whole rooms, to personal machines that are networked together to form a powerful tool for communication. How did this major multinational industry grow from university research and a few kids trying to impress each other with their programming skills? And what did the defense industry have to do with it? This is the extraordinary story of how a bunch of nerds with little business experience made up the rules as they went along, ending up creating the personal computing industry that exists today and transforming our global communications landscape In the 1950s powerful computing machines were used in America, the Soviet Union and other developed countries. They were hugely expensive but they offered unequalled processing power for academic and military research. Access to these machines was limited, so researchers started ‘time-sharing’. This meant that users could simultaneously access a mainframe computer through a series of terminals, although individually they had only a fraction of the computer’s actual power at their command.
As the number of central computers grew, with a corresponding number of users, a serious need arose for networking between them. This coincided with a Cold War fear in the US that they needed to develop a communications system that could not be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was founded in 1958, funded by the US Department of Defense. Among its projects was a remit to test the feasibility of a large-scale computer network, and so it invited a number of American computer hosts to join ARPANET. This network of a few mainframe machines formed the foundations of the Internet and later linked with similar networks across the world, such as ALOHA net in Hawaii.