1902 AD |
|
| In 1902, a young electrical engineer called Frank Pearne approached Mr. Joy Morton, the president of the well-known Morton Salt Company. Pearne had been experimenting with printing telegraphs and needed a sponsor. Morton discussed the situation with his friend, the distinguished mechanical engineer Charles L. Krum, and they eventually decided they were interested in pursuing this project. | ||
| a | ||
| After a year of unsuccessful experiments, Pearne lost interest and wandered off into the sunset to become a teacher. Krum continued to investigate the problem and, in 1906, was joined by his son Howard, who had recently graduated as an electrical engineer. The mechanical and electrical talents of the Krums Senior and Junior complemented each other. After solving the problem of synchronizing the transmitter and receiver, they oversaw their first installation on postal lines between New York City and Boston in the summer of 1910. | These devices, called teleprinters, had a typewriter-style keyboard for entering outgoing messages and a roll of paper for printing incoming messages. The Krums continued to improve the reliability of their systems over the years. By 1914, teleprinters were being used by the Associated Press to deliver copy to newspaper offices throughout America, and by the early 1920s they were in general use around the world. | |
| a | ||
| Meanwhile, toward the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, scientists and engineers began to focus their attentions on the issue of computing. The first devices, such as Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer, were predominantly analog, but not everyone was a devotee of analog computing. At a meeting in New Hampshire in September 1940 George Robert Stibitz used a digital machine to perform the first demonstration of remote computing. Leaving his computer in New York City, he took a teleprinter to the meeting which he connected to the computer using a telephone line. Stibitz then proceeded to astound the attendees by allowing them to pose problems which were entered on the teleprinter; within a minute, the teleprinter printed the answers generated by the computer. | ||
| a | ||
| By the 1950s, computers were becoming much more complex, but
operators were still largely limited to entering programs using a switch panel or loading
them from paper tapes or punched cards. Due to the fact that the only way for
early computers to be cost-effective was for them to operate twenty-four hours a day, the
time-consuming task of writing programs had to be performed off-line using teleprinters
with integrated paper tape writers or card punches. As computers increased in power, teleprinters began to be connected directly to them. This allowed the operators and the computer to communicate directly with each other, which was one of the first steps along the path toward the interactive way in which we use computers today. |
By the middle of the 1960s, computers had become so powerful that many operators could use the same machine simultaneously, and a new concept called time-sharing was born. The computer could switch between users so quickly that each user had the illusion they had sole access to the machine. (Strangely enough, time-sharing is now only practiced in large computing installations, because computers have become so powerful and so cheap that everyone can have a dedicated processor for themselves). | |
| a | ||
| However, the days of the teleprinter in the computing industry were numbered; they were eventually supplanted by the combination of computer keyboards and video displays, and the sound of teleprinters chuntering away in the back of computer rooms is now little more than a nostalgic memory. (See also The first commercial typewriter and The first printing telegraphs.) | ||
| a | |
|
|
| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
|
