x86 and all that

Computing dates back to prehistoric times, if you take the term to include ancient and surpisingly sophisticated techniques of using the fingers as calculation aids. The abacus was probably the first mechanical calculator, and almost certainly inspired our modern numbering system which is essentially a symbolic representation of abacus settings.

The Victorian Charles Babbage is generally credited with the idea of a programmable computer, and he spent much of his adult life trying to build one. His collaborator Ada Lovelace has been called the first programmer. This makes for a good story, she being the daughter of Lord Byron and (not unnaturally) a woman to boot. But it is stretching the truth.

Lingering postwar secrecy about activities at the Bletchley codebreaking centre obscured for many years the fact that the Collussus, the world's first electronic computer was built there, although it was programmable only by juggling plugs..

Closer to the modern computer was the Baby, built by Fred Williams and Tom Kilburn at Manchester just after the war. Kilburn, who died in 2001, had a pretty good claim to being the first modern programmer. Michael Hewitt interviewed him for PCW in 1998, to mark our 20th anniversary. You can read his report here (307Kb PDF).

The first operational, programmable electronic digital computer with a similar architecture to today's PC was the Edsac, built at Cambridge by a team under Sir Maurice Wilkes, who was interviewed by Clive Akass for our 25 birthday edition. You can read that interview here

In the same edition we reviewed the past 25 years of IT History as seen by PCW to create this retrospective. Other history files in our archives include:

The men who really invented the mouse
The history books say Doug Englebart invented the mouse, and so he did. But his ideas did not come out of nowhere. Radar engineers where the first people to grapple with the problems of the graphical interface - and they came up with an upside-down mouse ten years before Englebart. (PDF 585Kb).

Boffins emerge from the back room
More from the same era. Wartime secrecy was such that the contribution of radar technology to computing has been little acknowledged. Includes a great picture of an acoustic radar system.(PDF 70Kb)

The man who gave Bill Gates the world
Gary Kildall wrote CPM, the mother and father of all operating systems, so he was the obvious person to write the software to run the first IBM PC. Legend says IBM turned to Bill Gates after Kildall's wife showed two of its suits the door. Kildall died in 1994 but his friend, Symantec founder Gordon Eubanks, told Clive Akass what really happened.(1Mb PDF)

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