Early Computing History
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- When first built, the use cases for general-purpose electronic
computers were not very well understood.
- Users were large corporations, research institutions, and
government departments.
- Each had special needs, and efficiency dictated that software be
written to perform the required functions as quicly as possible in
as little space as possible.
- Processor speeds were measured in single digit megahertz -- today
gigahertz, 1,000x as fast. Core memory in single digit kilobytes
-- today single digit gigabytes for PCs (1,000,000x as large) and
terabytes for supercomputers (1,000,000,000x as large). Mass
storage was under 100KB (floppies) and around 10MB (hard drives)
-- today companies like Google have distributed databases counted
in petabytes (1,000,000,000x as large).
- Software was left up to end users, who were highly technical.
- Users of similar machines shared algorithms, issues, and
workarounds. Very similar to the science community: knowledge
was "public property".
- This custom remained through the development of operating systems.
For example, both American companies (Amdahl) and Japanese companies
(Fujitsu, Hitachi) build hardware compatible with IBM's System/360,
and ran IBM's OS/360 on them!
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