A Brief History of Enterprise Computing-Part 1
This brief history of enterprise computing is a chapter from my upcoming book Design for the Enterprise (available in early 2024).
For posting online, I’ve divided this history into three parts:
(1) Early systems and technologies (1880–1970) — appears below
Introduction
The history of enterprise computing is essentially the history of computing itself. It wasn’t until IBM introduced the personal computer in 1981 that computers gained widespread adoption outside the enterprise. Even today, with all our personal devices — phones, tablets, laptops, desktops — most computing still occurs within businesses and other organizations.
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I focus on early systems and technologies (1880–1970), including:
- Electronic tabulating machines
- Innovations spurred by World War II
- The first commercial mainframes
- Batch vs. real-time processing
- The IBM System/360
- From punch cards to video display terminals
Electronic tabulating machines
The 1880 U.S. census took eight long years to complete performing the tabulations manually, given the rapid increase in the U.S. population due to immigration. For the 1890 census, the Census Bureau sought a way to automate the data tabulation. Enter Herman Hollerith, a statistician and inventor who, with his tabulating machine, won a competition sponsored by the bureau.
Hollerith was well aware of how a series of punched holes could represent information. Fabric manufacturers had used punch cards to control looms since the early 19th century. In the tabulating machine Hollerith developed for the 1890 census, each citizen’s data was represented by punching a card in designated locales. Each card was put into the machine, where pins were pushed into the punched holes. The pins made contact with small mercury-filled cups that completed an electrical circuit. The resulting electrical impulses drove dial-like counters on the machine.
Image source: Wikipedia
The 1890 census took only two years to complete using the tabulation machine. Hollerith subsequently founded the Tabulating Machine Company. In 1911, he sold his company to Flint’s Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R), which in the 1920s evolved into IBM.
Punch card tabulating machines continued to be a mainstay of office automation until the 1950s when computers became commercially available.
Image source: Wikipedia
Innovations spurred by World War II
The more direct descendants of modern computers trace back to World War II when the demands of the war spurred rapid technological advancements. Computers during the war were mainly specialized machines designed to replace manually-prepared calculations such as missile trajectories.
Computers were also used for cryptography and codebreaking. The most famous example is the machine developed by Alan Turing, used by the British to decipher messages encoded by the German’s Enigma machine (believed at the time to be unbreakable). The 2014 movie “The Imitation Game” tells the story of Alan Turing, his machine, and the lives that Turing’s work ultimately saved during the war.
Another landmark computer began its life during World War II: the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), which was completed in 1945 as World War II was ending. Notable for its speed and programming flexibility, it was hailed as the dawn of the computer age. ENIAC, however, was a massive piece of engineering: weighing 30 tons, consuming 1,800 square feet of space, and including over 17,000 vacuum tubes.
Image source: Wikipedia
The first commercial mainframes
After the war, office equipment companies saw computers as the future. In 1951, Remington Rand introduced the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) — the first mass-market computer.
In 1953 General Eletric (GE) purchased the first non-governmental UNIVAC, which it intended to use for payroll, budget analysis, and inventory control, among other tasks. Though GE had underestimated the complexity of implementing the UNIVAC, it was fully operational by 1956 and provided significant cost savings.
Image source: Engineering and Technology History Wiki
Meanwhile, IBM responded to the UNIVAC with its 700 series of computers. Between its technical leadership and legendary sales force, IBM quickly became the market leader.
Early mainframe systems were custom affairs — programmed (and sometimes built) to meet each customer’s needs. The SABRE airline reservation system exemplifies this approach. Launched in 1960, it resulted from a close partnership between American Airlines and IBM. Before SABRE, American used a manual card-based system for taking reservations; each reservation took over an hour to complete. With SABRE, each reservation took just a few minutes to process.
This video by the Computer History Archives Project shows how American Airline agents (circa 1960) used SABRE to make reservations for customers. Note how punch cards are integral to this system!
Batch vs. real-time processing
SABRE is an example of a system that functions in real-time: agents placed a card containing flight options into a card reader, and SABRE reported back on how many seats were available on each flight. (SABRE terminals across the country were linked, via phone lines, to a set of centralized mainframes.)
Image source: IBM
In the 1960s, real-time processing was a major advance over the earliest mainframes focused solely on batch processing. Batch processing automated calculations previously done manually, and that was significant, but the real power to organizations was providing real-time transactions.
IBM System/360
In 1964, IBM introduced its System/360 — a family of mainframes that shared a single architecture across the lowest-end to the highest-end machines. The “360” branding signaled the range of customers the line could serve: small and large, business and scientific. Importantly, it allowed customers to start small and move to a larger system without reprogramming their software, as would have been the case previously. The unified architecture also created significant economies of scale for IBM. While this approach might seem obvious to us now, at the time it was revolutionary.
Image source: IBM
This video by Computer History Archives Project shows the original 1964 IBM System/360 product announcement, featuring its many innovations.
System/360 was a smash hit in the marketplace and further propelled IBM into an industry leader. However, its turnkey hold on the mainframe computer market, including hardware and software, led to several anti-trust actions, with the first suit being filed in 1969. While IBM successfully defended itself, the legal action against them did influence its business practices — most notably the decision to unbundle software services from hardware sales. Software thus became a separate product offering, carrying its own value and associated licensing fees. The software industry was officially launched.
From punch cards to video display terminals
Early mainframes relied on punch cards to represent data records and programming instructions. A programmer would write out a program by hand and then convert it to a set of punch cards using a punch card machine. As each card contained a single line of code, large programs could require creating many cards, which an operator would submit as a batch to the computer’s card reader. Punch cards supported the most complex computing requirements of the time — including military applications such as the SAGE air defense system and NASA’s Apollo space program.
Image source: Computer Hope
By the early 1970s, punch cards were gradually replaced by video display terminals that allowed users to enter data and programming instructions directly from a keyboard. Displays terminals were a significant advance over punch cards, which (clearly!) could be lost or fall out of sequence.
Image source: Wikipedia
