FUTURES
RESEARCH
0212 The March Of Progress – electronically
I have described, elsewhere, the changes that have taken place over recent decades. But the most indicative of these, in terms of illustrating the pace of change, has been that of electronics.
In the days of my youth, right into my teenage years, electronics only entered into my life in the form of a ‘wireless’ to which we listened incessantly. Even then, it was a crude valve-driven radio. In the whole of the house we probably had just one electric motor, and that was in the washing machine. In the mid 1950s my uncle Barry gave my Father an electric clock -- incorporated in an advertisement from one of bars at Butlins -- and my father converted that to an electric clock which proudly stood in the living room. That was second electric motor in our house, but even that didn't come until I was a teenager. We were one of the trendsetters getting a 12 inch television, in 1952, but our introduction in 1956 to ITV was an add-on box which sat clumsily underneath the television.
When I went to the RAE in 1959 that was a place where the leading edge technology was to be observed. Thus, next to our building, we had one of most powerful computers in the world. This computer ran a couple of applications. The first one of these was TRIDAC. This was a three-dimensional computer simulation used in ballistic missile calculations. The other one was SAFT, which was a Simulated Flight Table, again used in calculations of missile ballistics. The key thing about this computer was that it took up the literally the whole space of a complete office building and yet it was not as powerful as a modern pocket calculator. The size of building was needed because it was driven by the thermionic valves and the breakdown rates -- considering it had several thousand of these -- was such that every valve had to be monitored by a separate circuit. At the time, of course, I was working on the first transistorised computer circuits and it was around this time that IBM – even then the world-leading computer company -- produced its first commercial computers based on this technology. Interestingly the RAE at that time also had a commercial computer, the LEO produced by Lyons; who paradoxically were baker's who had needed it for their accounts!
When I started on my career, which involved quite a lot of calculation when I was doing the requisite forecasting, my ambition was simply to get hold of an electronic calculator. Eventually, in the mid 1960s, I managed to persuade Gallahers to buy one for me -- at the cost of a modern PC; yet all it could manage was the four arithmetic functions of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It was a lot less basic than the simplest throwaway calculator you now may be given a free. On the other hand, Gallahers did have a Honeywell mainframe computer which was by then processing all their financial data.
Going to IBM in the 1970s, as I have explained elsewhere, even the larger GSD machines I worked on only had memories of just 8K.
I can sustain this progression almost for ever, but it is just worthwhile comparing my current home computing set up with that I used commercially in IBM just 30 years. The main memory of my PC (at I gigabyte) is 125,000 times greater than the mainframe I then was using. The disc memory (at 375 gigabytes) is something like 150,000 times as great . In those early days there was the no such thing as telecommunications on any scale but now, sitting in front of my computer, I can watch barges sailing down the Seine in real-time; and control the camera that is showing the picture.
Life has changed quite dramatically on all fronts.
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