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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7955813/The-history-of-computers.html

Britons helped to pioneer early machines before the American behemoths took over.

 By Claudine Beaumont,

Technology Editor

Published: 7:50 AM BST 21 Aug 2010

The Apple Lisa computer

The pace of technological innovation in the world of computing has been rapid – there is more processing power in the average modern day mobile phone than in the computer that helped the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the moon.

US companies such as Apple and Microsoft dominate the modern computing landscape but historically, British mathematicians, scientists and engineers have been at the forefront of the computing revolution, helping to shape many of the rules and theories that underpin the concept of computing and problem-solving.

Charles Babbage is seen by many as the "father of computing", and his Difference Engine and related mathematical theories paved the way for the invention of mechanical computers.

His protégé, Ada Lovelace, was, in effect, the first computer "programmer", creating a method by which instructions could be woven on to punch cards, using a language that was compatible with Babbage's model.

From there, mathematicians made the leap to Bletchley Park's ranks of machines to crack the Nazi Enigma code. But the Altair 8800, launched in 1975 by Ed Roberts, is widely considered to be the first personal computer; modern machines with displays, mice, keyboards and desktop icons came shortly afterwards.

The Apple Lisa, which went on sale in 1983, featured a pioneering graphical user interface, and the Apple Macintosh, launched the following year, used a mouse, menus and icons to help people navigate around the machine.

Indeed, Microsoft liked the design and user interface so much that it used many of these ideas in its first Windows operating system, launched in 1985.

One of the biggest innovations has been the creation of the internet and the world wide web. The concept of an internet – a global system of interconnected computer networks – first came about in 1969, when the US Department of Defense created Arpanet, a military computer network that made it easier for people to communicate between machines.

But it wasn't until the invention of the world wide web in the Nineties – the system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via a web browser – that the modern internet was born. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his theory of the web in 1989 but decided not to patent the world wide web, allowing people to freely embrace the new technology as a way of creating and sharing documents across the internet.

The rest, as they say, is history. There are now an estimated 29 billion pages on the web and we use it for everything from finding cheaper car insurance to booking a last-minute holiday, shopping and staying in touch with friends.

Faster, cleverer computers, combined with web-based software and services, are helping to drive a new era of computing innovation, in which even those with little technical know-how can create websites, build apps and contribute to the internet.

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Showing 8 comments

1) yeah-right

08/22/2010 09:20 AM

Apple (which I use) and Microsoft PC's, don't really have a huge amount to do with computing, they are more akin to a telephone or a pillar box. They have far more to do with communications than computing. If one looks at a task manager or equivalent on either of these machines, one will notice that it is difficult to get the processor/s to be any more than 2-3% utilised.

IBM (whatever their history) still make proper computers and indeed, they still dominate the computing business. Take a look at Forbes where MS and Apple don't get into the top 100 companies and where IBM are in the top thirty, behind the oil companies.

You see it is not so much to do with the amount of processing power one has, it is far more to do with what one does with it, and computing is really suited to scientific or accounting (mathematical processes), they excel at performing trillions of calculations very quickly.

When I started working with computers, 3 hybrid IBM 360/370 machines which took up a quarter of an acre of space, but looked like computing dwarfs compared to the modern PC with only 3MB of memory between the three of them, would still outperform a modern PC in terms of output. Current systems are limited by the quality of their peripherals and the people that use them.

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2) Jackthesmilingblack

08/22/2010 01:20 AM

There's a much bigger story here. Check the contribution of Thomas H. Flowers of Post Office Research, London. The Bletchley boffins were only able to decode the German High Command messages sent by the coding machine "Lorenz" very slowly to be relevant. This new machine used 12 rotors rather than the three or four rotors of "Enigma". Flowers invented and built the first programmable computer (Colossus), which exponentially speeded up the message decoding process. The US computer “ENIAC” got the credit for being the world’s first programmable computer. The US getting the credit for a British invention: So what else is new?

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3) quickstick4

08/22/2010 12:13 AM

The article is written from the point of view of a consumer. Britain still is at the forefront frankly, just the firms everyone uses and the languages used to program were developed in the US - e.g:

Java was developed by a Canadian :)

C++ was developed by a man from Denmark living in the USA

Haskell was developed by Brit

PHP by a Dutch.

Also the WWW was developed - yes by a Brit - But in Belgium, and a Belgian helped develop it at the beginning!

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4) upik

08/22/2010 09:35 AM

.22/08/2010 09:34:56

Thank you for this info. I used to live in Belgium and would be interested to know where Tim B-L was when he originated the www. I had previously thought he got the idea while at CERN in Switzerland.

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5) steveleeoflondon

08/21/2010 09:25 PM

The US air force developed a computer system with a light pen to point at targets on a RADAR screen to designate them before Xerox came up with the "idea" of an interactive interface.

Of course another missing link with the British here was Lyons (yes the corner shop company) they designed and built the world's first general purpose business computers (Leo range), indeed they were the first company in the world to run their administration (payroll, stock etc) on a computer, being British (naive and trustworthy) they gave the plans to IBM to look at with the view of IBM building and selling Leo machines under license, IBM nicked the whole design and came out with competing (ultimately triumphant) system 360, IBM went on to become the biggest and richest company in the world for a generation.

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6) Daniel 'saxon' Mayhew

08/21/2010 06:50 PM

Xerox let apple looking at the GUI research in exchange for stock,

I would like to add that what country does the designer of the apple range come from.

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7) edwardllewellynbridge

08/21/2010 01:57 PM

Bit more research required, Claudine. Xerox invented the graphical user interface. Microsoft and Apple 'borrowed' it. And the history of computing isn't all about the PC.

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8) joons

08/21/2010 01:54 PM

Apple Lisa - come on - that's why Apple hit the skids following on its second failure in a row after the Apple III and almost went out of business. Not one mention of the IBM PC that brought affordable personal computing to the masses.

I see a fan boy here!

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