Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 141

8 Computing gets personal

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have
become the most empowering tool we've ever
created. They're tools of communication, they're
tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by
their user.
Bill Gates 1

The beginnings of interactive computing

In the early days of computing, computers were expensive and scarce.
They were built for solving serious computational problems - and certainly not
for frivolous activities like playing games! The microprocessor and Moore's law
have changed this perspective - computing hardware is now incredibly cheap
and it is the software production by humans and management of computers
that is expensive. Some of the ideas of interactive and personal computing
can be traced back to an MIT professor called J. C. R. Licklider. Lick - as he was
universally known - was a psychologist and one of the first researchers to take
an interest in the problem of human-computer interactions. During the Cold
War in the 1950s, he had worked at MIT's Lincoln Labs on the Semi-Automated
Ground Environment (SAGE) system designed to give early warning of an air-
borne attack on the United States. This system used computers to continuously
keep track of aircraft using radar data. It was this experience of interactive
computing that convinced Lick of the need to use computers to analyze data as
the data arrived - for “real time” computing.
Another type of interactive computing was being developed at around the
same time. Engineers at MIT's Lincoln Labs had developed the TX-0 in 1956 - one
of the first transistorized computers. Wesley Clark and Ken Olsen had specifi-
cally designed and built the TX-0 to be interactive and exciting, the exact oppo-
site of sedate batch processing on a big mainframe computer. Olsen recalled:

Then we had a light pen, which was what we used in the air-defense system
and which was the equivalent of the mouse or joystick we use today. With
that you could draw, play games, be creative - it was very close to being the
modern personal computer. 2

This level of interactivity, and for what then seemed to be frivolous uses of
valuable computing time, was a far cry from the regimented bureaucracy of
batch processing. To popularize their ideas, Olsen and Clark decided to send

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