Tag: 19th Century

19th Century – 1800s

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Timeline of the History of Computers

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c. 2500 BC – Sumerian Abacus

c. 700 BC – Scytale

c. 150 BC – Antikythera Mechanism

c. 60 – Programmable Robot

c. 850 – On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages

c. 1470 – Cipher Disk

1613 – First Recorded Use of the Word Computer

1621 – Slide Rule

1703 – Binary Arithmetic

1758 – Human Computers Predict Halley’s Comet

1770 – The “Mechanical Turk”

1792 – Optical Telegraph

1801 – The Jacquard Loom

1822 – The Difference Engine

1833 – Michael Faraday discovered silver sulfide became a better conductor when heated

1836 – Electrical Telegraph

1843 – Ada Lovelace Writes a Computer Program

1843 – Fax Machine Patented

1843 – Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”

1849 to early 1900s – Silicon Valley After the Gold Rush

1851 – Thomas Arithmometer

1854 – Boolean Algebra

1864 – First Electromagnetic Spam Message

1870 – Mitsubishi founded

1874 – Baudot Code

1874 – Semiconductor Diode conceived of

1876 – Ericsson Corporation founded in Sweden

1885 – Stanford University

1885 – William Burroughs’ adding machine

1890 – Herman Hollerith Tabulating the US Census

1890 – Toshiba founded in Japan

1891 – Strowger Step-by-Step Switch

1898 – Nippon Electric Limited Partnership – NEC Corporation founded in Japan

1890s to 1930s – Radio Engineering

Early 1900s – Electrical Engineering

1904 – “Diode” or Two-Element Amplifier actually invented

1904 – Three-Element Amplifier or “Triode”

1906 – Vacuum Tube or “Audion”

1907 – Lee DeForest coins the term “radio” to refer to wireless transmission when he formed his DeForest Radio Telephone Company

1909 – Charles Herrold in San Jose started first radio station in USA with regularly scheduled programming, including songs, using an arc transmitter of his own design. Herrold was one of Stanford’s earliest students and founded his own College of Wireless and Engineering in San Jose

1910 – Radio Broadcasting business pioneered by Lee DeForest with broadcast from New York of a live performance by Italian tenor Enrico Caruso

1910 – Hitachi founded in Japan

1912 – Sharp Corporation founded in Japan and takes its name from one of its founder’s first inventions, the Ever-Sharp mechanical pencil

1914 – Floating-Point Numbers

1917 – Vernam Cipher

1918 – Panasonic, then Matsushita Electric, founded in Japan

1920 – Rossum’s Universal Robots

1927 – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

1927 – First LED

1928 – Electronic Speech Synthesis

1930 – The Enigma Machine

1931 – Differential Analyzer

1935 – Fujitsu founded as Fuji Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturing in Japan. Fujitsu is the second oldest IT company after IBM and before Hewlett-Packard

1936 – Church-Turing Thesis

1939 – Hewlett-Packard founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California by Bill Hewlett and David Packard

1939 – Toshiba founded in Japan

1941 – Z3 Computer

1942 – Atanasoff-Berry Computer

1942 – Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

1942 – Seiko Corporation founded in Japan

1943 – ENIAC

1943 – Colossus

1944 – Delay Line Memory

1944 – Binary-Coded Decimal

1945 – Vannevar Bush‘s “As We May Think”

1945 – EDVAC First Draft Report – The von Neumann architecture

1946 – Trackball

1946 – Williams Tube Random Access Memory

1947 – Actual Bug Found – First “debugging”

1947 – William Shockley’s Silicon Transistor

1948 – The Bit – Binary Digit 0 or 1

1948 – Curta Calculator

1948 – Manchester SSEM

1949 – Whirlwind Computer

1950 – Error-Correcting Codes (ECC)

1951 – Turing Test of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

1951 – Magnetic Tape Used for Computers

1951 – Core Memory

1951 – Microprogramming

1952 – Computer Speech Recognition

1953 – First Transistorized Computer

1955 – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coined

1955 – Computer Proves Mathematical Theorem

1956 – First Disk Storage Unit

1956 – The Byte

1956 – Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet

1957 – FORTRAN Programming Language

1957 – First Digital Image

1958 – The Bell 101 Modem

1958 – SAGE Computer Operational

1959 – IBM 1401 Computer

1959 – DEC PDP-1

1959 – Quicksort Algorithm

1959 – SABRE Airline Reservation System

1960 – COBOL Programming Language

1960 – Recommended Standard 232 (RS-232)

1961 – ANITA Electronic Calculator

1961 – Unimate – First Mass-Produced Robot

1961 – Time-Sharing – The Original “Cloud Computing“

1961 – Shinshu Seiki Company founded in Japan (now called Seiko Epson Corporation) as a subsidiary of Seiko to supply precision parts for Seiko watches.

1962 – Spacewar! Video Game

1962 – Virtual Memory

1962 – Digital Long Distance Telephone Calls

1963 – Sketchpad Interactive Computer Graphics

1963 – ASCII Character Encoding

1963 – Seiko Corporation in Japan developed world’s first portable quartz timer (Seiko QC-951)

1964 – RAND Tablet Computer

1964 – Teletype Model 33 ASR

1964 – IBM System/360 Mainframe Computer

1964 – BASIC Programming Language

1965 – First Liquid-Crystal Display (LCD)

1965 – Fiber Optics – Optical-Fiber

1965 – DENDRAL Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Project

1965 – ELIZA – The First “Chatbot” – 1965

1965 – Touchscreen

1966 – Star Trek Premieres

1966 – Dynamic RAM

1966 – Linear predictive coding (LPC) proposed by Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT).[71]

1967 – Object-Oriented Programming

1967 – First ATM Machine

1967 – Head-Mounted Display

1967 – Programming for Children

1967 – The Mouse

1968 – Carterfone Decision

1968 – Software Engineering

1968 – HAL 9000 Computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey

1968 – First “Spacecraft” “Guided by Computer”

1968 – Cyberspace Coined—and Re-Coined

1968 – Mother of All Demos

1968 – Dot Matrix Printer – Shinshu Seiki (now called Seiko Epson Corporation) launched the world’s first mini-printer, the EP-101 (“EP” for Electronic Printer,) which was soon incorporated into many calculators

1968 – Interface Message Processor (IMP)

1969 – ARPANET / Internet

1969 – Digital Imaging

1969 – Network Working Group Request for Comments (RFC): 1

1969 – Utility Computing – Early “Cloud Computing“

1969 – Perceptrons Book – Dark Ages of Neural Networks Artificial Intelligence (AI)

1969 – UNIX Operating System

1969 – Seiko Epson Corporation in Japan developed world’s first quartz watch timepiece (Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ)

1970 – Fair Credit Reporting Act

1970 – Relational Databases

1970 – Floppy Disk

1971 – Laser Printer

1971 – NP-Completeness

1971 – @Mail Electronic Mail

1971 – First Microprocessor – General-Purpose CPU – “Computer on a Chip”

1971 – First Wireless Network

1972 – C Programming Language

1972 – Cray Research Supercomputers – High-Performance Computing (HPC)

1972 – Game of Life – Early Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research

1972 – HP-35 Calculator

1972 – Pong Game from Atari – Nolan Bushnell

1973 – First Cell Phone Call

1973 – Danny Cohen first demonstrated a form of packet voice as part of a flight simulator application, which operated across the early ARPANET.[69][70]

1973 – Xerox Alto from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

1973 – Sharp Corporation produced the first LCD calculator

1974 – Data Encryption Standard (DES)

1974 – The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publishes a paper entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection”.[82]

1974 – Network Voice Protocol (NVP) tested over ARPANET in August 1974, carrying barely audible 16 kpbs CVSD encoded voice.[71]

1974 – The first successful real-time conversation over ARPANET achieved using 2.4 kpbs LPC, between Culler-Harrison Incorporated in Goleta, California, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts.[71]

1974 – First Personal Computer: The Altair 8800 Invented by MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico

1975 – Colossal Cave Adventure – Text-based “Video” Game

1975 – The Shockwave Rider SciFi Book – A Prelude of the 21st Century Big Tech Police State

1975 – AI Medical Diagnosis – Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

1975 – BYTE Magazine

1975 – Homebrew Computer Club

1975 – The Mythical Man-Month

1975 – The name Epson was coined for the next generation of printers based on the EP-101 which was released to the public. (EPSON:E-P-SON: SON of Electronic Printer).[7] Epson America Inc. was established to sell printers for Shinshu Seiki Co.

1976 – Public Key Cryptography

1976 – Acer founded

1976 – Tandem NonStop

1976 – Dr. Dobb’s Journal

1977 – RSA Encryption

1977 – Apple II Computer

The TRS-80 Model I pictured alongside the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001-8. These three computers constitute what Byte Magazine called the “1977 Trinity” of home computing.

1977 – Danny Cohen and Jon Postel of the USC Information Sciences Institute, and Vint Cerf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), agree to separate IP from TCP, and create UDP for carrying real-time traffic.

1978 – First Internet Spam Message

1978 – France’s Minitel Videotext

1979 – Secret Sharing for Encryption

1979 – Dan Bricklin Invents VisiCalc Spreadsheet

1980 – Timex Sinclair ZX80 Computer

1980 – Flash Memory

1980 – RISC Microprocessors – Reduced Instruction Set Computer CPUs

1980 – Commercially Available Ethernet Invented by Robert Metcalfe of 3Com

1980 – Usenet

1981 – IBM Personal Computer – IBM PC

1981 – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Email

1981 – Japan’s Fifth Generation Computer Systems – Japan

1982 – Sun Microsystems was founded on February 24, 1982.[2]

1982 – AutoCAD

1982 – First Commercial UNIX Workstation

1982 – PostScript

1982 – Microsoft and the IBM PC Clones

1982 – First CGI Sequence in Feature Film – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

1982 – National Geographic Moves the Pyramids – Precursor to Photoshop

1982 – Secure Multi-Party Computation

1982 – TRON Movie

1982 – Home Computer Named Machine of the Year by Time Magazine

1983 – The Qubit – Quantum Computers

1983 – WarGames

1983 – 3-D Printing

1983 – Computerization of the Local Telephone Network

1983 – First Laptop

1983 – MIDI Computer Music Interface

1983 – Microsoft Word

1983 – Nintendo Entertainment System – Video Games

1983 – Domain Name System (DNS)

1983 – IPv4 Flag Day – TCP/IP

1984 – Text-to-Speech (TTS)

1984 – Apple Macintosh

1984 – VPL Research, Inc. – Virtual Reality (VR)

1984 – Quantum Cryptography

1984 – Telebit TrailBlazer Modems Break 9600 bps

1984 – Verilog Language

1984 – Dell founded by Michael Dell

1984 – Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984

1985 – Connection Machine – Parallelization

1985 – First Computer-Generated TV Host – Max Headroom – CGI

1985 – Zero-Knowledge Mathematical Proofs

1985 – FCC Approves Unlicensed Wireless Spread Spectrum

1985 – NSFNET National Science Foundation “Internet”

1985 – Desktop Publishing – with Macintosh, Aldus PageMaker, LaserJet, LaserWriter and PostScript

1985 – Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)

1985 – GNU Manifesto from Richard Stallman

1985 – AFIS Stops a Serial Killer – Automated Fingerprint Identification System

1986 – Software Bug Fatalities

1986 – Pixar Animation Studios

1986 – D-Link Corporation founded in Taipei, Taiwan

1987 – Digital Video Editing

1987 – GIF – Graphics Interchange Format

1988 – MPEG – Moving Picture Experts Group – Coding-Compressing Audio-Video

1988 – CD-ROM

1988 – Morris Worm Internet Computer Virus

1988 – Linksys founded

1989 – World Wide Web-HTML-HTTP Invented by Tim Berners-Lee

1989 – Asus was founded in Taipei, Taiwan

1989 – SimCity Video Game

1989 – ISP Provides Internet Access to the Public

1990 – GPS Is Operational – Global Positioning System

1990 – Digital Money is Invented – DigiCash – Precursor to Bitcoin

1991 – Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)

1991 – DARPA’s Report “Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age“

1991 – Linux Kernel Operating System Invented by Linus Torvalds

1992 – Boston Dynamics Robotics Company Founded

1992 – JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group

1992 – First Mass-Market Web Browser NCSA Mosaic Invented by Marc Andreessen

1992 – Unicode Character Encoding

1993 – Apple Newton

1994 – First Banner Ad – Wired Magazine

1994 – RSA-129 Encryption Cracked

1995 – DVD

1995 – E-Commerce Startups – eBay, Amazon and DoubleClick Launched

1995 – AltaVista Web Search Engine

1995 – Gartner Hype Cycle

1996 – Universal Serial Bus (USB)

1996 – Juniper Networks founded

1997 – IBM Computer Is World Chess Champion

1997 – PalmPilot

1997 – E Ink

1998 – Diamond Rio MP3 Player

1998 – Google

1999 – Collaborative Software Development

1999 – Blog Is Coined

1999 – Napster P2P Music and File Sharing

2000 – USB Flash Drive

2000 – Sharp Corporation’s Mobile Communications Division created the world’s first commercial camera phone, the J-SH04, in Japan

2000 – Fortinet founded

2001 – Wikipedia

2001 – Apple iTunes

2001 – Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

2001 – Quantum Computer Factors “15”

2002 – Home-Cleaning Robot

2003 – CAPTCHA

2004 – Product Tracking

2004 – Facebook

2004 – First International Meeting on Synthetic Biology

2005 – Video Game Enables Research into Real-World Pandemics

2006 – Apache Hadoop Makes Big Data Possible

2006 – Differential Privacy

2007 – Apple iPhone

2008 – Bitcoin

2010 – Air Force Builds Supercomputer with Gaming Consoles

2010 – Cyber Weapons

2011 – Smart Homes via the Internet of Things (IoT)

2011 – IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy!

2011 – World IPv6 Day

2011 – Social Media Enables the Arab Spring

2012 – DNA Data Storage

2013 – Algorithm Influences Prison Sentence

2013 – Subscription Software “Popularized”

2014 – Data Breaches

2014 – Over-the-Air Vehicle Software Updates

2015 – Google Releases TensorFlow

2016 – Augmented Reality Goes Mainstream

2016 – Computer Beats Master at Game of Go

~2050 -Hahahaha! – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

~9999 – The Limits of Computation?

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Bibliography of the History of Technology, Computing, IT, Internet and Programming

Return to Timeline of the History of Computers or History

Books

Alexander, Charles C. Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.

Baran, Paul.“Packet Switching.” In Fundamentals of Digital Switching. 2d ed. Edited by John C. McDonald. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.

Barry, John A. Technobabble. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Bell, C. Gordon, Alan Kotok, Thomas N. Hastings, and Richard Hill. “The Evolution of the DEC System-10.” In Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. Edited by C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara. Bedford, Mass.: Digital Equipment Corporation, 1978.

Bell, C. Gordon, Gerald Butler, Robert Gray, John E. McNamara, Donald Vonada, and Ronald Wilson. “The PDP-1 and Other 18-Bit Computers.” In Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. Edited by C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara. Bedford, Mass.: Digital Equipment Corporation, 1978.

Bergaust, Erik. Wernher von Braun. Washington, D.C.: National Space Institute, 1976.

Blanc, Robert P., and Ira W. Cotton, eds. Computer Networking. New York: IEEE Press, 1976.

Brendon, Piers. Ike: His Life and Times. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Brooks, John. Telephone: The First HundredYears. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Brucker, Roger W., and Richard A. Watson. The Longest Cave. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

Clarke, Arthur C., et al. The Telephone’s First Century—And Beyond: Essays on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Telephone Communication. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977

Computer Science, Numerical Analysis and Computing. National Physical Laboratory, Engineering Sciences Group, Research 1971. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972.

Froehlich, Fritz E., Allen Kent, and Carolyn M. Hall, eds. “ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Internet.” In The Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1991.

Goldstein, Jack S. A Different Sort of Time: The Life of Jerrold R. Zacharias. Cambridge MIT Press, 1992.

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York:Villard Books, 1993.

Hall, Mark, and John Barry. Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990.

Hammond, William M. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.

Hamner, W. Clay. “The United States Postal Service: Will It Be Ready for the Year 2000?” In The Future of the Postal Service. Edited by Joel L. Fleishman. New York: Praeger, 1983.

Holzmann, Gerard J., and Björn Pehrson. The Early History of Data Network. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.

Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.

Killian, James R., Jr. Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977.

———. The Education of a College President: A Memoir. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.

Kleinrock, Leonard. Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

———. Queueing Systems. 2 vols. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974–1976.

Langdon-Davies, John. NPL: Jubilee Book of the National Physical Laboratory. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1951.

Lebow, Irwin. Information Highways & Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century. New York: IEEE Press, 1995.

Licklider, J. C. R. “Computers and Government.” In The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, edited by Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses. MIT Bicentennial Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.

———. Libraries of the Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965.

Padlipsky, M. A. The Elements of Networking Style and Other Essays & Animadversions of the Art of Intercomputer Networking. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1985.

Proceedings of the Fifth Data Communications Symposium. IEEE Computer Society, Snowbird, Utah, September 27–29, 1977.

Pyatt, Edward. The National Physical Laboratory: A History. Bristol, England: Adam Hilger Ltd., 1983.

Redmond, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith. The Whirlwind Project: The History of a Pioneer Computer. Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1980.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

———. Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas Behind the Next Computer Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Roberts, Lawrence G. “The ARPANET and Computer Networks.” In A History of Personal Workstations, edited by Adele Goldberg. Reading, Mass.: ACM Press (Addison-Wesley), 1988.

Rose, Marshall T. The Internet Message: Closing the Book with Electronic Mail. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PTR Prentice Hall, 1993.

Sherman, Kenneth. Data Communications: A User’s Guide. Reston,Virginia: Reston Publishing Company, 1981.

Smith, Douglas K., and Robert C. Alexander. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. New York: William Morrow, 1988.

Udall, Stewart L. The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Wildes, Karl L., and Nilo A. Lindgren. A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882–1982. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.Edit

Journal, Magazine, and Newspaper Articles

Abramson, Norman. “Development of the Alohanet.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, January 1985.

Anderson, Christopher. “The Accidental Superhighway.” The Economist, 1 July 1995.

Baran, Paul. “On Distributed Communications Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems, 1 March 1964.

———.“Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes.” RAND Corporation Mathematics Division Report No. P-1995, 27 May 1960.

Boggs, David R., John F. Shoch, Edward A. Taft, and Robert M. Metcalfe. “PUP: An Internetwork Architecture.” IEEE Transactions on Communications, April 1980.

“Bolt Beranek Accused by Government of Contract Overcharges.” Dow Jones News Service–Wall Street Journal combined stories, 27 October 1980.

“Bolt Beranek and Newman: Two Aides Plead Guilty to U.S. Charge.” Dow Jones News Service–Wall Street Journal combined stories, 12 November 1980.

“Bolt Beranek, Aides Accused of Cheating U.S. on Several Jobs.” The Wall Street Journal, 28 October 1980.

Bulkeley, William M. “Can He Turn Big Ideas into Big Sales?” The Wall Street Journal, 12 September 1994.

Bush,Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin. “Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory: 1965–1975.” Annals of the History of Computing 9, no. 3/4, 1988.

Cerf,Vinton G., and Peter T. Kirstein. “Issues in Packet-Network Interconnection.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1979.

Cerf, Vinton G., and Robert E. Kahn. “A Protocol for Packet-Network Intercommunication.” IEEE Transactions on Communications, May 1974.

Cerf, Vinton. “PARRY Encounters the Doctor: Conversation Between a Simulated Paranoid and a Simulated Psychiatrist.” Datamation, July 1973.

Clark, David D. “The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols.” Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery Sigcomm Symposium on Data Communications, August 1988.

Clark, David D., Kenneth T. Pogran, and David P. Reed. “An Introduction to Local Area Networks.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1979.

Comer, Douglas. “The Computer Science Research Network CSNET: A History and Status Report.” Communications of the ACM, October 1983.

Crowther, W. R., F. E. Heart, A. A. McKenzie, J. M. McQuillan, and D. C. Walden.“Issues in Packet Switching Networking Design.” Proceedings of the 1975 National Computer Conference, 1975.

Denning, Peter J. “The Science of Computing: The ARPANET After Twenty Years.” American Scientist, November-December 1989.

Denning, Peter J., Anthony Hearn, and C. William Kern. “History and Overview of CSNET. “Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery Sigcomm Symposium on Data Communications, March 1983.

“Dr. J. C. R. Licklider Receives Biennial Award at State College Meeting.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, November 1950.

Engelbart, Douglas C. “Coordinated Information Services for a Discipline-or Mission-Oriented Community.” Proceedings of the Second Annual Computer Communications Conference, January 1972.

———. “Intellectual Implications of Multi-Access Computer Networks.” Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference on Multi-Access Computer Networks, Austin, Texas, April 1970.

Ericson, Raymond. “Philharmonic Hall Acoustics Start Rumors Flying.” The NewYork Times, 4 December 1962.

Finucane, Martin. “Creators of the Internet Forerunner Gather in Boston.” Reading (Mass.) Daily Times Herald, 12 September 1994.

Fisher, Sharon. “The Largest Computer Network: Internet Links UNIX Computers Worldwide.” InfoWorld, 25 April 1988.

Hines, William. “Mail.” Chicago Sun-Times, 29 March 1978.

Haughney, Joseph F. “Anatomy of a Packet-Switching Overhaul.” Data Communications, June 1982.

Holusha, John. “Computer Tied Carter, Mondale Campaigns: The Bethesda Connection.” Washington Star, 21 November 1976.

Jacobs, Irwin M., Richard Binder, and EstilV. Hoversten. “General Purpose Packet Satellite Networks.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.

Jennings, Dennis M., Lawrence H. Landweber, Ira H. Fuchs, David J. Farber, and W. Richards Adrion. “Computer Networking for Scientists.” Science, 22 February 1986.

Kahn, Robert E. “The Role of Government in the Evolution of the Internet.” Communications of the ACM, August 1994.

Kahn, Robert E., Steven A. Gronemeyer, Jerry Burchfiel, and Ronald C. Kunzelman. “Advances in Packet Radio Technology.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.

Kantrowitz, Barbara, and Adam Rogers. “The Birth of the Internet.” Newsweek, 8 August 1994.

Kleinrock, Leonard. “Principles and Lessons in Packet Communications.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.

Landweber, Lawrence H., Dennis M. Jennings, and Ira Fuchs. “Research Computer Networks and Their Interconnection.” IEEE Communications Magazine, June 1986.

Lee, J. A. N., and Robert F. Rosin.“The CTSS Interviews.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 1, 1992.

———.“The Project MAC Interviews.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 2, 1992.

Licklider, J. C. R. “A Gridless, Wireless Rat-Shocker.” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 44, 1951.

———. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” Reprint. In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider. Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center, 7 August 1990.

Licklider, J. C. R., and Albert Vezza. “Applications of Information Networks.” Proceedings of the IEEE, November 1978.

Licklider, J. C. R., and Robert W. Taylor. “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Reprint. In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider. Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center, 7 August 1990.

Markoff, John. “Up from the Computer Underground.” The NewYork Times, 27 August 1993.

McKenzie, Alexander A., and B. P. Cosell, J. M. McQuillan, M. J. Thrope. “The Network Control Center for the ARPA Network.” Proceedings of the IEEE, 1972.

Mier, Edwin E. “Defense Department Readying Network Ramparts.” Data Communications, October 1983.

Mills, Jeffrey. “Electronic Mail.” Associated Press, 4 January 1976.

———.“Electronic Mail.” Associated Press, 19 June 1976.

———. “Postal Service Tests Electronic Message Service.” Associated Press, 28 March 1978.

Mills, Kay.“The Public Concern: Mail.” Newhouse News Service, 27 July 1976.

Mohl, Bruce A. “2 Bolt, Beranek Officials Collapse in Federal Court.” The Boston Globe, 31 October 1980.

Pallesen, Gayle. “Consultant Firm on PBIA Faces Criminal Charges.” Palm Beach (Florida) Post, 8 November 1980.

Pearse, Ben. “Defense Chief in the Sputnik Age.” The NewYork Times Magazine, 10 November 1957.

Pool, Bob. “Inventing the Future: UCLA Scientist Who Helped Create Internet Isn’t Done Yet.” Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1994.

Quarterman, John S., and Josiah C. Hoskins. “Notable Computer Networks.” Communications of the ACM, October 1986.

Roberts, Lawrence G. “ARPA Network Implications.” Educom, Bulletin of the Interuniversity Communications Council, fall 1971.

Salus, Peter. “Pioneers of the Internet.” Internet World, September 1994.

“Scanning the Issues,” IEEE Spectrum, August 1964.

Schonberg, Harold C. “4 Acoustics Experts to Urge Revisions in Auditorium.” The NewYork Times, 4 April 1963.

———.“Acoustics Again: Philharmonic Hall Has Some Defects, But Also Has a Poetry of Its Own.” The NewYork Times, 9 December 1962.

Selling It. Consumer Reports, June 1977.

Space Agencies. “ARPA Shapes Military Space Research.” Aviation Week, 16 June 1958.

Sterling, Bruce. “Internet.” Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1993.

Swartzlander, Earl. “Time-Sharing at MIT.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 1, 1992.

“Transforming BB&N: ARPANET’s Architect Targets Non-Military Networks.” Data Communications, April 1984.

Wilson, David McKay. “BBN Executives Collapse in Court.” Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, 6 November 1980.

———. “Consulting Co. Admits Overcharge.” Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle, 30 October 1980.

Zitner, Aaron. “A Quiet Leap Forward in Cyberspace.” The Boston Globe, 11 September 1994.

Zuckerman, Laurence.“BBN Steps Out of the Shadows and into the Limelight.” The NewYork Times, 17 July 1995.Edit

Unpublished Papers, Interviews from Secondary Sources, and Other Documents

”Act One.” Symposium on the history of the ARPANET held at the University of California at Los Angeles, 17 August 1989. Transcript.

ARPA Network Information Center, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif. “Scenarios for Using the ARPANET.” Booklet. Prepared for the International Conference on Computer Communication, Washington, D.C., October 1972.

Baran, Paul. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 5 March 1990.

Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” Pinedale, Wyo., June 1990.

BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation. “Annual Report of the Science Development Program.” Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

Bhushan, A. K. “Comments on the File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 385. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., August 1972.

———.“The File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 354. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., July 1972.

Bhushan, Abhay, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White. “Standardizing Network Mail Headers.” Request for Comments 561. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 5 September 1973.

Blue, Allan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 June 1989.

Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. “ARPANET Completion Report: Draft.” Cambridge, Mass., September 1977.

———.“BBN Proposal No. IMP P69-IST-5: Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Department of the Army, Defense Supply Service, in response to RFQ No. DAHC15 69 Q 0002. Washington, D.C., 6 September 1968.

———. “BBN Report No. 1763: Initial Design for Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. DAHC 15-69-C-0179. Washington, D.C., 6 January 1969.

———. “BBN Report No. 1822: Interface Message Processor.” Technical report. Cambridge, Mass., 1969.

———.“Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Quarterly technical reports. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. DAHC 15-69-C-0179 and contract no. F08606-73-C-0027. Washington, D.C., 1969–1973.

———. “Operating Manual for Interface Message Processors: 516 IMP, 316 IMP, TEP.” Revised. Submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA order no. 1260, contract no. DAHC15-69-C-0179. Arlington,Va., April 1973.

———. “Report No. 4799: A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade.” Submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Arlington,Va., April 1981.

———.“The Four Cities Plan.” Draft proposal and cost analysis for maintenance of IMPs and TIPs in Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Papers of BBN Division 6. Cambridge, Mass., April 1974.

———. Internal memoranda and papers relating to the work of Division 6. Cambridge, Mass., 1971–1972.

Carr, C. Stephen, Stephen D. Crocker, and Vinton G. Cerf. “HOST-HOST Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.

Catton, Major General, USAF, Jack. Letter to F. R. Collbohm of RAND Corporation, 11 October 1965. Referring the preliminary technical development plan for message-block network to the Defense Communications Agency.

Cerf,Vinton G.“Confessions of a Hearing-Impaired Engineer.” Unpublished.

———.“PARRY Encounters the Doctor.” Request for Comments 439 (NIC 13771). Network Working Group, 21 January 1973.

Cerf, Vinton G., and Jonathan B. Postel. “Specification of Internetwork Transmission Control Protocol: TCP Version 3.” Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, January 1978.

Cerf, Vinton G. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/ IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990.

Cerf, Vinton G., and Robert Kahn. “HOST and PROCESS Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 39, 13 September 1973.

Clark, Wesley. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 May 1990.

Crocker, David H. “Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages.” Request for Comments 822. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Delaware, 13 August 1982.

Crocker, David H., John J. Vittal, Kenneth T. Pogran, and D. Austin Henderson Jr. “Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages.” Request for Comments 733. The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif., 21 November 1977.

Crowther, William. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 March 1990.

Crowther, William, and David Walden. “CurrentViews of Timing.” Memorandum to Frank E. Heart, Cambridge, Mass., 8 July 1969.

Davies, Donald W. “Further Speculations on Data Transmission.” Private papers. London, 16 November 1965.

———.“Proposal for a Digital Communication Network.” Private papers, photocopied and widely circulated. London, June 1966.

———. “Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-Line Data Processing.” Private papers. London, 15 December 1965.

———. “Remote On-line Data Processing and Its Communication Needs.” Private papers. London, 10 November 1965.

Davies, Donald W. Interview by Martin Campbell-Kelly. National Physical Laboratory, U.K., 17 March 1986.

Davies, Donald W., Keith Bartlett, Roger Scantlebury, and Peter Wilkinson. “A Digital Communications Network for Computers Giving Rapid Response at Remote Terminals.” Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating System Principles, Gatlinburg, Tenn., October 1967.

Davis, Ruth M. “Comments and Recommendations Concerning the ARPA Network.” Center for Computer Sciences and Technology, U.S. National Bureau of Standards, 6 October 1971.

Digital Equipment Corporation. “Interface Message Processors for the ARPA Computer Network.” Design proposal. Submitted to the Department of the Army, Defense Supply Service, in RFQ no. DAHC15 69 Q 002, 5 September 1968.

Frank, Howard. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 30 March 1990.

Goldstein, Paul. “The Proposed ARPANET Divestiture: Legal Questions and Economic Issues.” Working Paper, Cabledata Associates, Inc., CAWP no. 101, 27 July 1973.

Hauben, Michael, and Ronda Hauben. The Netizens Netbook page can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/∼hauben/netbook/. The Haubens’ work has also appeared in the Amateur Computerist Newsletter, available from ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc/acn/.

Heart, F. E., R. E. Kahn, S. M. Ornstein, W. R. Crowther, and D. C. Walden. “The Interface Message Processor for the ARPA Computer Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.

Heart, Frank E. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 13 March 1990.

Herzfeld, Charles. Interview by Arthur Norberg. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 August 1990.

Honeywell, Inc. “Honeywell at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.” Brochure. Published for the ARPA Network demonstration at the International Conference on Computer Communication, Washington, D.C., October 1972.

Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol.” Request for Comments 761. Prepared for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Techniques Office, Arlington,Va., January 1980.

International Data Corporation. “ARPA Computer Network Provides Communications Technology for Computer/Computer Interaction Within Special Research Community.” Industry report and market review. Newtonville, Mass., 3 March 1972.

Kahn, Robert. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990.

Kahn, Robert. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 22 March 1989.

Kleinrock, Leonard. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 April 1990.

Kryter, Karl D. “Lick as a Psychoacoustician and Physioacoustician.” Presentation honoring J. C. R. Licklider at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Baltimore, Md., 30 April 1991.

———. Obituary of J. C. R. Licklider, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, December 1990.

Licklider, J. C. R., and Welden E. Clark. “On-Line Man-Computer Communication.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1962.

Licklider, J. C. R. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 28 October 1988.

Lukasik, Stephen. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 17 October 1991.

Marill, Thomas, and Lawrence G. Roberts. “Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers.” Paper presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1966.

McCarthy, J., S. Boilen, E. Fredkin, and J. C. R. Licklider. “A Time-Sharing Debugging System for a Small Computer.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1963.

McKenzie, Alexander A. “The ARPA Network Control Center.” Paper presented at the Fourth Data Communications Symposium of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, October 1975.

McKenzie, Alexander A. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 13 March 1990.

Message Group. The full text of more than 2,600 e-mail messages sent by members of the Message Group (or MsgGroup), one of the first electronic mailing lists, relating to the development of e-mail. The Computer Museum, Boston, Mass., June 1975–June 1986. Electronic document. (http://www.tcm.org/msgroup)

Metcalfe, Robert. “Some Historic Moments in Networking.” Request for Comments 89. Network Working Group, 19 January 1971.

Myer, T. H., and D. A. Henderson. “Message Transmission Protocol.” Request for Comments 680. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., 1975.

National Research Council, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems. “Transport Protocols for Department of Defense Data Networks.” Report to the Department of Defense and the National Bureau of Standards, Board on Telecommunication and Computer Applications, 1985.

Neigus, N.J. “File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 542. Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge, Mass., 12 July 1973.

Norberg, Arthur L., and Judy E. O’Neill. “A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn., 1992.

Ornstein, Severo M., F. E. Heart, W. R. Crowther, H. K. Rising, S. B. Russell, and A. Michel. “The Terminal IMP for the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, Atlantic City, N.J., May 1972.

Ornstein, Severo. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 March 1990.

Pogran, Ken, John Vittal, Dave Crowther, and Austin Henderson. “Proposed Official Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Messages.” Request for Comments 724. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 12 May 1977.

Postel, Jonathan B. “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 821. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, August 1982.

———. “Specification of Internetwork Transmission Control Protocol: TCP Version 4.” Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, September 1978.

———. “TCP and IP Bake Off.” Request for Comments 1025. Network Working Group, September 1987.

Pouzin, Louis. “Network Protocols.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 50, September 1973.

———.“Presentation and Major Design Aspects of the Cyclades Computer Network.” Paper presented at the IEEE Third Data Communications Symposium (Data Networks: Analysis and Design), November 1973.

———. “Experimental Communication Protocol: Basic Message Frame.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 48, January 1974.

———.“Interconnection of Packet Switching Networks.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 42, October 1973.

———. “Network Architecture and Components.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 49, August 1973.

RAND Corporation. “Development of the Distributed Adaptive Message-Block Network.” Recommendation to the Air Staff, 30 August 1965.

RCA Service Company, Government Services Division. “ARPANET Study Final Report.” Submitted under contract no. F08606-73-C-0018. 24 November 1972.

Richard J. Barber Associates, Inc. “The Advanced Research Projects Agency: 1958–1974.” A study for the Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract no. MDA-903-74-C-0096. Washington, D.C., December 1975. Photocopy.

Roberts, Lawrence G. “Extensions of Packet Communications Technology to a Hand-Held Personal Terminal.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, May 1972.

———. “Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication.” Paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 1967.

Roberts, Lawrence G., and Barry D. Wessler. “Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing.” Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970.

Roberts, Lawrence G. Interview by Arthur Norberg. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 4 April 1989.

Ruina, Jack. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 20 April 1989.

Sutherland, Ivan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 1 May 1989.

Taylor, Robert. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 28 February 1989.

U.S. Postal Service. “Electronic Message Systems for the U.S. Postal Service.” Report of the U.S.P.S. Support Panel, Committee on Telecommunications, Washington, D.C., January 1977.

Walden, David C. “Experiences in Building, Operating, and Using the ARPA Network.” Paper presented at the Second USA-Japan Computer Conference, Tokyo, Japan, August 1975.

Walden, David. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 6 February 1990.

Walker, Stephen T. “Completion Report: ARPA Network Development.” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Processing Techniques Office, Washington, D.C., 4 January 1978.

Weik, Martin H. “A Third Survey of Domestic Electronic Digital Computing Systems.” Ballistic Research Laboratories, report no. 1115, March 1961.

White, Jim. “Proposed Mail Protocol.” Request for Comments 524. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., 13 June 1973.

Zimmermann, H., and M. Elie. “Proposed Standard Host-Host Protocol for Heterogeneous Computer Networks: Transport Protocol.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 43, December 1973.Edit

Electronic Archives

Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota. Large archival collection relating to the history of computing. More information can be obtained via the CBI Web site at http://cbi.itdean.umn.edu/cbi/welcome.html or via e-mail addressed to [email protected].

Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts. Large collection relating to the history of computing, including the archives of the Message Group concerning the early development of e-mail. The archive is available via the homepage at http://www.tcm.org/msgroup.

Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. Collection includes up-to-date indexes and tests of Internet standards, protocols, Requests for Comments (RFCs), and various other technical notes available via the ISI Web site: http://www.isi.edu. Some of the earlier RFCs are not available electronically, but are archived off-line in meticulous fashion by RFC editor Jon Postel. A searchable archive is maintained at http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc.

Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science. The CIS Web Server offers access to RFCs and various other technical and historical documents related to the Internet via http://www.cis. ohio-state.edu:80/hypertext/information/rfc.html.

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late – The Origins Of The Internet

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late – The Origins Of The Internet by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner

by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner

“Twenty five years ago, it didn’t exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone.”

“In the 1960’s, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.”Edit

Book Details

  • Print length: 304 pages
  • Publication date: August 19, 1999
  • ASIN: B000FC0WP6
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • ISBN: 0684832674

Table of Contents

  • Prologue
  • 1. The Fastest Million Dollars
  • 2. A Block Here, Some Stones There
  • 3. The Third University
  • 4. Head Down in the Bits
  • 5. Do It to It Truett
  • 6. Hacking Away and Hollering
  • 7. E-Mail
  • 8. A Rocket on Our Hands
  • Epilogue
  • Chapter Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index

Dedication

To the memory of J. C. R. Licklider and to the memory of Cary Lu

“Los Alamos’ lights where wizards stay up late, (Stay in the car, forget the gate), To save the world or end it, time will tell” — James Merrill, “Under Libra: Weights and Measures”

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History

Hacker Culture – Late 20th Century

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Hacker Culture.

Where Did Hacker Culture Come From?

Builder culture: Model building, Radio controlled airplanes.

Greg Hartrell, Product Leader @ Google. Top Quora Writer.Updated August 27, 2017 · Forbes, Apple News and Observer · 

How hacker culture originated is an interesting story. Here’s a set of perspectives that I found interesting many years after I realized I was pulled into this culture at a young age.

The origins of hacker culture are most attributed to early computer science departments, specifically MIT, in the 1960s. That said, the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club seems to be ground zero, starting with elaborate efforts to automate model trains, and later moved into tinkering with mainframe computing. Hacker culture emerged from a fusion of intellectual curiosity, counter-culture and a hate-on for any technology that you couldn’t easily get access to or tamper with.

An insight I’ll call out is that the culture of self-repair and openness in products was normal in America prior to early computing… people expected to fix and tinker with cars, appliances and every day things, and if you were a kid, you probably grew up with a parent who tinkered with those every day things all the time. When computing in universities was first introduced, they were expensive mainframe systems. The high cost of early computing meant limited access to a few access terminals and restrictive rules on what you could and couldn’t do with those million dollar systems. Other technologies then emerged (more advanced phone systems for example, later personal computers) that continued a trend of being expensive, inaccessible and off limits to the average person. This rubbed up against the old culture of openness and self-repair.

So, hacker culture was a bit of a protest to the trend to centralize, make everything proprietary and hide the way things worked from people. If you couldn’t repair something, you didn’t really own it. If the way something worked was hidden from you, you ought to be suspicious of creator’s intentions. Most importantly, automation and technology offered (and still offers) so much promise to help improve our lives that everyone should be able to use it. So those who felt that way found like-minded folks to come together and tinker with stuff, understand it deeply and teach others around them how to do it.

Each generation since then has found it’s own “authority” or “centralization movement” to push back against, gain back control and and make the technologies around us more open. Early “phreakers” tampered with opaque phone systems to see how the system that helped us communicate really worked. The personal computing era had people assembling bootleg systems in their garages and homes with spare parts. Modems emerged and spawned fragmented communication networks and bulletin board services (BBSes) for sharing knowledge and socializing. And of course, we saw the emergence of the Internet (and it’s open protocol) and open source software culture (massive collaboration and the culture code sharing and open review).

The book “Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution” (Levy) has the best historical summary of the principles of these early groups, which stands the test of time to this day.

I would paraphrase and summarize them this way:

  • Access to computers and anything that may teach you how the world works should be unlimited and total (a.k.a. The hands-on imperative.)
  • All information should be free (later elaborated on as all information also wants to be expensive.)
  • Mistrust authority and promote decentralization, closed systems and bureaucracies are anti-patterns.
  • You should be judged only by your abilities and skill, not “bogus criteria” like demographic traits.
  • You can create art and beauty on a computer. (i.e. computing isn’t purely mechanical in nature… it sits next to the other methods of creativity that we enjoy as humans. Indeed simple code that does great things is akin to a music composition or a poem.)
  • Computers can change your life for the better (i.e. believe in the power of computing to change and enrich people’s lives, and spreading access, and this ethic, can make the world a better place.)

I see a lot of today’s Silicon Valley product development culture continues in these traditions. We have only begun to harness the power of computing to change our lives for the better, and I think we’ll do so through open systems, radical inclusiveness and spreading our knowledge to the many.”

“Mondo 2000 and Wired were instrumental in moving technology to the lifestyle of young college-educated people. They served, and helped grow, the hacker culture created in the 1980s. Hacker conferences multiplied, notably Defcon, started in Las Vegas in 1993 by Jeff Moss, and HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), founded in New York in 1994 by the hacker magazine 2600.”

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IBM History

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“Nobody ever lost their job for recommending the purchase of IBM products.” —COMPUTER INDUSTRY FOLK WISDOM

“More than any other company since World War II, IBM has shaped the way the modern world goes about its business. Large corporations and governments began to use IBM’s products before 1900. Its computers served as global computing gearboxes for decades before the public “discovered” the Internet in the 1990s. Many of IBM’s computers had been part of the Internet since the early 1970s and part of even older networks since the 1960s. The US census of 1890 was the first in the world to be done using automation tools — the punch card — and that too came from what would come to be IBM. For a long time, the company has been at the center of much of what makes a modern society function.” Fair Use Source: B08BSXJCBP

“By working in conference rooms and data centers for over a century, IBM made this achievement possible. For that reason, few people outside those two places knew what it did, or how. They just knew that it was big, important, and usually well run. What they understood was largely the product of a century-long marketing and public relations campaign by IBM to manage carefully what we imagine when thinking about the firm. Its influence proved so powerful for so long that whenever there were problems at IBM — and there always seemed to be — the information technology world was affected, including the operation of large enterprises and government agencies, stock markets, and even how national governments armed themselves for global wars.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“So what? We live in an increasingly dangerous world, profoundly influenced by computing, so understanding the role of one of the world’s most important providers of such technologies is crucial and urgent. We face three problems: ongoing acts of terrorism; a cyberwar involving the United States, Russia, and China but also affecting other countries caught in the crossfire, evidenced by cyber attacks on German elections, Chinese hacking of companies, and” hoax of “Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election in 2016, for example; and a global political and economic environment that is becoming increasingly uncertain as nations flirt with trade restrictions and efforts to keep jobs from migrating to other countries.” (B08BSXJCBP)

IBM has been at the heart of outsourcing most of its American and European jobs to low cost “slave wages” of Communist China and India.

“In the thick of all these conditions, information processing plays a profound role, and in the middle of that role stands a few technology companies, notably IBM. Which would be more important for the security of a nation under a cyberattack, IBM or Netflix, IBM or Apple? For decades, commercial enterprises and government agencies in the United States and in other nations considered IBM a national treasure.” (B08BSXJCBP)

This is no longer true that IBM is a so-called “national treasure” since IBM with the help of the UniParty of Democrats and Republicans outsourced the vast majority of their American jobs to “slave wage” countries like India and Communist China.

“When the West needed computing for national defense, it turned to IBM. In World War II, IBM provided the Allies with machines to organize national economies for the war effort; in the Cold War, it implemented a national air defense system, assisted in making “space travel” possible, and did intelligence work. IBM has nearly a century of experience dealing with Russian counterintelligence operations—today’s hacking and intelligence operations are not new to it.” (B08BSXJCBP)

IBM like the rest of Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook), at best ignores and is indirectly and sometimes directly complicit with the military hacking and intelligence operations of Communist China and their ChiCom state-sponsored companies. This is due to Big Tech’s close embedded work with the Chinese Communist government and its “companies”.

“We again face a time when many countries need the skills long evident at IBM. Nevertheless, it is a company that has suffered chronic problems, a malaise that while it tries to shake it off leaves open questions about its long-term viability. Understanding what this company is capable of doing begins by appreciating its history. Such insight helps employees, citizens, companies, and entire industries and nations understand what they can do to ensure that IBM is there when they need it. The company is too important to do otherwise. That is what led me to write this book.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“IBM is a company that has a century-long history of not being generous in explaining how it interacts with the world. Like most large multinational corporations, it works to control what the public knows about it, including its global practices. Why, for example, several years ago, was IBM willing to share with China the guts of some of its critical software in exchange for being allowed to sell in that country?” (B08BSXJCBP)

Big Tech, especially Google and IBM, is completely in bed with the Chinese Communist Party and their apparatchiks and nomenklatura.

“Why does it have a history of also doing confidential work for the U.S. intelligence and military communities? During World War II, when it was a ‘tiny company’, the Allies and the Axis” (IBM helped the National Socialists or Nazis) “used its products. Is IBM as American a company as it was 30 or 50 years ago? With an estimated 75 percent of its workforce now located outside the United States, some tough questions have to be asked. Such national security interests are addressed in this book and head-on in the last chapter, because this company may be one of those too critical to allow to fail.” (B08BSXJCBP)

To Big to Fail: Too critical to the Chinese Communists and India?

“Business historians, economists, and business management professors have their own concerns as well. Scholars and journalists have studied IBM for decades. Historians are interested in how large corporations function, why they exist for decades, their effects on national economies, and how they influence their own industries. A crucial question raised by IBM’s experience is how it became an iconic company yet also experienced periods of severe business crises that nearly killed it. Across all of IBM’s history, nearly lethal troubles accompanied its successes. How could that be? What lessons for other firms can IBM’s story teach? What can be learned that scholars and managers can apply in their explorations of how other firms flourished, failed, or are floundering? Answering such questions is central to this book.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“IBM’s influence on our lives is significant, but the company remains little appreciated. Occasionally we hear about it, such as when its stock goes up or down, in the 1980s when it introduced the world to the term “Personal Computer” and in the process made it now “O.K.” for corporations, not just geeks and commercial artists, to use PCs. Did you know that selling computers is now the tiniest piece of IBM’s business?” (B08BSXJCBP)

Especially after IBM sold its PC business to the Chinese Communist Beijing-based Lenovo.

“Did you know that it is the world’s largest software firm, or that it operates in 178 countries? Did you know that it almost went out of business several times, including as recently as 1993? Or that as this book was being written in 2017, observers thought IBM was on a slow march to extinction while still generating billions of dollars in profits each year? It is time to pull aside the veil to see how this fascinating and powerful company was able to thrive for over a century while being both respected and disliked, and to understand what essentially has been its positive impact on the world while at the same time it demonstrated toughness against its enemies and in its constant battle to survive and thrive.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“Today IBM functions under ugly storm clouds, but let a blogger friendly to it describe what I mean: “International Business Machines might be the most iconic company in the entire multitrillion-dollar tech industry. For decades, its name was synonymous with technology, to the point where ‘IBM’ was all but shorthand for computing hardware. Its century-plus history might even make it the oldest tech company in a world where tech titans rise and fall every few years. It’s also one of the world’s largest tech companies, trailing only a handful of others in the global market-cap rankings.” Here is the clincher: “But it’s probably bound to be the worst-performing tech stock on the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the foreseeable future. High performance isn’t a requirement to remain in the Dow, but if IBM can’t do something about its flatlining revenue, it might eventually force the Dow’s handlers to do the unthinkable and replace it with a more appropriate company.”1 What is going on?” (B08BSXJCBP)

“One of the important, little understood findings presented in this book is the profound influence of prior events on what the company does today. Some of its long-serving senior executives are aware, for example, that our grandparents received Social Security payments because of IBM, since nobody else at the time could calculate and print checks quickly enough, or in the millions needed, permanently assisting millions of older Americans out of poverty. Many are aware that IBM could radically define and then build computers that do what one expected of them, thanks to a “bet your company” life-threatening decision in the 1960s that led the majority of the world’s large organizations to finally start using computers. IBM employees wrote software and managed its implementation so that humans could “go to the moon” for the first time and be brought safely back to earth. They are aware that it was IBM’s introduction of the PC in 1981, not Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh, that led the world to finally embrace this technology by the hundreds of millions. It is a company taking the half-century promise of artificial intelligence and turning it into actions that smartly do things humans cannot do, such as advise a doctor based on all human knowledge of a medical condition or calculate more precise weather forecasts. This is happening now, and IBM is making millions of dollars providing such capabilities. We do not know whether IBM is going to be around in 20 or 100 years, but we do know that it is a large, technologically muscular company in the thick of what is going on with computing. Generations of managers, economists, and professionals, and tens of millions of customers, knew about the role of this company during the twentieth century. Now the rest of us should, too.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“What made IBM iconic included technological prowess, enormous business success, massive visibility, and hundreds of thousands of aggressive, smart, ambitious men and women used to success and always fearful of failure. It was the “IBM Way.” For over a half century, it was said no worker ever lost their job for recommending that their firm acquire IBM’s products, because those products normally worked. IBMers would make them work, and “everyone” seemed to think IBM was one of the best-run firms in the world. They joked about IBMers as too serious, focused, polished in their presentations, and facile in dealing with all manner of technology. Competitors feared and hated them; customers accepted them as the safe bet.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“IBM’s iconic role thus left IBMers, their customers, and the public in dozens of countries ill prepared for its near-death experience in the early 1990s. A fired CEO, John F. Akers, almost went into hiding; he never spoke publicly of IBM for the rest of his life. His successor, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., observed the IBM culture as a customer and now had to face a depressed yet combative workforce. He had worked at Nabisco as a turnaround leader and came into IBM as the butt of cookie jokes but with the hope that he could save the firm. He brought the company back to iconic status. Afterward he reported that the biggest problem he faced was IBM’s culture, invented by Thomas Watson Sr. and his son Thomas Watson Jr., remade partly by Charlie Chaplin’s character the “Little Tramp,” and battered by hundreds of competitors, including Steve Jobs at Apple. To any IBM employee, the company always felt small, because it was a firm filled with characters, more a collection of fantastic personalities than a faceless corporation, an ecosystem with its own culture.” (B08BSXJCBP)

“IBM’s corporate culture is central in understanding much about “Big Blue.” That is also a clue for answering a central question about IBM: How is it that a company viewed as so stable and reliable for decades had so many ups and downs over the course of its 130-year history? The company’s history from its origins in the 1880s to the 1970s was essentially a story of repeated successes, despite enormous difficulties. By the end of the 1970s, however, the company had entered a new era in which it was now large, difficult to run, and slow to make decisions and to take timely actions, and so its subsequent history took on a very different tone. It continued to grow, shrink, reconfigure itself, grow again, and spin off vast sums of profitable revenue while laying off tens of thousands of employees almost without the public hearing about it. How could that be? Observers had been predicting its demise since the mid-1960s, loudly in the early 1990s, and again after 2012. Yet there it stood as this book was being published: bloodied, anemic, slow to move, and grey around the cultural temples but also vigorous, employing vast numbers of young employees around the world while having shed tens of thousands of older ones” (B08BSXJCBP), (Meaning IBM, like all of Big Tech, especially Facebook and Google, is focused on using young “wage slaves” from Communist China and India) “financially sound, and still a major player in one of the world’s most important industries. Again, how could that be? Our purpose is to answer that question.” (B08BSXJCBP)

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IBM – The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon

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by James W. Cortada

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IBM – The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon

A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

“Nobody ever lost their job for recommending the purchase of IBM products.” —COMPUTER INDUSTRY FOLK WISDOM

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM’s technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company’s shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM’s business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM’s unequaled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies.

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cortada, James W., author.

Title: IBM : the rise and fall and reinvention of a global icon / James W. Cortada.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2019] | Series: History of computing | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018023090 | ISBN 9780262039444 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: International Business Machines Corporation—History. | Computer industry—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HD9696.2.U6 C67 2019 | DDC 338.7/61004—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023090

Contents

Preface

  I   From Birth to Identity: IBM in Its Early Years, 1880s–1945

  1   Origins, 1880s–1914

  2   Thomas J. Watson Sr. and the Creation of IBM, 1914–1924

  3   The Emergence of IBM and the Culture of THINK

  4   IBM and the Great Depression

  5   IBM in World War II, 1939–1945

 II   IBM the Computer Behemoth, 1945–1985

  6   IBM Gets into the Computer Business, 1945–1964

  7   How Customers, IBM, and a New Industry Evolved, 1945–1964

  8   System 360: One of the Greatest Products in History?

  9   “The IBM Way”: How It Worked, 1964–1993

10   “The IBM Way”: What the World Saw, 1964–1993

11   IBM on the Global Stage

12   Two Decades of Antitrust Suits, 1960s–1980s

13   Communist Computers

14   “A Tool for Modern Times”: IBM and the Personal Computer

III   A Time of Crisis, 1985–1994

15   Storms, Crisis, and Near Death, 1985–1993

16   IBM’s Initial Response, 1985–1993

17   How IBM Was Rescued, 1993–1994

IV   IBM in the New Century

18   A New IBM, 1995–2012

19   Hard Times, Again, and Another Transformation

20   THINK: IBM Today and Its Legacy

Author’s Note: In the Spirit of Transparency

Bibliographic Essay

Index

“The purpose of this book is to introduce a new generation to IBM’s role by telling the story of its long history, its culture and values, and, most important, explain how it helped to shape the world in which we live, a process still unfolding. I argue that it is essential to understand its corporate culture, one that academics and reporters found difficult to describe but that they recognized was essential to describe. Published accounts of IBM offer insufficient insights. IBM is also a multinational company operating around the world, so we need to understand its role in international disputes. Is it an American corporation or is it so globalized that only its senior leaders are U.S. citizens? What are the implications for Russia, China, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Australia, and so many other countries?”

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Scouts: Electrical-Nuclear Engineering and the U.S. Navy – A Culture of Innovation – 1925-1940 AD

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Scouts: Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, the Navy, and a Culture of Innovation (1925-40)

  • Stanford and Electrical Engineering – Early 20th Century
  • Berkeley and Nuclear Engineering
  • NACA National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
  • San Francisco Bay Area Culture and Society – 1920 to 1940 AD
  • Stanford and US Industry
  • Progress in Electronic Computation
  • High-tech Construction
  • The Aerospace Industry in Los Angeles

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Stanford and Electrical Engineering – Early 20th Century

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“A pivotal event in the history of the Bay Area’s high-tech industry took place in 1925: Harris Ryan’s student, Frederick Terman (a ham radio fan who had also studied at MIT in Boston with Vannevar Bush, joined Stanford University to work at Ryan’s pioneering radio-communications laboratory. Terman was the son of a Stanford professor, so he represented a highly educated generation that had been raised in the Bay Area, a step forward from the immigrants of previous decades. Within two years, the young apprentice became a visionary on his own, fostering a new science on the border between wireless communications and vacuum-tube electronics. Terman didn’t just perfect the art of radio engineering. The Bay Area offered precious few opportunities for employment, and during the Great Depression that started in 1929 virtually none. Terman encouraged his students to start their own businesses rather than wait for jobs to be offered to them. After all, Stanford had perfected a number of engineering technologies that could potentially be of general interest (one being the resistance-capacity oscillator built by Bill Hewlett in 1935). Many of those students were coming from the East Coast. He encouraged them to start businesses in the Bay Area. He viewed the university as an incubator of business plans. It was a step up from Harris Ryan’s philosophy of encouraging cooperation between academia and industry.

A vibrant industry was taking hold around Stanford University by the time Ryan retired in 1931 and Cyril Elwell’s Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) moved east. Several startups were spin-offs of the early radio companies.

Stanford’s student Ralph Heintz, a former radio amateur and employee of Earle Ennis, had started a business to install short-wave radios on ships and airplanes. In 1926 he founded Heintz & Kaufmann in San Francisco; but soon had to start manufacturing their own vacuum tubes to compete with RCA, for which they hired radio hobbyists Bill Eitel and Jack McCullough.

Litton Engineering Laboratories had been founded in 1932 by ham-radio hobbyist, Stanford student, and FTC manager Charlie Litton at his parents’ Redwood City home to manufacture tools for vacuum tube manufacturers (the same job he had at FTC). Litton invented the glass lathe that mechanized the process of making vacuum tubes. Eitel-McCullough (later Eimac) was formed in 1934 in San Bruno by Heintz’s employees Bill Eitel and Jack McCullough to develop better vacuum tubes for the amateur or ham radio market (which would become the Armed Forces’ favorite tubes during the war). Another FTC employee, German-born Gerhard Fisher invented the metal detector in 1928, and founded Fisher Research Laboratories in 1931 in his home’s garage in Palo Alto. Many of these independents who scouted the market for radio communications and electronics had started out as ham radio amateurs, some of them at a very early age.

At the time, Stanford was a minor university, and not many scholars of international standing were willing to join its ranks. The world sent many Europeans (especially Jews) to the USA, but almost all to the universities of the East Coast. The head of the department of Mathematics at Stanford, Hans Blichfeldt, was the son of Danish peasants who immigrated to the USA. Admitted to Stanford despite his lack of formal education, he had to spend a year in Germany (Leipzig) in order to finish his dissertation: German universities had a far better reputation than Stanford, especially in mathematics. After he retired in 1938, he was succeeded by the Austro-Hungarian Jew Gabor Szego, who had fled Europe after the rising of Nazism and in 1940 convinced his friend Gyorgy Polya to join him. “George” Polya would go on to become the world’s expert in heuristics, the rules of thumb that mathematicians use to find solutions, a topic on which he published an influential book, “How to Solve it” (1945), originally written in German in Switzerland but rejected by European publishers. While all of these mathematicians were brilliant, none compared with the likes of John VonNeumann and Kurt Goedel who flocked to the East Coast universities (not to mention Albert Einstein).

Stanford’s “Engineering Corner” (2010)

The local tradition of radio engineering led an immigrant to settle in San Francisco to conduct his experiments. In 1927 Philo Farnsworth, a stereotypical amateur who had been discovered in Utah by San Francisco venture capitalists Leslie Gorrell and George Everson, carried out the first all-electronic television broadcast. It was based on a theory that he had conceived as a teenager. Farnsworth’s team included the young Russ Varian and Ralph Heintz. In 1931 the investors decided to cash in. They sold the company to the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company (later renamed Philco). At the time, Philco was the main maker of home radios in the US and therefore in a much better position to mass-manufacture television sets. The power of RCA, however, was such that the Russian-born scientist Vladimir Zworkyn of their New Jersey laboratories was credited by the media with inventing television. Farnsworth’s reputation was saved by his good San Francisco friend, Donald Lippincott, formerly a Magnavox engineer and now an attorney, who in 1930 defended the young inventor’s intellectual property against RCA. Lippincott exemplified a tradition of heavy intellectual-property litigation in the Bay Area that would be crucial to the development of the high-tech industry run by young inventors.”

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The Prehistory of Office Automation – IBM-NCR-Burroughs 1910s – 1930s AD

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The Prehistory of Office Automation

“Elsewhere (mainly in New York and Detroit) the frantic growth in statistical and bookkeeping activities, bootstrapped by the Census Bureau of the US government, was fueling a new industry: calculating machines. In 1924 Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company of New York changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM). Other inventors created useful business machines too. In 1922 National Cash Register (NCR) of Ohio sold more than two million electrical cash registers (about 90% of the market). In 1925 Burroughs of Detroit introduced a portable adding machine (still weighing quite a bit but “portable” by a strong man).”

“The Bay Area had its share of glory during the boom of office calculators. In 1911 Rodney and Alfred Marchant of Oakland began selling one of the many clones of the Odhner arithmometer, and in 1918 their chief engineer, the Swedish-born Carl Friden, built an original model that established the company as one of the most innovative in calculators. In 1934 Friden would start building his own electromechanical calculators, some of the most sophisticated and most expensive on the market.”

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San Francisco Bay Area Culture and Society – 1849 to 1919 AD

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Culture and Society

“In the 1890s most of California was still unexplored. A vast area of the state, the Sierra Nevada, was virtually inaccessible. The fascination for finding out what lay inside drew men from all backgrounds but especially scientists. In 1860 (just a few years after becoming a state of the USA) California had created the Office of State Geologist and had hired Josiah Whitney, professor of geology at Harvard University, to lead it. Between 1863 and 1864 Whitney had led expeditions that had included botanists, zoologists, paleontologists and topographers to explore the High Sierra, “discovering” what today are known as Yosemite and King’s Canyon national parks. Another geologist, Clarence King, who had traveled overland to California in 1863 from Yale, had become the first white man to spot Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the USA outside of Alaska. The mountains were largely explored by the least documented of all explorers: the European shepherds, who probably created many of the trails used today by mountaineers. The High Sierra was an ideal terrain for sheep, thanks to its many meadows and relatively mild climate. One such shepherd was John Muir, originally from Scotland, a nomadic sawyer who had reached San Francisco in 1868, having traveled by steamship from Florida via Cuba and Panama. He settled in Yosemite for a few years and eventually became influential enough to convince the USA to create Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in 1890, but never actually hiked what is today North America’s most famous trail, the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mt Whitney. The idea for that trail must be credited to Theodore Solomons, born and raised in San Francisco, who in 1892 set out to independently explore regions of the Sierra Nevada that no white man had seen before. The 1890s were the golden age of Sierra exploration.”

“San Francisco was still living with the legacy of the “Gold Rush” of 1849. The “Barbary Coast,” as the red-light district was known, was a haven for brothels and nightclubs. The thousands of Chinese immigrants who had been lured to California to build railways, mine gold and grow food had fathered a new generation that settled in “Chinatown,” the largest Chinese community outside Asia. The port served steamers bound for the coast or Asia as well as ferry traffic to the bay and the Sacramento River, and supported a large community of teamsters and longshoremen that also made it the most unionized city in the US.”

“Dubious characters still roamed the landscape: the career of despised media tycoon William Randolph Hearst got its start in 1887 when his father handed him the San Francisco Examiner. But there were also honest enterprising men, such as Amadeo Giannini, who founded the Bank of Italy in 1904 to serve the agricultural economy of the Santa Clara Valley (it was later renamed Bank of America). At the turn of the century one could already sense San Francisco’s predisposition towards rebellion: John Muir’s Sierra Club (formed in 1892) led the first environmental protest when the state planned a dam in Yosemite; the American Anti-Imperialist League (formed in 1898) organized the first anti-war movement when the US went to war against Spain (a war largely architected by Hearst” and the New York Times “to sell more copies of his newspapers); and the Union Labor Party (formed in 1901) became the first pseudo-socialist party to win a mayoral election in a US city. In 1871 Susan Mills and her husband Cyrus founded Mills College in Oakland, the first women’s college in the western states.”

“Most of this was irrelevant to the rest of the nation. San Francisco made the national news in 1906 because of the earthquake and fire that leveled most of it.”

“California was also blessed with some of the most reformist governors in the country, notably Hiram Johnson (1911-1917), who democratized California and reduced the power of the political barons, and William Stephens (1917-1923), who did something similar to curb the political power of unions. Their policies focused on raising the living standards of the middle class, and therefore of the suburbs.”

“Immigration made San Francisco a cosmopolitan city. There had already been Italians when California was still under Mexican rule. They were fishermen and farmers. By the turn of the century, old and new Italians had created an Italian quarter in North Beach. Then came the Japanese, who replaced the Chinese in agriculture. At the beginning of the century San Francisco boasted two Japanese-language newspapers: “The New World” and the “Japanese American.” Mexicans immigrated from 1910 to 1930, following the Mexican revolution and the construction of a railway.”

“San Francisco was also becoming friendly toward the arts. In 1902 the California Society of Artists was founded by a cosmopolitan group that included the Mexican-born painter Xavier Martinez and the Swiss-born painter and muralist Gottardo Piazzoni. At the California School of Design, many students were influenced by muralist and painter Arthur Mathews, one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement that tried to reconcile craftsmanship with industrial consumerism (a major national trend after the success of Boston’s 1897 American Arts and Crafts Exhibition). A symbolic event took place after the 1906 earthquake when Mathews opened his own shop (both as a craftsman and a painter) and started publishing one of the earliest art magazines in town, the Philopolis. Another by-product of the American Arts and Crafts Movement was Oakland’s California College of the Arts and Crafts founded in 1907 by one of the movement’s protagonists, Frederick Meyer.”

“More and more artists were moving to San Francisco. They created the equivalent of Paris’ Montmartre artistic quarter at the four-story building called “Montgomery Block” (also nicknamed “Monkey Block”), the epicenter of San Francisco’s bohemian life. Another art colony was born in the coastal city of Carmel, about two hours south of San Francisco. Armin Hansen opened his studio there in 1913. Percy Gray located there in 1922 and impressionist master William Merritt Chase taught there in 1914.”

“Architects were in high demand both because of the fortunes created by the railway and because of the reconstruction of San Francisco after the earthquake (for example, Willis Polk). Mary Colter studied in San Francisco before venturing into her vernacular architecture for the Southwest’s desert landscape. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, held in San Francisco, for which Bernard Maybeck built the exquisite Palace of Fine Arts, symbolized the transformation that had taken place in the area: from emperors and gold diggers to inventors and investors (and, soon, defense contractors). A major sculptor was Ralph Stackpole, who in 1913 founded the California Society of Etchers and in 1915 provided sculptures for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, notably the Palace of Varied Industries (demolished after the exposition). Influenced by the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, during the 1920s Maynard Dixon created an original Western style of painting. It was at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that the painters of the “Society of Six” (August Gay, Bernard von Eichman, Maurice Logan, Louis Siegriest, and William Clapp) were seduced by impressionism. Last but not least, in 1921 Ansel Adams began to publish his photographs of Yosemite. It was another small contribution to changing the reputation of that part of California and the birth of one of the most vibrant schools of photography in the world. Literature, on the other hand, lagged behind, represented by Frank Pixley’s literary magazine the “Argonaut,” located at Montgomery Block.”

“Classical music was represented by its own school of iconoclasts. From 1912 to 1916, Charles Seeger taught unorthodox techniques such as dissonant counterpoint at UC Berkeley. Starting with “The Tides of Manaunaun” (1912), pianist Henry Cowell, a pupil of Seeger, began exploring the tone-cluster technique. That piece was based on poems by John Osborne Varian, the father of Russell and Sigurd Varian, who had moved to Halcyon, a utopian community founded in 1903 halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles by the theosophists William Dower and Francia LaDue. Varian’s sons Russell and Sigurd later became friends with Ansel Adams through their mutual affiliation with the Sierra Club.”

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Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father – The Sage of Monticello – 1743 AD – July 4, 1826

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“The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.” — Thomas Jefferson

“The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1779.

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3rd President of the United States – Official Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson (by Rembrandt Peale, 1800)

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743[a] – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States between 1797 and 1801. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.

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Radio Engineering – 1890s to 1930s AD

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Radio Engineering

“At the same time, San Francisco’s inhabitants showed a voracious interest in the radio technology invented in Europe at the turn of the century. The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, then in Britain, had galvanized the sector with his long-distance radio transmissions, beginning in 1897 and culminating with the radio message from the US President Theodore Roosevelt to the British king Edward VII of 1903. Marconi’s company set up radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships at sea. However, it was not yet trivial how to create a wireless communication system.”

“In 1906 an independent with a degree from Yale, Lee DeForest, had built a vacuum tube in New York without quite understanding its potential as a signal amplifier. In fact his invention, the “audion”, was useful to amplify electrical signals, and therefore to wireless transmissions. (In 1904 the British chemist John-Ambrose Fleming had invented the two-element amplifier, or “diode”, and a few months before DeForest the Austrian physicist Robert von Lieben had already built a three-element amplifier, or “triode”). In 1910 DeForest moved to San Francisco and got into radio broadcasting, a business that he had pioneered in January when he had broadcast from New York a live performance by legendary Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. In fact, DeForest is the one who started using the term “radio” to refer to wireless transmission when he formed his DeForest Radio Telephone Company in 1907. However, his early broadcasts did not use the audion yet. Interest in radio broadcasting was high in the Bay Area, even if there were no mass-produced radios yet. A year earlier, in 1909, Charles Herrold in San Jose had started the first radio station in the US with regularly scheduled programming, including songs, using an arc transmitter of his own design. Charles Herrold had been one of Stanford’s earliest students and founded his own College of Wireless and Engineering in San Jose.

The Bay Area stumbled into electronics almost by accident. In 1909 another Stanford alumnus, Cyril Elwell, had founded the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company in Palo Alto, later renamed the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC), to commercialize a new European invention. In 1903 the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen invented an arc transmitter for radio transmission, but no European company was doing anything with it. Elwell understood its potential was not only technological but also legal: it allowed him to create radio products without violating Marconi’s patents. Elwell acquired the US rights for the Poulsen arc. His radio technology, adequately funded by a group of San Francisco investors led by Beach Thompson, blew away the competition of the East Coast. In 1912 he won a contract with the Navy, which was by far the biggest consumer of radio communications. Thus commercial radiotelegraphy developed first in the US. The “startup” was initially funded by Stanford’s own President, David Starr Jordan, and employed Stanford students, notably Edwin Pridham. Jordan had just inaugurated venture-capital investment in the region.

In need of better receiver amplifiers for the arc transmissions, FTC hired Lee DeForest, who by 1912 had finally realized that his audion could be used as an amplifier. The problem with long-distance telephone and radio transmissions was that the signal was lost en route as it became too faint. DeForest’s vacuum tube enabled the construction of repeaters that restored the signal at intermediate points. The audion could dramatically reduce the cost of long-distance wireless communications. FTC began applying the audion to develop a geographically distributed radiotelegraphy system. The first tower they had built, in July 1910, was on a San Francisco beach and it was 90 meters tall. Yet the most impressive of all was inaugurated in 1912 at Point San Bruno (just south of the city), a large complex boasting the tallest antenna in the world (130 meters).

By the end of 1912 FTC had grown; it had stations in Texas, Hawaii, Arizona, Missouri and Washington besides California. However, the Poulsen arc remained the main technology for radiotelephony (voice transmission) and, ironically, FTC was no longer in that business. Improvements to the design by recent Cornell graduate Leonard Fuller (mostly during World War I, when the radio industry was nationalized to produce transmitters for the Navy) that allowed the audion to amplify a signal a million times eventually led FTC to create the first global wireless communication system. The audion was still used only for receivers, while most transmitters were arc-based. It was only in 1915 that DeForest realized that a feedback loop of audions could be used to build transmitters as well. DeForest had already (in 1913) sold the patent for his audion to Graham Bell’s AT&T in New York, and AT&T had already used it to set up the first coast-to-coast telephone line (January 1915), just in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Meanwhile, DeForest had moved to New York. There, in 1916, he stunned the nation by broadcasting the results of the presidential elections with music and commentary from New York to stations within a range of 300 kilometers, and this time using an audion transmitter. Radiotelephony would switch from the Poulsen arc to his audion during the 1920s. In due time Leo Fuller took Elwell’s place as chief engineer of FTC, and in 1920 Navy engineer and former Marconi engineer Haraden Pratt was hired to launch commercial wireless telegraph service, and sugar magnate Rudolph Spreckels bought control of FTC.

The wireless industry was booming throughout the US, aided by sensational articles in the mainstream press. Earle Ennis had opened a company (Western Wireless Equipment Company) to sell wireless equipment for ships. He also ran a radio broadcast to deliver news to ships at sea. In 1910 he organized the first air-to-ground radio message, thus showing that the same technology could be used by the nascent airline industry.

Because of its maritime business, the Bay Area became one of the largest centers for amateur radio. The Bay Counties Wireless Telegraph Association was founded in 1907 by (then) amateurs such as Haraden Pratt, Ellery Stone and Lewis Clement.

Quite a bit of innovation in radio engineering came from the “ham” radio amateurs. The first wireless communications were, by definition, done by independents who set up their own equipment. This was the first “virtual” community as they frequently never met in person. The first magazine devoted to radio engineering, Modern Electrics, was launched in April 1908 in New York by Hugo Gernsback, a 24-year-old Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg. It reached a circulation of 52,000 in 1911, the year when it started publishing science-fiction stories (thus also becoming de facto the first science-fiction magazine). Amateur wireless associations popped up throughout the country, such as the Radio Club of Salt Lake City in Utah, founded in September 1909, and the Wireless Association of Central California, formed in May 1910 in Fresno. From a social point of view, the beauty of ham radio was that it blurred class boundaries: they were known by codes such as 6ZAF, not by their last names, and it made no difference whether they were rural teenagers, Stanford PhD students or professional radio engineers. They were all on the same level.

Among the amateurs of the second decade were Charlie Litton, an eleven-year old prodigy who operated an amateur station in Redwood City in 1915, and Frederick Terman, a teenager who operated an amateur station in Palo Alto in 1917. Some of those amateurs went on to create small companies. Little did they know that their hobby would in time of war constitute a strategic industry for the Air Force, Navy and Army: during World War I (in 1918) Elwell’s technology would be a pillar of naval communications for the US. The Navy had set up radio stations all over the place. In January 1918 the President of the US, Woodrow Wilson, proudly spoke live to Europe, the Far East and Latin America.

Magnavox Corp. was founded in 1910 in Napa (north of the bay). It was the brainchild of Peter Jensen (one of the Danish engineers imported by FTC to commercialize the Poulsen arc) and Edwin Pridham (a Stanford graduate who also worked at FTC). In 1917 they introduced a new type of electrical loudspeaker.

Alas, after World War I it became obvious that radio technology was strategic, and it couldn’t be left in the hands of West-Coast independents. The US government basically forced a large East-Coast company, General Electric, to buy the US business of Marconi. The US government also helped the new company to acquire the most important radio patents. Thus a new giant, RCA, was born and soon became the dominant player in consumer electronics, as the number of radios grew from 5,000 in 1920 to 25 million in 1924. Hence FTC was doomed and other Bay Area-based radio companies had to live with only military applications.

Ham-radio amateurs were the first “garage nerds” of the San Francisco Bay Area, a place isolated from the rest of the country (reaching any other city required a long journey by ship, by train or by coach). Bill Eitel presided the Santa Clara County Amateur Radio Association, formed in 1921, before he went on to launch his own “startup”. The First National Radio Conference took place in Washington in February 1922, and it pitted the five big corporations that owned all the patents (American Telephone & Telegraph, General Electric, Western Electric, Westinghouse and RCA) against the ham-radio amateur clubs. That conference established their legal legitimacy. A few weeks later, in April 1922, the first transpacific two-way amateur communication was established between 6ZAC (Clifford Down) in Hawaii and 6ZAF (A.H. Babcock) in Berkeley. The ham-radio operators became heroes in countless cases of natural disasters, especially in the Western states, at a time when there was no other way to communicate rapidly with the aid workers. A teenager, known as 6BYQ, sent out the first alarm when a dam broke in 1928 in Santa Paula, near Los Angeles, causing a flood that caused massive destruction. Ham-radios helped in September 1932 when a landslide wiped out the mining town of Tehachapi, east of Los Angeles, and in March 1933 when an earthquake struck Long Beach, south of Los Angeles. Ham-radios were the first “consumers” of the vacuum tubes made in the Bay Area.

Radio engineering created two worlds in the Bay Area that would greatly influence its future: a high-tech industry and a community of high-tech amateurs.

SEE ALSO: Electrical Engineering – Early 1900s

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Electrical Engineering – Early 1900s

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Electrical Engineering

“The railway brought people to the Bay Area, and created the first fortunes. But then, the Bay Area needed electricity. California had plenty of water, coming down from its mighty Sierra Nevada mountain range. Entrepreneurs understood that dams (hydroelectric plants) could provide the electrical power needed by the coastal cities, and engineers were working on solving the problem of how to distribute that power. The East Coast had not faced the problem of carrying high-tension voltage over long-distances, but that was precisely the problem to be solved on the West Coast. Stanford professors and students, under the leadership of the new head of the Electrical Engineering Department, Harris Ryan, another Cornell alumnus who had arrived in 1905, helped solve the problem. They inaugurated a cooperative model between university and industry. The Bay Area’s electrical power companies used the Stanford High Voltage Laboratory (as well as the one at UC Berkeley) for the development of long-distance electric power transmission. That cooperation, in addition, raised a generation of electrical engineers that could match the know-how of the East Coast.”

SEE ALSO: Radio Engineering – 1890s to 1930s AD

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Santa Clara Valley

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Santa Clara Valley

“The Santa Clara Valley (the valley between Palo Alto and San Jose) was known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” because it was an endless expanse of orchards. Its agriculture was growing rapidly and, thanks to the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, it soon became the largest fruit production and packing region in the world. At one point there were 39 canneries in the valley, notably the San Jose Fruit Packing Company. At the peak, Chinese workers represented 48% of agricultural labor in the Santa Clara Valley. In 1863 the second railroad of California (after the pioneering Sacramento-Folsom of 1855) connected San Francisco to Mayfield (now Churhill Avenue in Palo Alto), a rough town popular with loggers (and later with students), and then to San Jose (in 1864) with a daily ride that took three and a half hours. The Menlo Park depot (built in 1867) was the major station on that route until Palo Alto began to grow.”

“The first transcontinental railroad was finally completed in 1869, linking the East Coast with Oakland (and then by ferry to San Francisco).”

“Perhaps the first “high tech” of the Bay Area came in the form of the aerial tramway invented in 1867 by the British-born Andrew Hallidie, a former gold miner and a bridge builder. Installed on high towers that frequently overlooked incredibly steep slopes, it was used across the Sierra Nevada to transport ore, supplies and miners. In 1873 Hallidie, using a similar design with help from German-born engineer William Ep, inaugurated the Clay Street Hill Railroad in San Francisco, the world’s first cable-car system.”

“At the time the Bay Area also had its flirt with oil, in fact predating the celebrated Edward Doheny well of 1892 that started the oil rush in Los Angeles. In 1879 a San Francisco banker and politician, Charles Felton, founded the Pacific Coast Oil Company (PCO). Within a few months the new company discovered large oil deposits on Moody Gulch, a few kilometers west of San Jose in the south bay. In 1880 PCO opened a refinery in the island Alameda, located near Oakland by the bay, i.e. with good access to the railroad terminal and the port. In 1902 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, that two years earlier had acquired PCO, built a new refinery further north, in what is now Richmond, one of the largest and most advanced refineries in the world. In 1907 this refinery invented Zerolene, one of the most successful Standard Oil products.”

“The agricultural boom increased the demand for firewood and lumber, which made the fortune of the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company of Felton. (But mostly the boom made the fortune of the “railroad barons”, who provided the main form of transportation for goods and people. In fact, Santa Clara county confronted the arrogant railroad empires in a case that became famous in and had consequences for the whole nation: in 1886 the Supreme Court of the USA decreed that corporations should have the same rights as persons, and therefore the Southern Pacific Railroad Company was entitled to deduct mortgage from its taxable income just like any household). And, of course, ports dotted the bay, notably Redwood City’s port that shipped lumber to San Francisco. Redwood City was located in the “Peninsula,” i.e. the stretch of land between San Francisco and Palo Alto.”

“Most of the Peninsula belonged to San Mateo County and was underpopulated. The county road from San Francisco to Belmont (north of Redwood City) served the wealthy San Franciscan who had bought a mansion in the countryside, typically for the summer, when San Francisco was blanketed by its famous fog. These mansions usually controlled a large tract of land and constituted self-sufficient agricultural units. The First World War (1917) helped populate one town, Menlo Park, just north of Palo Alto, where the Army established Camp Fremont to train tens of thousands of soldiers.”

“The Bay Area became one in the early years of the 20th century. In the 1880s Frank Smith, who had made his fortune with his borax mines in Nevada and Death Valley, settled in Oakland and began to create a network of railways that eventually (1903) would become the Key System, connecting San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.”

“Not much else was going on in the sleepy bay accidentally discovered in 1769 by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola.”

“A lot was going in the rest of the US. The nation was booming with innovative ideas revolutionizing agriculture, industry, mining and transportation. Since there were more and more numbers to crunch, it is not surprising that in those years inventors devised several computing machines. The most influential were William Burroughs’ adding machine of 1885 and Herman Hollerith’s tabulator of 1890 (chosen for the national census). However, the new sensation at the turn of the century was electricity, which was enabling a whole new spectrum of appliances, from the light bulb to the phonograph.”

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Stanford University – 1885 AD

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Stanford University

Stanford University seal 2003.svg
Motto German: Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Motto in English: “The wind of freedom blows”

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University,[12] is a private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is ranked among the most prestigious universities in the world by numerous major education publications.[13][14][15]

The university was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year.[2] Stanford was a U.S. Senator and former Governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891,[2][3] as a coeducational and non-denominational institution.

Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.[16] Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.[17] The university is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.[18]

“Until 1919 the only road connecting San Jose to San Francisco was the old “El Camino Real,” a dusty country road (at the time known as US 101) that snaked its way through orchards and barren hills. The only way to travel quickly was the Southern Pacific Railroad. It had been acquired by the railway empire of Leland Stanford, the president of the company charged with the western section of the first transcontinental railroad. Stanford was a former California governor and a US senator. The Stanfords donated land and money to start a university near their farm after their only son, Leland Junior, died. They had a station built on the Southern Pacific route, the station of University Park, later renamed Palo Alto.”

“Stanford University opened in 1891. It was not the first university of the Bay Area: the Berkeley campus of the University of California had opened in 1873 at the other end of the bay. However, Leland was a man with a plan: his express goal was to create the Harvard of the West, something like New York State’s Cornell University. At the time, despite the huge sums of money offered to them by Leland, neither the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, nor the President of Cornell were willing to move to such a primitive place as the Bay Area from their comfortable East Coast cities; so Leland had to content himself with a humbler choice: a relatively young Cornell graduate, David Starr Jordan. In 1892 he hired Albert Pruden Carmen from the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) to teach electricity (at the time still a new discipline) within the Physics Department. The following year, another Princeton graduate, Fred Perrine, became the first professor of electrical engineering within a department furnished with equipment donated by local electrical firms.”

View of the main quadrangle of Stanford University with Memorial Church in the center background from across the grass-covered Oval.

“The light bulb (Edison) and the alternating current motor (Tesla) had been invented on the East Coast, but California pioneered their domestic use. In 1860s Horatio Livermore’s Natoma Water and Mining Company, based in Folsom, had built an extensive network of dams to supply water to the miners of the Gold Rush on the American River. Leveraging that investment, in July 1895 his company opened a 35 km hydroelectric power line to bring electricity from Folsom to Sacramento, with water powering four colossal electrical generators (dynamos), the first time that high-voltage alternating current had been successfully conducted over a long distance. In September 1895 Sacramento celebrated the coming of electricity with a Grand Electrical Carnival, and very soon the streets of the state’s capital were roamed by electric streetcars. Unlike on the East Coast, where electricity mainly served the industry, in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles electricity first came to the cities for public and domestic use. That also explains why electric consumer goods (such as the washing machine) would spread more rapidly in California, creating a myth of high-tech living.”

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