I'm sure it is usefull, I'm not sure it is popular, and I'm also sure a lot of things would be less miserable with some more knowledhe about the subject.

by [Theo Verelst]

Of course feel free to add (preferably identified)

My official, and finished education in the area is that I have a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, and before I left my position for reasons of completely different nature than content, I was maybe between a few months or a year from a PhD in the area of advanced computer design, at the then network theory section I also graduated. Not that I think mightily high of all fellow workers from that time, but at least I'm qualified. Not that I normally care that much, but when it concerns knowledge about computers, and especially when certain circuits and people in it are involved, I take it to be essential that I make such clear.

Computers existed in some form already long ago, I think it may have been in anchien china when mechanical adding machines were invented, and certainly telephone exchanges from a small century ago where computing some complicated things. In second world war, analog computers were used to compute bomb trajectories for the nonlinear (quadric I guess) influence of air resistance and wind on the bombs.

A bit later, tube based computers were tried, applying binary principles. I think boolean algebra was a lot older than that, but I shuld look that up. Such machine would produce amazing amounts of heat, and use a lot of power, and of course every our or day one of the tubes would blow, and it would have to be fixed.

Things started to accelerate after the transistor became available cheaply, and especially when the first and further digital chips appeared and even became cheaply available. I know this from experience since about 1977 or so, when as a still beginning teenager I bought those for hobbying together (working) circuits). That was a little while before the advancing technology brought forth the Z80, and the PET and TRS80 and other APPLE computers started to become widely sold, in the time when the intel 8080 processor was known (I had a book on it, but hardly dreamt of owning one...).

In about 1979 (from memory) serious versions of the trs80 and other microcomputer systems become consumer goods as well, that is they were widely used outside business and for much lower prices.

Before that, many machines of great innovative value were made in medium and major business and science sense, such as supercomputers, all kinds of (IBM) mainframes, and the interesting pdp 9 and 11 and others.

It was on such and also some smaller (for instance cpm based) systems that most principles were experimented with which 20, 30 years later are still fashionable such as disc based operating systems, multi tasking, multi user operation, memory management such as paging and virtual memory, shared libraries, and also caching, pipelining, and parallel systems (for instance in early and later supercomputers).