A Personal History of Computing - Part 1

Once upon a time there was a small boy. He lived in a small town on the prairie, where his father and his grandfather had an office suite (he didn’t know then it was a suite, or even what a suite was) above the Five and Dime on main street. They managed farms, sold real estate and insurance, and with them was the small boy’s uncle Bud, who was a lawyer, with row on row of beautiful books. There was a dentist down the hall in the upstairs of that brick storefront building, and it was a forbidding place, what with lawyers, and dentists, a busy father, and a dour grandfather.

But there was one object that seemed magic. It sat on a stand high enough to be majestic, low enough to be a visual feast of little mechanical pieces masterfully arranged to some rule not understood by the boy. It said Burroughs on it, it was a 100-key adding machine, and you could see its innards. Tiny little parts and pieces that were positioned by setting the keys to represent numbers, then all moved together when a great handle on the side of the machine was pulled. The small boy couldn’t pull it himself – it was too high and too hard – and of course he wouldn’t dare, in that very serious place.

That was the boy’s first computer, an adding machine invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642, but more specifically the improvement patented by William Burroughs in 1888. His company was the American Arithmometer Company which became the Burroughs Corporation, which later built big (we called them mainframe) computers, and finally merged with Sperry to become Unisys, one of the computer giants of the second half of the last century (before IBM ate them all for lunch, of course).

That magic machine was more to be admired than used. A few year after that, there was ninth grade typing class on Royal electric typewriters, while Univac was “inventing” the first computer for the US Navy to build its nuclear submarines. (At least that’s how I remember that story.) The boy wasn’t really affected by all that, since there were other far more pressing interests. Their names were Carol, and Elaine, and Janet.

Those are stories of a different kind. Of unrequited love. Stories shared by all pubescent boys.

Anyway, there’s Chapter 1 of A Personal History of Computing.