Word: computerize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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But the new LSls had an innate drawback. Because they were made in rigid patterns and served only particular purposes -or were, as engineers say, "hard-wired"-they lacked flexibility. That limitation was ingeniously solved by the work of Hoff and others on microprogramming-storing control instructions on a memory...
Babbage's loom, alas, never wove anything. By the time the eccentric genius died in 1871, he had managed to put together just a few small parts; only his elaborate drawings provide a clue to his visionary machine. Indeed, when Harvard and IBM scientists rediscovered Babbage's work...
The Harvard machine occupied a large room and sounded, in the words of Physicist-Author Jeremy Bernstein, "like a roomful of ladies knitting." The noise came from the rapid opening and closing of thousands of little switches, and it represented an enormous information flow and extremely long calculations for the...
Working with long strings of Is and 0s would be cumbersome for humans-but it is a snap for a digital computer. Composed mostly of parts that are essentially on-off switches, the machines are perfectly suited for binary computation. When a switch is open, it corresponds to the binary...
But how does the computer make sense out of the binary numbers represented by its open and closed switches? At the heart of the answer is the work of two other gifted Englishmen.