From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  In 1971 Intel brought the Intel 4004 to market.42 Intel’s first microprocessor had as much processing power as ENIAC-type machines that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.43 Yet the Intel chip was priced at hundreds of dollars. Four months later Hoff and colleagues produced the more powerful Intel 8008, and within a year they were producing the Intel 8080, which ran 220 times faster than the Intel 4004.44

  Big computers, however, were still the computing mainstay. By the mid-1970s computers had become like the hand-copied books pre-Gutenberg—sacred knowledge and capabilities locked away in facilities inaccessible to mere mortals, where they were tended by a special priesthood. Microprocessors may have put the Turing machine on a chip, but the priesthood could not fathom its relevance to everyday life.

  The kind of people who read Popular Electronics magazine saw the opportunity differently, however. In 1973, the magazine asked its readers to contribute their design for “the first desktop computer kit.” The winning entry from Edward Roberts in Albuquerque became the cover story of the magazine’s January 1975 issue. The kit was powered by an Intel 8800 microprocessor. Roberts’s daughter suggested he name it after the planet on the Star Trek episode they had just watched—Altair. The kit cost $397. It had no keyboard, monitor, or operating system. Data were loaded via toggle switches, and the results of the computer’s efforts were displayed on the front panel. Roberts received 4,000 orders in the three months following the cover story. The personal computer was born.45

  Two readers of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics were a Harvard student named Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen. Paul Allen called Edward Roberts and told him the two had programming software for the Altair. They called their company Micro-Soft.46

  Two years later, two Silicon Valley whiz kids brought to market a $790 fully assembled personal computer. Steve Wozniak’s and Steve Jobs’s Apple II moved personal computing beyond kit-building hobbyists. Software programs written by others allowed the Apple II to do word processing, create spreadsheets, and play games. By 1981, Apple had $300 million in annual sales and employed 1,500 people.47

  In 1981, the priesthood came after the upstarts. Mainframe powerhouse IBM introduced the IBM PC and chose Intel for the PC’s microprocessor. IBM turned to Bill Gates and Paul Allen for the computer’s operating system. Combining the initials “IBM” and “PC” seemed a contradiction in terms, but it gave personal computing the credibility boost that changed its course. In 1981 IBM sold about 35,000 IBM PCs; two years later sales of the microprocessor-powered devices had soared to 800,000.48

  Even with that kind of sales growth, PCs were still foreign to most people. Today we cannot imagine our lives without microprocessors and PCs, but it was only a short time ago that individualized computing was a concept from science fiction. In 1984, for instance, I was CEO of a computer and networking company; our salespeople’s greatest challenge was to get prospective customers to touch the computer or its keyboard.49 So ingrained was the idea that computers were mystical and fragile that we trained our salesforce to seat the customer and then physically place the keyboard in the customer’s lap to force them to touch it.

  The trip from Charles Babbage to the personal computer was a century-and-a-half odyssey. It was, however, the first step in defining our current network revolution. Soon the ideas of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse, and John Vincent Atanasoff became manifest in our daily lives through the ability of computers to communicate with one another and with networks of computers.

  Connections

  For the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore (who was still at Fairchild at the time) wrote an article titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” The article made the seemingly wild forecast that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year, bringing processing power up and cost down. The result of this, Moore predicted, would bring “such wonders as home computers … automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment.”50

  Dubbed “Moore’s law,” that 1965 forecast has proven incredibly resilient over the past fifty years. While the complexity of chip making has caused the time component of Moore’s law to vary, its basic concept still holds true: every couple of years the computing power of the state-of-the-art microprocessor doubles exponentially. When Gordon Moore wrote the article, the most prominent challenge was the shift from thirty transistors to sixty on a microchip; today, the number is in the billions.

  At age fifty, Moore’s law is beginning to show its years and slow down, but its trajectory remains on course. In the process it has become the computational bedrock of the new network revolution. The exponential functioning of Moore’s law means that today’s smart phone has the computing power of the multimillion-dollar supercomputer of just a few decades ago. Of even greater significance to our future, however, is the continued up-and-to-the-right growth of microchip computing power, with the effect that the computing power increases we will see in the next five years will far exceed what we experienced in the last five.

  Six

  Connected Computing

  A vibrant palette of raucous colors and crisp air welcomed the members of the American Mathematical Society to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, for their 1940 conclave.

  Standing before the audience gathered in McNutt Hall on September 11, George Stibitz delivered a paper describing the Complex Number Computer he and his colleagues had constructed 250 miles away at Bell Laboratories in New York City.1 At the heart of Stibitz’s computer was a discovery he had made on his kitchen table. He had repurposed the on-off functionality of the electromagnetic relays typically used to route telephone calls to instead solve mathematical problems.2

  The discovery Stibitz was demonstrating was developed on a November weekend in 1937. Using a couple of telephone relays, tin strips cut from a tobacco can, a flashlight battery, and some flashlight bulbs, Stibitz created a contraption that added binary numbers to produce a binary sum. In honor of the kitchen table at which it was invented, Stibitz dubbed it the “Model K.”

  Less than three years later he stood before his peers describing how he had harnessed the on-off functionality of approximately 400 telephone relays into a machine that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide complex equations.3

  Then George Stibitz turned showman.

  At Bell Labs, Stibitz’s Complex Number Computer was locked away in a small room. Modified teletype machines outside the room provided inputs to the machine. Operators would type the problem to be computed into the teletype, the impulses would be fed to the computer, and the teletype would print the result. Stibitz had arranged for a similar teletype to be on stage with him at Dartmouth. He would not only describe his computer; he would make it perform for the crowd as if it were a circus animal, even though it was 250 miles away.

  It was the first time a computing machine had ever been accessed remotely via phone lines.4 On stage, Stiblitz would input a problem into the teletype terminal on stage; the problem would be transmitted 250 miles to the computer in Manhattan, where the computation would be performed and sent back to the awaiting teletype. The whole 500-mile round trip and processing took about a minute. It seemed like magic.

  Like a carnival barker, Stibitz invited the audience to come forward and try his computer. From 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. that day attendees played Stump the Box. The box always won.

  The cause of the excitement, as well as the topic of Stibitz’s paper, was the Complex Number Computer and its capabilities. The history that was made that day, however, was the remote access of a computing device over telephone wires.5 The technology Alexander Graham Bell had developed would become the infrastructure for communicating computers.

  A Technological Step Backward

  As we’ve seen, the telephone could be considered a technological step backward in the progression from the telegraph to the internet. While the telegraph was a bi
nary on-off signal just like today’s digital impulses, the telephone was an analog waveform. The telephone’s contribution to the march to the digital future was not its technology alone, but how that technology developed into a ubiquitous backbone for connecting computers.

  The path to George Stibitz’s demonstration began in 1871 when the Boston Board of Education recruited a young Canadian who was fascinated with acoustics and the nature of sound to teach hearing-impaired students. The teacher’s name was Alexander Graham Bell.

  The dominant network company at the time, Western Union, was in search of a technology that would increase its productivity and lower costs by allowing a single wire to carry multiple messages simultaneously. Thomas Edison, while on retainer to Western Union, had invented a means for four signals to be carried simultaneously—two in each direction.

  Edison—a man whom Western Union president William Orton described as having a “vacuum” where his “conscience ought to be”—contended he owned the patent on this quadruplex technology despite the fact he had developed it under contract to Western Union.6 Financier Jay Gould, who was engaged in manipulating Western Union’s stock, bought Edison’s patent. By threatening to employ the patent in his rival telegraph companies, Gould was able to depress the market value of Western Union.7

  Riches lay ahead for anyone who could replicate Edison’s quadruplex effect without violating his patent. Back in Boston, the father of one of Bell’s students, prominent attorney Gardiner G. Hubbard, financed the acoustics expert so he could apply his knowledge in pursuit of harmonic transmission whereby multiple different signals would move on the same wire at different frequencies.8

  There was also another dynamic at play for Bell and Hubbard; Bell and his student Mabel Hubbard were in love. Arguably, one reason to accept Hubbard’s commission was for Bell to curry favor with his future father-in-law.9

  Bell conceived of what he called an “undulatory current” to carry the telegraph signal. Presumably, multiple such signals operating at different frequencies could carry multiple telegraph signals on a single wire. Bell’s acoustic training also convinced him such an undulatory current could carry sound. “If I can make a deaf-mute talk,” he reportedly said, “I can make iron talk.”10 On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent on undulating signals.11 A few weeks later, on March 10, the historic “Mr. Watson—Come here” transmission moved Bell’s voice over wire.12

  At first the ability to “make iron talk” was more of a phenomenon than a practical application. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, Bell’s demonstration was banished to a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. For six weeks it sat there unappreciated until Hubbard (who was one of the commissioners of the Centennial Exposition) persuaded the judges to detour and take a look. As if by providence, as the bored judges were at Bell’s display (reportedly not even putting the receiver to their ears), the emperor of Brazil swooped in and greeted Bell by name (he had visited one of Bell’s classes for the deaf in Boston). His warm welcome got everyone’s attention. Picking up the receiver and listening, the emperor exclaimed, “My God—it talks!”

  Soon the venerable Joseph Henry, the very man whose ideas Samuel Morse had purloined for his own, proclaimed, “This comes nearer to overthrowing the doctrine of the conservation of energy than anything I ever saw.” Sir William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin), the world’s foremost expert on electrical energy, proclaimed, “It DOES speak…. It is the most wonderful thing I have seen in America.”13 Suddenly, Bell’s invention was lifted out of obscurity and onto the exposition’s central stage.

  The Bell phenomenon went on a road show after the exposition. Transporting voices and music into halls throughout New England, the new technology, while greeted with awe, bumped up against the same resistance prompted by earlier network innovations—including the accusation that it had to be the work of Satan. In an echo of Baltimore’s pastors warning of Morse’s telegraph, the Providence Press observed, “It is hard to resist the notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league with it.” The New York Herald described it as “weird and almost supernatural.”14

  It was a long way from road-show demonstrations in public halls to a universally available network that switches calls between users. The new technology was so revolutionary that there were no readily apparent applications for it. To Bell’s financier, Gardiner Hubbard, fell the burden of seizing the public’s interest to turn the technology into a business. One by one, pairs of telephones slowly found their way into use, but there was still no tsunami of demand. An early application was to call (or receive a call from) the central telegraph office to send (or receive) a telegram, but the telephone remained a technology in search of a market.15

  With business dragging and capital hard to raise, Gardiner Hubbard acquiesced to the inevitable. In the winter of 1876–77, he offered Bell’s patent to Western Union for $100,000. William Orton, the president of Western Union, rejected the proposal, reportedly (perhaps apocryphally) with a sniff: “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”16

  Orton’s rejection of Bell’s patent made the incumbent networks zero for two in recognizing the opportunity of a new network technology. In 1845, the Post Office Department had turned down Morse’s patent and its $100,000 price tag. Thirty-two years later, Morse’s progeny made the same short-sighted mistake for the same $100,000 figure.

  Enter a New Vail

  Alfred Vail, Samuel Morse’s underappreciated assistant, played a pivotal role in the development of the telegraph. His younger cousin, Theodore Vail, would be seminal in the development of universal telephone service.

  At thirty-three, Theodore Vail had already distinguished himself as a hard-charging Post Office employee who had improved the efficiency of the railroad mail service and ultimately had 3,500 people reporting to him.17 In 1878 Gardiner Hubbard recruited Vail to run the year-old Bell Telephone Company.18 When Vail tendered his resignation, the assistant postmaster general, his boss, incredulously responded, “I can scarcely believe that a man of your sound judgment … should throw it up for a d____d old Yankee notion … called a telephone!”19 It was not an illegitimate observation. At the time the Bell Telephone Company had all of 10,000 phones in service and the first manual switchboard had just been introduced.20

  His new job at Bell confronted Theodore Vail not only with building a market for telephone service and all the technical issues associated with network expansion but also with the challenge of executing basic business activities, including raising capital. Most threatening to the small company’s future was the newly awakened Western Union. By 1878, Western Union had reversed its position of two years earlier and entered the telephone business. Thomas Edison, his relationship with the company restored, had significantly improved Bell’s telephone devices so that Western Union subscribers did not have to shout for their devices to work. By the end of 1878, Western Union’s American Speaking Telephone Company subsidiary had 56,000 telephones in service.21

  Alexander Graham Bell became so depressed at how Western Union had assumed dominance over the technology he had invented that he checked himself into Massachusetts General Hospital.22

  Western Union’s strategy was multifaceted. Backed by the deep pockets of the nation’s largest corporation, Western Union lawyers descended on the Bell patent to challenge its validity. Reaching into those deep pockets again, Western Union would buy out local Bell franchises. Where the Bell licensees would not sell, Western Union overbuilt them with a competitive offering.

  Alone on the Bell battlements stood Theodore Vail and his small band.23

  Amazingly, Western Union blinked. Some attribute this to the company’s ongoing struggle with the financier Jay Gould which served to challenge management.24 Others assert the Western Union lawyers came to the realization that theirs was the weaker patent position.25 Whatever the reason, the behemoth parleyed with the upstart. The result was a market-dividing pact. Western Union would concede the Bell
patent and depart the telephone business. In return, the Bell Company would purchase Western Union’s telephone assets, pay a royalty to Western Union on each piece of telephone equipment, and agree not to enter the telegraph business.26

  With a clear path ahead, Theodore Vail pushed to expand telephone service out of local municipalities by interconnecting local exchanges. “We have a proposition on foot to connect the different cities … to organize a grand telephone system,” Vail wrote in 1879.27 Vail’s vision was derided as unrealistic. Placing calls within a city had been a slow-growing activity—why was there a need to call between cities?

  It fell to Vail to personally organize a new company outside Bell for the purpose of building a line between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Such foolishness was dubbed “Vail’s Folly.” Today the success of the Boston-Providence line should come as no surprise. At the time, however, it was dumbfounding. Yet thanks to Vail’s intercity concept, the telephone became more than a neighborhood affair.28 The following year, a new line from Boston to New York went into operation.

  The bridge to the universally connected network was under construction.

  A dispute with Bell Company directors over whether to reinvest profits into the network or pay dividends drove Theodore Vail to take his leave of the company in 1887.29 Having bested Western Union and battled to interconnect local telephone exchanges, Vail threw in his hand and sailed for entrepreneurial adventure in South America.

  Vail’s Vision Triumphant

  Vail’s new venture built the company that provided electricity for the lighting and trolleys of Buenos Aires. When Vail left the United States in 1887, he was well-off; when he returned barely more than a dozen years later, he was truly wealthy. Rich and out of the day-to-day combat of commerce, Vail became a gentleman farmer on his Vermont estate.