IT Hall of Fame

The first great calculating machines spent the 1940s helping the Allied powers win World War II. Just before 1950, many machines whose existence had been classified were unveiled to the public virtually all at once, battle-tested and ready to rescue a 20th century

Throughout the business world, the 1950s portrayed computers as ‘electronic brains.’ With most business executives still never having touched a computer by 1960, it’s no wonder it was perceived as more of a personality trapped in a metal cabinet, than as a functional business tool.

The space program proved that miniaturization not only made for less expensive computers but for better built ones. But none of the major manufacturers in 1970 — Honeywell, Sperry Univac, Burroughs, DEC, and maybe least of all, IBM — directly foresaw the evolutionary path from microchips to miniaturization to mass production to democratization of computing technology.

As the first great era of ubiquitous computing came to an end, the question of how the world would compute was being addressed by hardware: the design of the processor, the memory map of the internal ROM, the speed of storage and retrieval.

The Internet was a reality as early as the late 1970s, but back then it was seen as little more than an academic experiment. By the dawn of the 1980s, a few thousand people began using it as an exchange mechanism for electronic mail.

The “dot-com bubble” was the biggest and hardest lesson ever learned by the computing industry. Following the terrorist attacks of 2001, the fact that so many millions of consumers were interested in modem communications and the early Web, was no longer enough for investors to place big bets on startups without business models.