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‘The
Tangerine Microtan 65 was a 6502 based machine, not Z80
based’ – fact correction in the exe conference
on CIX.
‘History as
you remember it’ – Sellar and Yeatman, 1066
and all that. (Or some such: it
seemed against the spirit of the original to check the
quote, so we haven’t.)
1835. Charlie Babbage
invents his famous Calculating Engine, the first ever
computer, which is powered by Stephenson’s Rocket,
and consequently four foot eight and one half inches
wide. Genius p're et fils engineering double act
Marc and Isambard Brunel offer to create a seven foot
version but, as a result of an unfortunate error in the
copying of the plans, instead build the South Devon
Atmospheric Railway. Stung by disappointment, Babbage
switches his efforts to a dual gauge Analytical Engine,
and places the first ever advertisement for the first
ever programmer – an advert which has been used ever
since as a model by recruiting agencies (‘Mr Charles
Babbage of 147 Coprocessor Lane, Westminster Village
seeks the assistance of a programmatic person, to aid him
with his Government researches. On-the-job training will
be given, but applicants with Visual C++, Oracle, Tuxedo,
UNIX and NT4 will be preferred. Babbage Calculating
Engines Ltd is an equal opportunities employer. Either
sex may apply for this post, but breast feeding abilities
considered an advantage’).
Babbage is lucky enough to
secure the services of Countess Ada Lovelace, at that
time best known as the star of many early-Victorian
pornographic lithographs. Although Babbage’s working
relationship with Lovelace is excellent, his interest in
a practical engine for analysing coefficients of
Taylor’s theorem according to sundry measurements of
external objects wanes, and his interest in going to bed
in the afternoon waxes. Babbage’s work is never
completed; this doesn’t matter because nobody else
does any work on it either. Thus England is Top Nation in
computing for the next 100 years – a Good Thing.
1936. In Hitler’s
Nazi Germany, a beastly German person whose name is not
important attempts to reinvent the computer 10 years too
early, using the bakelite knobs that have fallen off
Ferguson wireless sets. Unfortunately for Herr Not
Important, Lawrence of Arabia and Lawrence of Olivier are
soon both on the case, and turn the tables on him using a
black-and-white John Buchan plot. Thus the Empire is
preserved for people who pronounce the word hands as
‘hends’.
Meanwhile, in England,
mathematician and pipe smoker Alan Turing proposes his
famous Turing Machine, a contraption which can display
and interpret a sequence of odd-looking, arbitrary
symbols. Predictably he fails to interest the British
Government in his idea – with all resources
committed to the Appeasement Effort, there is no money
available to fritter away on infinitely long paper tapes
– but it is taken up by the hotel and catering
industry, who subsequently manufacture a slightly
modified version in large quantities. This commercial
version is named after the man who effected the
modifications: Professor J R Fruit.
1942. At Bletchley Park,
Turing invents Robbie the Robot, a fantastic automaton
which can decrypt the secret Enigma codes of the U-boats,
play chess, accurately forecast greyhound and horse
racing results and make polite smalltalk at dinner
parties. Prime Minister Winston Churchill wants to send
Robbie on a special mission to kidnap Hitler and end the
war; but he is foiled in this wish when it turns out that
Robbie is unable to override his own Prime Directive: the
robot cannot harm a human being no matter how evil, or
how silly her moustache. Despondent at his failure,
Robbie sets about a career as a Shakespearean actor, and
eventually achieves fulfilment; his portrayal of Ariel in
a 1950s production of The Tempest being
particularly well received.
1950. The American company
IBM launches UNIVAC, a dual vortex dataprocessor which
beats as it sweeps as it cleans. Not to be outdone,
British company Lyon’s Maid launches Leo, a
gargantuan hulk of machinery which turns out to be
useless for office automation, but excellent for keeping
ice lollies cold.
1954. At Manchester
University, Alan Turing is fatally wounded in a
laboratory accident, when the subject of his latest
Turing Test turns out not to be, as he believed, a Mark
II Electronic Brain running at half clock speed, but
instead an irate builder’s labourer, Mr Arthur Wit.
Turing dies tragically on the operating table while
surgeons battle to retrieve his own left upper canine
from inside his kidneys.
Back at the Manchester
University labs, Turing’s former colleagues make
what turns out to be a fatal mistake for British
Computing: they decide to abandon his theoretical efforts
on computer science, and instead concentrate on his pipe
smoking work. Thus America becomes Top Dog in Computing,
a Bad Thing.
The 1960s. The UK
continues to lag behind. In 1966, pressed by the Wilson
Government ‘yellow glimmer of know how’
technology policy, Edinburgh University manages to build
a noughts-and-crosses machine which, while not
unbeatable, ‘puts up a jolly good show’. It is
opened by the Beatles, and in an exciting and tense match
the machine loses five games to nil to Ringo (this was of
course before mind-bending drugs took the edge off
Ringo’s noughts-and-crosses abilities). In 1968,
English Home Counties Electric Valves produces Sir Ernie,
the Premium Bond random number generator, a primitive
forerunner of the exciting and leading edge technology
which today drives the National Lottery.
1971. Edsger Dijkstra
delivers his famous ACM paper dealing with naming
conventions: ‘Excessive consonants considered hard
to spell’.
1979. At last a triumph
for Great Britain! Sir Clive Sinclair’s Z80-based
Tangerine Microtan 65 launches. With its handsome (for
its time) ‘dead flesh’ keyboard, its ability to
drive a modified TV at a startling (for its time) rate of
405 lines per minute and its startling (for its time)
sixteen byte memory, all for a knock-down price of
£599.99, the machine is an immediate hit. For a while,
it outsells even the former market leader the Apple Big
Jobs, but eventually tragedy strikes when somebody else
offers a much better computer for rather less money.
1980. IBM asks Gary
Kildall to invent an operating system for the future PC,
to be called OS/2. Kildall refuses, and then makes
matters worse by flying around and around IBM
headquarters in a biplane taunting the IBMers about
‘their silly blue shirts’. IBM hires Bill Gates
to blow Kildall out of the sky with an anti-aircraft gun,
and as a token of gratitude for accomplishing this
successfully hands over the rights to all computing
technology forever.
And that is the end of
computing history.
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