Technological Milestones of the Past 200 Years

The world's first modern computer, built in Manchester England in 1948, was followed remarkably swiftly by the first business software, but by 1968 software was in crisis and NATO called a conference. The problems were diagnosed, solutions were proposed - and largely ignored. A second Software Crisis was announced in the early 1980's and again the effective solutions were considered impractical and the practical solutions were largely ineffective. Meanwhile as Moore's Law predicted, hardware costs continued to fall exponentially, making software systems ubiquitous and leading to a third software crisis, this time of cybersecurity.

This article aims to present how the computer, humanity's greatest invention, evolved and how its most likely future will be. The computer is humanity's greatest invention because the worldwide computer network made possible the use of the Internet as the technology that most changed the world with the advent of the information society. IBM developed the mainframe computer starting in 1952. In the 1970s, the dominance of mainframes began to be challenged by the emergence of microprocessors. The innovations greatly facilitated the task of developing and manufacturing smaller computers - then called minicomputers. In 1976, the first microcomputers appeared whose costs represented only a fraction of those practiced by manufacturers of mainframes and minicomputers. The existence of the computer provided the conditions for the advent of the Internet which is undoubtedly one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, whose development took place in 1965. At the beginning of the 21st century, cloud computing emerged, which symbolizes the tendency to place all the infrastructure and information available digitally on the Internet. Current computers are electronic because they are made up of transistors used in electronic chips that have limitations given that there will be a time when it will no longer be possible to reduce the size of one of the components of the processors, the transistor. Quantum computers have been shown to be the newest answer in Physics and Computing to problems related to the limited capacity of electronic computers. Canadian company D-Wave claims to have produced the first commercial quantum computer. In addition to the quantum computer, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can reinvent computers.

Papers and discussions presented at the December 3-5, 1958, eastern joint computer conference: Modern computers: objectives, designs, applications on XX - AIEE-ACM-IRE '58 (Eastern), 1958

— In posing the question as to challenges to computing, we consider what will sustain it. That is, we ask if or when will computing and computers come to their end of innovative applications. This is not a discussion about bigger and faster machines. Of course, bigger and faster computers can and will push to new limits ordinary and well explored topics. This is ongoing and will continue for centuries. We are entered into a discussion about the use of computers to solve new, even revolutionary, problems of this world. Innovation is necessary for the simple reason that problems are becoming bigger, more complex, even wicked, and some apparently impossible.

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2007