From mainframes to orchids

Sitting in a condo in Vail, Colorado. Suddenly my iPhone chimes with a Facebook notification alert. My cousin Maria, from eight time zones away has posted "La mia orchidea sta fiorendo ... non ci posso credere!!!!"

I was struck suddenly by the sheer wonder of it.

In 1968, having joined the Marine Corps and they having denied several naive requests to be posted to Vietnam, I was sent to Computer Sciences School in Quantico Virginia. It was only a generation prior that "computer" was a time honored profession peopled by those who laboriously calculated logarithmic and trigonometric and ballistic and astronomical tables. Human computers performed tedious work and were prone to errors. Several computers would perform the same calculations which later would be compared and discrepancies resolved. Human computing was time consuming, imperfect, and very expensive.

Then everything changed. Driven by the computing demands of World War II, scientists created the first electromechanical computers. At first rudimentary and slow and consisting of clattering banks of relays, these machines were still many times faster than humans and, if programmed correctly, capable of delivering faultless results. In the 1950s truly electronic computers evolved, first with hot, glowing vacuum tubes and then with silent and swift transistors. The age of machine computing was well underway.

Later I was posted to the Marine's worldwide data processing center on the verge of the Kansas prairie. The machines were housed in cavernous, clean, air conditioned rooms and were kept comfortably cool and dry – more so than the human attendants who went home to suffer in the sultry Midwestern summer nights. Mainframe computers were huge and noisy and vibrated as data was searched and manipulated and written to hundreds of disk and tape devices. High speed printers whirred and whined and gushed out boxes of printed reports at the unbelievable rate of a thousand lines per minute. All this while consuming enough electricity to power a good sized village. These machines calculated and printed paychecks, maintained base and outpost inventories, and kept track of myriad facts and figures of a modern military force.

But while all of this progress was being made in computing, the real magic was just underway. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born when two computers, one in Los Angeles and one in Palo Alto, California, first talked to each other. It was at that point, slowly, grudgingly, and very gradually, computers became less about calculating and more about tying people together.

In Vail, the iPhone in my hand has a million times the memory and processing capacity of those early mainframes. And much, much more importantly, it reaches out as if by magic through the air to tell me that my cousin Maria could hardly believe that her orchid was in the process of blooming.