IT History Society Blog

As this report from Interop shows, SHARE is not only still around, it is alive and healthy. So is the mainframe. And IBM continues to play a major role in this market. And, yes, COBOL is still being used, although it takes a back seat to Java and Linux.

This came as a surprise to me, but it should not have. Old technologies don’t simply disappear. They evolve, and become embedded into the background. They become part of the infrastructure. Sometimes that means an obsolete, inefficient system is kept in place. But not always. Sometimes you need huge amounts of mass storage, and big pipes to move the data in and out. One thing that mainframes today have is high availability: lots of redundancy, so that when something breaks, the system keeps running while you swap out the bad part.

I have to wonder, though, about COBOL.

(By the way, that’s Grace Hopper at the console of a UNIVAC.)

Having just come back from a happy trip to see the latest Pixar production, Wall-E, I cannot help but think about the ways computers, and critical attitude to computerisation, percolate into everyday culture. Some fifty years ago a modern ‘electronic brain’ rhetoric swept the Western world. in 1947, even before its release, the Cambridge Edsac was to be commented upon as a ‘brain’ provided with an impressive two-ton “memory” of steel tubes and mercury promising to hold “25 times more ‘knowledge’” than the Eniac [1]. By 1949, the tone was somehow different. By then informed commentators warned as “misleading” the attribution of “almost human qualities” to the computer. As marvellous a machine that may perform 15,000 calculations a minute the Edsac may be, the reality was still ultimately a machine, or, in Wilkes ‘s more incisive wording, “a moron who cannot think but can be trusted to do what he is told,” including silly things [2]. It had been realised that, beyond the rhetoric, the Edsac was and was ever to remain a thing “knocked up with a screwdriver” [3]

Each age since the 1940s has had its output of critical popular look-up upon computers’ ability to revolutionise the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, these criticisms were for example embodied in HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today we have Wall-E and other occurrences of computers in science-fiction popular writings, such as Hex, the ant-powered computer of Pratchett‘s Discworld. We may all at times fall trustingly in love with the marvellous capabilities of our computers. Still I am trusting that some critical attitude will always pervade in human societies against believing that computers are not humanity’s Graal without people to knock them up, or down, with screwdrivers.

[1] “A Don Builds a Memory. 4Ft. Tubes in his ‘Brain’,” Daily Mail, October 1947

[2] “New ‘Brain’ Store Orders. Calculations At 15,000 A Minute,” Daily Telegraph, 17.6.49s

[3] Merrick Winn, “Merrick Winn Sees A Room Full of Astonishing Gadgets … It’s A MECHANICAL BRAIN,” The Star, 5.7.49