Within the past decade, the cell phone has spread around the world. The iPod is a permanent appendage to teen-agers, while the Blackberry plays the same role for "grown-ups." All these, of course, are based on the microprocessor, whose architecture in turn is based on computer designs that go back at least to the 1960s. The almost universal adoption of this architecture makes it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that computer architecture could have evolved any other way. (Maybe that's why we have science fiction writers.)

At first I assumed that everyone out there knows who I am, but perhaps I had better introduce myself. I am Paul Ceruzzi, Curator of Aerospace Computing and Electronics at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, in Washington, D.C. My interests in the history of computing go back to my graduate school days at the University of Kansas, where in the mid-1970s I took what had to be one of the first courses on that topic offered anywhere.