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Note:  This blog post was authored by Gordon Bell and edited by Alan J Weissberger.

Introduction:

On March 3, 2014, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (co-authors of The New Digital Age) engaged in a stimulating conversation with Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg.  The event took place at the Computer History Museum (CHM) as part of the museum's Revolutionary series (see description below).  This very interesting and wide ranging discussion, was mostly related to the promise and perils of the digital revolution, especially the Internet as it impacts the developing world. 

When I first wrote programs in 1953, there was no software and few programmers. I entered programs in the computer’s binary language (octal notation) directly into the machine’s registers. And the machine was all mine: there was no operating system to allocate its resources among multiple programs or operate the input-output devices.

During January some of you might have noticed a running dialogue among historians and other interested parties about who invented the “first” computer. There was no agreement reached on the correct answer to that question. Discussions about “firsts” pop up about every five years, almost like short-lived brush fires on the side of the road as historians travel on to do their serious work. Over the past forty years I have seen articles and books, even one lawsuit on patents, over the question of “firsts.”

Ever get the urge to mess with Visicalc or WordStar again? Play the original Donkey Kong or Adventure on your computer? Now you can!

The United Kingdom has finally pardoned Alan Turing for a gay sex conviction which tarnished the brilliant career of the code breaker credited with helping win the war against Nazi Germany and laying the foundation for the computer age.

Computer visionary Doug Englebart was posthumously honored on December 9th at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mt View, CA.  The date of this event was significant, because December 9 was the 45th Anniversary of the “Mother of All Demos.^”  Doug's wife, daughter, and several people that worked with Doug or knew of his work made brief speeches to honor him.

The History of Science Society held its annual meeting two weeks ago (November 21st to November 24th) in Boston MA. The meeting celebrated among other things the centenary of the journal Isis, the organ around which the society was eventually formed. The meeting covered a broad range of topics in the history of science from all historical periods ancient to recent.

LEO, more formally known as Lyons Electronic Office, was the world's first business computer, having been developed by the British company J. Lyons & Co. Ltd. between 1947-1954. John Simmons was very much the genius behind this adventure into business process re-engineering. His papers are archived at the Modern Record Centre at Warwick University in Coventry, England. Many of these contain valuable information about the ideas behind the LEO development.

The event was in the form of an interview/conversation led by CHM CEO/moderator John Hollar.  Mr. Rattner spent a lot of time discussing his early life at Hollywood High School and how he got involved in electronics and as a EE student at Cornell University.  It was less about Intel's early history.  However, here are a few quick takes on Intel from Mr. Rattner:

In November 1943, an electrical engineer working in the telecommunications department of Britain's General Post Office named Tommy Flowers designed and built the world’s first programmable computer. Named "Colossus," the thermionic tube-based programmable computer successfully broke the supposedly unbreakable Lorenz cipher used by Hitler and the German High Command during the Second World War.