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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.”