The Next Web has a great little anecdote about a 10-year-old kid who got lost inside a computer at Michigan State University in the 1950s. The story goes like this:
In 1950, I was 10 years old, visiting the Michigan State University campus. The computer was on the ground floor, turned off, with the door open. It was perhaps half the size of a gym, with many rows of cabinets taller than me. I wandered up and down the rows looking at the vacuum tubes until I got bored. By then I couldn’t see the door and didn’t remember how to get back out. I was literally “lost in the computer”. So I continued wandering, eventually found the open door back out, and left.
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That was the time when computers less powerful than your current phone were bigger than most homes.
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- UNIVAC: the first mass-produced commercial computer (infographic) (royal.pingdom.com)
- History and Generations (thetakenyoutake.wordpress.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.