When Minicomputers Were King

The first Eniac computer, state of the art in 1946, was the first general-purpose digital computer. It was rapidly improved upon by a generation of mainframe makers who came to dominate computing throughout the 1940's and 1950's.

In 1956, IBM came out with its 704 mainframe (behind operator's desk in the center). The computer could execute up to 40,000 instructions per second and featured other innovations, such as the incorporation of core memory instead of the <a href ="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube">tubes</a> used in a preceding model. (You can find imore nformation on other IBM mainframes <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_profiles.html">here.</a>)

Considering what now passes for state of the art in computer technology, the original PDP from Digital Equipment Corp. was not much to look at. But this 12-bit computer, introduced in 1959, was nonetheless a proverbial game-changer.

Ken Olsen, who was then working at MIT, had come up with a huge technical advantage over IBM, whose mainframes then dominated the computer market. Unlike Big Blue's machines, the PDP was interactive, which meant that it would interact with users when they fed programming instructions with holes punched into paper. OK, user friendly, it was not. Still, it was a leap over the static, batch processing model then dominating the scene where programming meant feeding in a punch card and then waiting around for the eventual result. It's hard not to underscore the significance of this product approach as it signaled a major shift in the philosophy of computer design.

The founding of DEC was an East Coast variant of the West Coast success story of Hewlett-Packard. The company began in 1957 when Ken Olsen, Harlan Anderson, and Stan Olsen got started with an initial capital investment of $70,000 and set up shopt in a corner of a mill complex in the Boston suburb of Maynard, Massachusetts.

On Monday, Feb. 7, Olsen passed away at the age of 84. You can read more about his life here.

Another breakthrough from DEC came in the form of the VAX, a 32-bit complex instruction set computer designed in the mid-1970s. The advent of DEC and other minicomputer makers provided the needed fillip to the development of smaller and more affordable computers.

Data General was another minicomputer maker that started up in Massachusetts. Not surprisingly, its founders included several former engineers who had left DEC in search of greener pastures. The Nova was a 16-bit minicomputer DG introduced in 1969. Smaller and faster than the PDP from DEC, it soon found its way into science laboratories around the world. The Nova is also important in the history of computing for another reason: It was the first computer to have its entire central processor built on a single printed circuit board.

Hewlett Packard came out with a family of minicomputers starting in 1973. The models were billed as the first of their kind to offer a full-featured operating system with time-sharing functionality.

Another blast from the (minicomputing) past: Prime Computer. Also based in the Bay State, Prime reached No. 334 on Fortune's 1988 list of the top 500 corporations in America. But within a few years, its business withered up as the industry moved on to embrace personal computing.

Computervision co-founder Philippe Villers and then Mass Governor Michael Dukakis at the dedication of a new plant. The company built products tailored for the design and automation fields.

It didn't take long before companies across the ocean noticed the computing transition taking place in the United States. The HITAC 10 from Hitachi was Japan's first minicomputer. The product, which debuted in 1969, featured a 16-bit word architecture.