At the start of the 1950s, mathematically trained human “computers” were employed by the thousands to perform both sophisticated scientific mathematical calculations and also to do mundane accounting math for billing, salaries, taxes, and the like.
By the end of the decade, the term “computer” had morphed into meaning a digital computer, and the occupation of computer programmer was starting to occur in significant numbers, while the older occupation of human mathematical “computers” was in rapid decline and would soon disappear.
In the 1950s, universities with strong engineering and science departments began to teach courses on computers and software. For example, UCLA’s initial courses in 1950 were taught by Douglas Pfister and Willis Ware. The Institute for Numerical Analysis was formed at UCLA to work with RAND and military organizations on the use of computers. Other universities, such as Princeton, Harvard, and MIT, also began to incorporate computer-related courses into engineering curricula.
During this decade, several major inventions began the expansion of computers and software from being massive and complex laboratory instruments to becoming global commercial products.
Two critical background inventions, among the most important in the history of science, were the development of transistors to replace vacuum tubes and the invention of integrated circuits to replace discrete electronic components. The first silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1974. However, a long history led to this result.
In 1947, William Bardeen and Walter Brattan of AT&T Bell Labs developed a prototype semiconductor based on Germanium. The group leader, William Shockley, participated in expanding the idea. In 1956, Bardeen, Brattan, and Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the transistor effect.
They were not alone; even earlier work by Julius Lillenfield in the 1920s and by Oskar Heil in the 1930s led to both patenting concepts similar to transistors. However, these did not lead to working models.
Incidentally, the term “transistor” was coined by John R. Pierce of Bell Labs from the combination of the words “transfer resistor.” Bell Labs was the research arm of AT&T. Fortunately for the industry, Bell scientists recommended sharing and licensing transistor technology. In 1952, Bell Labs sponsored a nine-day transistor technology symposium, which attracted 100 researchers. Of those who participated, 40 each paid a $25,000 license fee to gain access to transistor technology.
The openness with patents and intellectual property in the 1950s is very different from today’s fierce patent wars, which are threatening to stifle innovation or at least make new products extremely expensive to build due to artificially high patent license fees. This era was also before the “patent troll” subindustry appeared. The companies in this group buy patent rights not because of their intellectual value but rather because of their use as threats to gain royalty payments.
In 1949, a German scientist from Siemens AG filed a patent for an integrated circuit that he envisioned would use transistors. Later in 1952, Geoffrey Dummer from the British Royal Radio Establishment gave a public lecture on the need for integrated circuits.
In about 1950, a Russian researcher, S. A. Lebedev, built a vacuum tube digital computer in Ukraine called MESM to solve equations in nuclear engineering and rocketry. Lebedev moved to Moscow and eventually developed some 15 different computer models.
A few months after Lebedev’s MESM was operational, another Russian researcher, Isaac Brook, and his colleagues built the M-1 computer, which used semiconductor diodes instead of tubes. This is claimed to be the first stored-program computer built in Russia.
In late 1951, the first American commercial digital computer went on the market. This was the famous UNIVAC I, designed by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. In 1951, Remington Rand purchased the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and its name was changed to Univac. In the 1950s, Univac and IBM competed in the nascent market for mainframe digital computers.
In 1952, President Harry S. Truman signed a letter that authorized the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA). This agency replaced an amalgamation of separate military security groups, and it expanded its role from military intelligence to true national intelligence.
In later years, the NSA would become the world’s most sophisticated user of computers and also the owner of the world’s most powerful computers. The NSA itself would contribute to software engineering and the development of encryption technologies.
In 1957, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) placed a 25% tariff on computers and components imported into Japan. This spurred the growth of Japanese computer companies such as Fujitsu, which soon competed with American companies in global markets. Japan also pursued competition in the market for computer components such as transistors and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips.
As is widely known, the Japanese industrial companies were among the first to apply the concepts of W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran to industrial quality control. (Deming’s contributions started in the 1940s and early 1950s. Juran’s started in early 1954.) In 1950, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) invited W. Edwards Deming of the United States to teach a 30-day seminar on statistical quality control. This seminar also paved the way for the later Deming Prize for quality.
The high quality of Japanese products benefited their market shares in a variety of products, including computer chips, computer memory, televisions and portable radios, and automobiles. Eventually, Japan pulled ahead of the United States in these markets due in part to very high manufacturing quality levels.
In 1958, a researcher named Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated a working integrated circuit. This idea was patented in 1959 and was soon used by the U.S. Air Force. In 2000, Kilby won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the integrated circuit.
Suffice it to say that without transistors and integrated circuits, none of the tiny computerized electronic devices that are common today would be possible. Without transistors and integrated circuits, software would probably be a small niche industry that supported a few dozen mainframe computers that use vacuum tubes. Neither personal computers nor embedded devices would be possible without low-power microscopic transistors and integrated circuits.
In 1958, a mathematician and statistician from Bell Labs named John Wilder Tukey used the word “software” in a paper. This was in the context of being a separate entity from “hardware.” This is the first known use of the word “software” in a computer context.
Also in 1958, the first local computer was built in mainland China. It was a vacuum tube computer called the 901, and it was constructed by the Institute of Military Engineering at the University of
Harbin.