The Future of Computing: What Comes Next

Our story starts in World War II with Alan Turing and the bombes.  The bombes were the first working computers, and they were created to take advantage of Polish advances in breaking the Nazi Enigma enciphering machine.   This was not "general purpose" computing -- the programmer-universe was 1 person and even though they were terrific at cracking the Enigma code, they were basically useless for anything else.

Even so John Von Neumann turned the bombe design into a general computing architecture that has defined everything slnce, including the machine I'm typing this post on.

Fast-forward 20 years, and you enter an era when "mainframes" rule the computing world.   The IBM System 360 ruled computing from my childhood until I started grad school -- and System 360 Assembler was one of my first programming languages.

Now fast-forward again, but only about 10 years this time.    Minicomputers now rule -- much like a mainframe, but a bit smaller and much cheaper. The programmer-universe was now really expanding -- at MIT our Vax 11-780 had CRT displays, so no more punch cards!

The next fast-forward is only 5 years, and personal computers and PC software are starting to dominate computing.   Lotus 1-2-3 represented the future of software then -- it had a visual programming language (the spreadsheet metaphor) and macros for more conventional text-based programming.  The future was here!

Or was it?   Through the years computers had dropped in cost by a factor of 10,000, dropped in size by a factor of 10,000, and with Moore's Law they'd risen in processing power by a factor of a million. But how much had software and information processing really changed?

Google and the rise of Internet computing have set the stage of the next advances in information processing. The "PC age" spanned 30 years, and while the archtypal machine continued to advance at Moore's Law pace, our models for information processing really didn't change that much.

But they are changing now. The PC era is being supplanted by 3 regimes of computing that will advance our visions of information processing in the years ahead. I'll write more about them in my next post, when we'll talk about the new ages of computing - characterized by:

the Pad,
the Cloud, and
the Software that links it all