My New Project - What Makes Computers Tick

During the lock-out I began work on a project I had in my mind for a few years - a book about how computers work aimed at everyone.

I started sketches for this illustrated book back in May and by now (August) I have done a lot of sketches and research in the intricate inner workings of computers. I have even designed a cover for it...

Prototype cover of What Makes Computers Tick

The idea of this cover came from a memory of seeing a book cover like this back in High School. It was an old book, I admit, but I wanted to make my book feel that it could have been made some time ago. I wanted to give it a sort of timelessness. (An near-impossible fete, considering the nature of the computer industry.) A timelessness achieved through nostalgia. 

So why am I doing this?

My answer can found in the introduction I have already written for it.

Introduction 

The Miracles and Our Alarming Ignorance About Them

At the time of this book’s publication (the first half of the 21st century) we happen to live in a world full of incredible technology. If someone from centuries ago would somehow see our time (and see all our wonderful abilities in action) that person would think we all become sorcerers. We have been able to build artificial organisms and sent them to other planets. We also made them take us across the Earth and make things for us. We have become able to capture light and sound and send it across vast distances, to allow others to experience the same things we have. We have the means to gather and bring up any piece of our vast collective knowledge wherever we are and at any time, and no matter how obscure it is, it can be found before you can say “googolplex.” And with these means we have been able to map more planets outside our solar system and other things, including our genes. Also, we have been able to make more accurate predictions with things like the weather and the state of the marketplace (with increasing success over time). And, if we find the real world boring, we can create new exciting worlds to play in … or test ideas out before implementing them for real. And thanks to such “simulations” we have been able to build things that would have been considered impossible just decades earlier.

Worded like this, it sounds like we’re living in a world full of magic. But this is our world in the 21st century. None of this is an exaggeration. Between the time of that ancestor and now we have developed a lot of new tools and technology that has made this world possible. Technology you would have trouble describing to that ancestor (If you happen to end up in the ancestor’s time with no examples to demonstrate. It could happen someday.). You could probably list ten of them right now in an instant.

Trains, cars, aeroplanes, telephones, cameras, microwaves, record players, plastic, TV, fridges, you can go on….

But, I bet when it comes to one particular one, many of you may not think of it instantly. You may have thought of it after thinking of others first. It’s not a surprise that is case, because most of the time we don’t think about them… mostly because many of them are invisible in daily life (except the very obvious ones you probably use at work or leisure). I know that some of you will have thought of this thing first, as you may be very aware of how many they are and what they do. As you are reading this many of these things are tracking stock in stores, transferring money from bank account to bank account, sending bills and statements to customers, spotting suspects in CCTV, making things to a design with very high precision, predicting the weather tomorrow, generating alternate worlds for pleasure, mapping the genes of individuals to detect “defects,” and giving life to and guiding those artificial organisms I talked about earlier (you know them better as “robots”).

It can be easily argued that of all the “miracles” we have developed since the days people were burnt to the stake as “witches,” this particular one has made the biggest impact. Without it, we will be back to life before World War II. A time when thousands of people were employed just to crunch numbers for various reasons, from managing a company’s finances to calculating the stress forces on Zeppelins.

These people were once given a name. A name that was later adopted to name the “miracles” that replaced them. A name that became so linked to these machines that soon people forgot it was once used to describe people – computers.

From large machines used in academia and data centres containing “the cloud” to devices on your desk or in your pocket (or inside you), computers are everywhere and come in many forms. They have even embedded themselves in other things, such as cars and kitchen appliances. So even if you try to go “offline” you will interact with at least one computer without knowing it.

But here’s a thought…. How many of us know how they work? I don’t mean stuff like you need to press control+alt+delete to get the menu that allows to get Task Manager or to change your password on your Windows PC. I mean their nuts and bolts. What makes them tick. I’m sure a lot of you have at least once thought about this question. With them everywhere and you using them almost every day it would be odd not to have thought of asking “how computers work?” But how many of us managed to find a satisfactory answer to that question?

This is what has been bugging me (and made me make this book) – attempts to explain how computers work to people (children and adults) with almost no scientific or technical knowledge to begin with have been …. terrible. In many attempts to explain how computers work the writers have been too simplistic or wrote too long a passage and filled it with jargon, causing confusion and alienation. A lot just point out the parts of a computer and say this does this and that does that. This is what I experienced for years. It wasn’t until I was in higher education (studying multimedia in college and computer animation in university) that I finally worked out how computers really work. Thanks to some hands-on experience making interactive media and learning how computers model virtual worlds, I gained my mental picture of how all the components of a computer interact with each other. And in doing so learned why I didn’t get “it” until then. I have been an avid reader on the subject of how things work and got high grades for physics. Surely I could have worked it out before then, but I didn’t. All the text I have read didn’t do a good job explaining it. Why?

They are two basic problems that come to finding out how computers work for yourself (and writing about it). First off, if you get hold of a computer and open it up to take a look inside you are confronted with a selection of wires, chips and circuit boards. Unlike a mechanical clock, they are no gears or wheels to see moving. No single tangible indicator to help build up a picture of how it ticks. Second of, computers are no all-in-one boxes. They are made of several component systems that work together. It’s like a car. Cars are made up of several systems that work together – transmission, brake, steering, suspension, electrics and so on. It would be ridiculous (in trying to explain how cars work) to sum them all up in a single paragraph. But many have done just that when trying to work out or explain how computers work. With no obvious moving parts (except disk drives and cooling fans – or robot limbs) and a multisystem construction, it’s no wonder many have failed the task of explaining how computers work to non-nerds. It’s no wonder (like cars) computers entered the domain of nerds.*

*I don’t see a difference between guys who talk about the differences between Fords and Chevys for hours and guys who talk about the differences between Android and Apple devices for the same amount of time. It’s the same mentality all fans have. If you love something so passionately to bother to learn everything about them (from football to that singer everyone’s talking about now) you are (technically) a nerd of that subject.

So what? Some of you ask? I don’t need to know how it works. As long as it does what I want it to do, I’m happy. Okay, continue been ignorant. But what if your computer (or any computer) does something you didn’t want it to do? What if it crashes and you loss all your data you worked hard creating? What if your processor or internet connection begins to slow down? What if someone stole your password and messed about your accounts? What if your bank sent you something not meant for you because you shared a name and date-of-birth of someone else? What if your sat-nav directs you the wrong way up a one-way street? Surely when incidents like these happen to you or in the news you want to know how such faults are possible. This is when (I think) you need to be taught how computers work. If you have this knowledge you may be able to understand how such errors happen and be able avoid such problems yourself in the future.

As more computers come into existence and more of us actively login I think there is a need for this book more than ever before. Without an accurate easy-to-understand description to work with, many people have gained a lot of wrong ideas about computers and what they are able to do. This happens to all new technology. When a new gizmo appears, the average Joe has no idea what makes it tick. And when some people get some experience with them they spread rumours and misconceptions about them due to their lack of understanding of the science behind them or false correlations between it and something unrelated (usually something medical). This is how we get ideas like, cameras taking people’s souls, people on TV been able to see you as you watch them, putting metal cutlery in a microwave will make it explode, or that high use of cellphones cause brain tumors.

Computers are no different. You may have heard (and believe) some misconceptions about them, such as the idea that they are some form of artificial brain that becoming increasingly intelligent. An increasing intelligence that might one day surpass the collective intelligence of all humans … and when that moment comes they’ll think that they don’t need us anymore and kill us off by activating the world’s nuclear missiles by playing tune down a phone line. That last bit is based on a lie a law enforcement officer may have said to convince American federal judge Marianna Pfaelzer to convict high-profile computer hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1999 …. which she believed, making her rule that after serving 46 months in jail he was banned from touching a single computer or dial-tone telephone for three years.
The fact that a judge (a presumingly highly-educated person) bought such a lie highlights how far this ignorance has become. And with computers doing a lot of things in society that is a worry. We have had false ideas that computers are “brains” and that a robot uprising is coming to cloud our judgements about everything related to computers. These are ideas that first came about when computers were new to the world and only the guys in white coats operating these early colossuses knew the truth about them – computers are stupid. They are not “brains,” they are just piles of wired up switches designed to do math very quickly. They are like trained animals following master’s commands. But that image was dull, so journalists and science-fiction writers filled our ignorance gap with metaphors and B-movie plot devices to make them sound interesting.
Although computers have changed shape and have been made of different stuff since those early “monsters,” the way they tick is exactly the same. And no matter what they do, from composing music to identifying species of moth, what they all doing is the same thing – mathematics done very quickly.

It’s no surprise if you take a look at their history and origins. When science historians write about the history of computers they also tend to link it with the history of calculators, because they have the same origins – devices designed to aid the adding up of numbers. Devices we began to need after we began to count beyond our ten fingers and toes.

To begin to understand what makes computers tick this is a good starting point – how do you make a machine add up? Curious? Want to know more? Don’t want to feel alienated by a selection of microchips in a box …. again?

Let’s us begin with their heart ….. the processor

(and find out how you make a machine add up).

[Enough Said]

Acts of Cultural Vandalism #1 - Advertising the Personal Computer

The most significant technological development of the late-20th century is the Personal Computer (or PC). Until the 1970s it was nearly unthinkable that one day it was possible to have a computer more powerful than ENIAC that is also small and light enough to place on an office desk (without crushing it). It was the result of years of tinkering by electronic nerds in California. However, after they finished their tinkering, how do you demonstrate it to the public. It was the 1970s. People were managing well with their lives without computers and businesses and organizations were happy with their humongous mainframe machines. How could you advertise a product that was  (ad-libbing from Douglas Adams) "An ingenious solution to a problem that doesn't exist" .... let. Its a problem all "ingenious solutions" faced when they were new and no one had found a use for... let. 

Below is (from 1977) one of the first ever TV ads for the first consumer personal computer - the Apple II.*

*For the ignorant who are wondering what happened to the Apple I, the Apple I (introduced in 1976) was a circuit-board with connectors.  You had to provide your own casing, keyboard and monitor. The Apple II came in a single plastic casing with built-in keyboard. All you needed was to provide a monitor (any old TV set was enough) and load in the software (by a cassette deck or separate floppy disk drive).

Apple II ad (1977)

This ad sums up exactly how people saw and used the first personal computers. They were toys. Expensive boys toys with flashing colours and little practical use, like radio-controlled planes or pinball machines. They wern't something you could see a woman use. As this ad from 1977, featuring Dick Cravett, shows, from the very beginning of personal computing, manufacturers have tried to address the gender balance.

Apple II ad featuring Dick Cravett and a "homemaker" (1977)

But this isn't the first time a computer manufacturer has tried to get women into computing. Below is a quite patronizing print ad for the Honeywell 316 from 1969.

Ad for the Honeywell 316 (1969)

As you can see, Honeywell thought that a computer could help with everything from remembering recipes to... recommending recipes for tonight's dinner (nothing about checking stock market prices, though). Despite its misgivings, this ad was the first to show a computer as a consumer product.

For more click the link below.

 Honeywell 316

Comparing this to the Apple ad less than a decade later, we can see that Apple was (and still is in some aspects) a far-thinking company. They didn't see computers as just simple number-crunching machines that were only used by a few mathematicians, they saw computers as something that could be used by everyone (including women). The computer had to shake off its image of been a machine you find in a science lab.

For that to happen the computer first had to change its appearance. For anything that needs an image change, it can be done in two ways. One, change the actual thing (in the case of computers that was done by redesigning the actual machines to make them more "user-friendly"). Or two, change its cultural or public image (through advertising). As this blog is about the advertising of PCs, I'm not going to bother writing about how desktop computers changed in their design during the 1970s. This is about the ads and how they were made into everyday consumer product we are familiar with today.

One way that was done was to show they were sophisticated machines (like hi-fi systems or video recorders), with lists of specs and some computer-generated graphics in the ad, like this one from 1982 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum ad (1982)

Another way was to show the computer as something that was cool to have. Sometime to impress the girls (its the 1980s remember). For example, here's an ad from Australia in 1985 for the Commodore 64, the most successful  single model of personal computer ever sold (selling between 12.5 to 17million during its lifetime).

Australian Commodore 64 ad (1985)

The biggest symbol of all, show how important a new product is today is celebrity endorsement. In the early-1980s Texas Instruments got Bill Cosby to endorse their computers.

Texas Instruments ad featuring Bill Cosby (early-1980s?)

Of course, a better celebrity to endorse a computer would be someone from the world of sci-fi.... like William Shatner (here endorsing the Commodore VIC-20, launched in 1981).

Commodore VIC-20 ad featuring William Shatner (early-1980s)

Of course, for most of the 1980s, most personal computers were bought as educational devices for children, so many computer ads in the early-1980s had kids in them using the advertised product. Computers were sold to schools as well to educate kids how to program them. With a computer at home, parents were assured that their kids were getting an education for a hi-tech future. But, as we all know now, most kids just wanted a computer just to play (and sometimes create) games.

This ad for the Acorn Electron in 1984 shows that some parents got into them as well, like the dad who plays with the new train set, not allowing the kid a shot.

Acorn Electron UK ad (1984)

Acorn was a big player in computers in the UK, been the makers of the BBC Microcomputer for a government education scheme to make the UK the most computer-literate country in the World. But the Electron was a failure, due to the slump in the computer market (they were too many computers to choose from and everyone who wanted one had already bought one).

By 1983 the personal computer began to be treated as a very serious product (especially as a business machine). But as the technology was new, trying to tell customers what made their machine great (and better than any other machine that was out) was a challenge. Only people who meddled with electronics knew what RAM and clock-speeds were and knew what the figures meant.

Here's one example how it was done, an ad from the now legendary mid-1980s ad campaign for Compaq Computers starring John Cleese. In this ad (possibly from 1986) John compares the capabilities of the Compaq Portable 2 (something that was mysterious to most people at the time) with a dead fish (something most people knew about at the time).

Compaq Portable 2 ad featuring John Cleese (c1986)

There is more from John later.

This is an ad for the Sinclair QL (meaning "Quantum Leap") from 1984, featuring Clive Sinclair leaping over the competition.

Sinclair QL UK ad (1984)

Sadly, this was Sinclair's last personal computer, before making the disastrous C5 electric trike, which bankrupted the company, resulting it been bought by Amstrad in 1986.

In 1985, AT&T entered the desktop computer market with this ad, saying it was future-proof.

AT&T desktop ad (1985)

It was a very competitive market by then. This ad (also from AT&T in 1985) compares the PC market as a board game.

AT&T desktop ad (1985)

Here's an Australian ad for the Amstrad 6128 from 1986, advertised at a price that seemed to have driven the competition mad.

Australian Amstrad ad (1986)

And that's how Amstrad took over the UK computer market in the late-1980s. Low prices and IBM compatibility.

But for all the computer companies, the ultimate rivalry was between IBM (the big company that was late in adapting their products for the coming new information age) and Apple Computers (the first to beat them to it). This rivalry is expressed in one of the greatest TV ads in the 20th century, the 1984 Superbowl Orwellian Macintosh ad, directed by Ridley Scott.

Apple Macintosh "1984" ad

So what was so special about the Macintosh? I'll let this ad tell you...

Apple Macintosh 128K ad (1984)

And for the British market....

UK Apple Macintosh ad (1984)

Astonishing. And it explains why the desktop of all computers look like what they are, with its "folders" and its "waste basket." Which ad do you think was better? The first ad showed the actual product at use, while the other tried to explain its features in a creative way (without showing how they done on the actual machine). I may be bias towards the British ad (as I am British) but I do understand the merits of the American ad in explaining how the new machine works by actually showing how it works (sounds kind of typically American from this aspect).

A year later, Apple made another (less remembered) ad for the Superbowl. This ad, called "Lemmings" shows blindfolded business men marching off a cliff humming "Hi ho, Hi ho, its off to work we go." Its a visual metaphor of businesses blindingly buying IBM products without considering looking at Apple products.

Apple Macintosh "Lemmings" ad (1985)

That ad was a failure. By 1984, computers were improving. Processors were getting faster and more memory was becoming available for desktop machines. Both these changes led to the biggest leap in technology - the GUI. The Graphics User Interface (the windows and drop menu screens that you are familiar with now) made computers more accessible to people who couldn't learn to type programming code.  To begin with, only Apple computers had this feature, but soon IBM PCs gained that ability (courtney of Microsoft's Windows).

Here's an ad for the Apple IIc from 1984, showing what are you getting in just a small package.

Apple IIc ad (1984)

And here's another also from 1984, taking a swipe at its main rival the IBM PC jr.

Apple IIc ad comparing it to the IBM PC jr (1984)

But, it was a bit too late for Apple, as companies like Compaq were beginning to flood the market with "PC clones" which were reversed engineered IBM PCs (only cheaper). But the name "IBM" still had an authority in the computing market, like Coca-cola has over soft drinks. These ads were a more successful swipe at this "blind devotion" to a "well-known name."

And here's one to take a swipe at supposed Apple buyers.

It was great to have celebrities  (like John Cleese) to endorse your product, but it seemed that the celebrity is as clueless as most people are about the product that's been advertised, as this ad clearly demonstrates.

In fact, sometimes people had questioned whether what the companies were selling was what they say they are, with the celebrities who were endorsing these new fangled computers worried about their reputations, as this ad jokingly demonstrates.

But as new machines came about, they had to show that you have to ignore all their previous machines to get the best, as this ad hints at.

But even in the PC fever of the mid-1980s most people still didn't know what the specs mean. Some advertisers have tried to address this problem by poking fun at our ignorance, as seen in this ad.

But that wasn't the only problem, another problem was that saying the specs was the most boring part of any commercial fro any computer. Some advertisers have tried to address this problem too, as seen in this ad.

In fact it got to the point that viewers needed an distraction to keep watching the ad, as seen in this ad.

Eventually, it reached a point where it seemed pointless saying the specs, as seen in this ad for the Compaq Deskpro 386 in 1986.

Meanwhile, in Britain, in 1987 Amstrad advertised their "word processors" with the help of the greatest expert in speaking gobbledygook in the English-speaking world - Professor Stanley Unwin. This is probably the best ad ever to demonstrate the greatest feature of every self-made word processor - spell-check.

Amstrad UK ad featuring Stanley Unwin (1987)

And here's Professor Unwin again two years later telling you that you can exchange your old "tripewriter" for  a new word processor at a discounted price.

Amstrad UK ad featuring Stanley Unwin (1989)

This ad indicates that they were still many tripewrit... I mean, typewriters in use in the western world by the time the Berlin Wall came down. I can still remember messing around with my mother's electric typewriter as a child in the mid-1990s (The family had a PC then, but my mother never used it (and still doesn't to this day)). But their days were numbered as this ad (also from Amstrad) clearly shows.

Amstrad PCW8256 ad (late-1980s)

By 1990, the IBM PC (and its numerous clones) was the most dominant computer format in business. With the IBM PC been the "standard" for all personal computers, it was now possible to make a simple introductory one-does-everything machine that is compatible with everything else (except Macs), like this Headstart desktop (designed by Vendex). This ad is from the late-1980s and features the wrestler King Kong Bundy.

Headstart Computer ad (late-1980s)

But, Apple didn't go down without a fight, saying that people prefer their computers, as they were designed to be as user-friendly as possible, as this ad from 1990 shows.

Apple Macintosh ad (1990)

By the time of this ad, people had finally got use to desktop computers and they realized that the specs were irreverent when it came to the things most people used them at the time - spreadsheets, word-processing, and doing very difficult math. But in 1990, there was a sense that these machines were capable of more, as this Apple ad also from 1990 shows.

Apple "Industrial Revelation" ad (1990)

In the late-1980s and early-1990s, there was a feeling that something big was going to happen in the world. An information revolution led by computer nerds in IT clubs. In 1990 they were 101million personal computers in the world. Computers were getting trendy, as this French ad from Amstrad from 1990 demonstrates by the use of rap music and a crocodile.

1990 French Amstrad ad

Despite this, the popularity of computers were a sign of something big. At the time it was thought that the big thing that was coming was interactive multimedia (as said in Douglas Adams' 1990 BBC Two programme Hyperland) and virtual reality (according to films like The Lawnmower Man). But the real revolution was bought about by something only a few saw coming... the Interweb.

AOL ad from 1995

By 1995 they were 235million computers, but most of them were PCs (based on the IBM PC format) running Windows. They were cheaper than Macs, but they were more prone to errors, viruses.... I don't need to tell you this. You all already know all that.

Here's an ad from Apple from 1995, which takes a swipe at Windows.

Apple "Crowd Control" ad (1995)

This ad from the US in 1999 highlights that by the late-1990s their was a second-hand PC market, and like every second-hand product market you can't sure what you are getting until you buy it.

Gateway PC ad (1999)

However, although it was possible to buy a PC at a discounted price, you still had trouble with the software, especially when it comes to installing Windows, as this ad (obviously from Apple) demonstrates.

Apple Macintosh "Christmas Nightmare" ad (c1995)

By 2000, they were 500million personal computers in the world (all crashing their way through life calculating tax returns, chatting away on dating sites, playing solitaire and downloading low-resolution pornography).

To show how far we had come (and still how ignorant we were about the workings of computers), Apple made this ad in 1999. It not only demonstrates how far the computer has come since 1969, it also exploits our ignorance (and attack their rivals) by saying that their computers were immune to the Millennium Bug.

Apple "HAL" ad (1999)

Of course, the Millennium Bug turned out to be just a bit of hot air. The result of years of people getting use to the use of computers in their lives and can't imagining a life without them with little knowledge of how they actually work. But in the end the personal computer is an amazing development. An achievement of late-20th century electronics and commerce. Here's an ad from 1998 starring Leonard Nimoy, advertising like it was a "time machine" (The company was called Time Computers).

Time Computers ad featuring Leonard Nimoy (1998)

This turns out to be one of the last PC ads of this kind. PCs were no longer advertised as functional machines. They had become life-style accessories (regardless of function).

In the late-1990s, something happened to the look of computers. In 1998 Apple introduced the iMac, a radical move from the beige box-look that dominated desktop computers since the 1980s.

Apple iMac from 1998 (excuse the image quality, it was taken by me eons ago in high school)

This ad from 1998 highlights this new trend.

Apple iMac G3 "colours" ad (1998)

It was (like the original Macintosh) a simple machine to use. You can just plug it in and use it to surf the web instantly, as this ad (also from 1998) demonstrates (with Jeff Goldblum as the voice-over).

Apple iMac G3 ad (1998)

Since then, the look of a device became a factor in the selling of computers. The RAM and clock-speeds were irreverent now. Everyone wanted a desktop just to surf the web (the main reason people bought them). This ad from 2002 is a notable example of the PC ads that appeared in the early-2000s.

Apple iMac G4 ad (2002)

Since then, desktop computers in general have become irreverent, with advertising now mostly adverting notebooks, netbooks, PDAs, tablets.... basically, more portable computers. As this edition of Cultural Vandalism is getting very long, I'm going to end it here and save the advertising of portable computers (and game consoles) for another day. Until then, please remember to update your anti-virus software and keep surfing (regardless what machine you use).

Bye....