How were the computers 100 years ago?

Answer 1

A hundred years ago was 1913 and no they didn't have computers. The car had just been put into mass production (and still cost several times the annual income of an average person), the airplane was invented in 1903, the telephone was still fairly new and all calls were made through the operator (the first dial phones were not introduced in the US until after WW1 and then only in certain parts of very large cities), and there were still people without electricity. Herman Hollerith had introduced electromechanical punchcard data processing in the 1890 US Census and by 1895 was leasing them to railroads and a few other large businesses as well as governments. IBM standardized the 80 column punchcard in 1928. The 1932 creation of the SSA dramatically increased demand for electromechanical punchcard data processing machines (and may have saved IBM from the depression). MIT built a gigantic mechanical analog computer programmed by removing and rearranging belt-chains that connected the various shafts, called the Differential Analyzer in 1929 that consisted of thousands of rotating shafts and dozens of glass disk integrators. The first TV was made in 1924, but not sold until 1939 (then sales were suspended due to WW2 and not resumed until 1947). People used radios for news, music, and entertainment all through the 1930's and 1940's. The first programmable electronic digitalcomputer was a military/government computer (ENIAC) declassified in 1946 that filled a room with the machinery it took to run it. It used punchcards for input/output and was programmed by plugging cables into connectors and manually setting several hundreds of switches. Solid State semiconductor electronics hadn't been invented yet (just relays and vacuum tubes). The first electronic digital computers that were priced under $10,000 did not become available until about 1968, but the companies that made them made no attempt to market them to individuals (the price of a typical car in 1968 was about $1700). There was no internet (1971 when it was invented by two MIT grad students) and desktop computers weren't sold until the late 1970's. The Apple ][E was an early home computer with 16KB memory. The car radio phone (which occupied most of the trunk of your car) was introduced in a few large cities in 1946 by AT&T, but even by the late 1970s this system could support no more than about a dozen simultaneous calls in one service area (the wait just to connect to the radio phone operator when you started a call sometimes exceeded half an hour!). The handheld portable cell phone was invented by Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1971 and sold for government use. It wasn't until 1984 that they were sold to the public. In 1913 the phonograph was a gramophone powered by a handcranked spring mechanism, playing very fragile glass-shellac records, and if volume control was provided it was by opening and closing doors on the cabinet. There were no CD's, no tape, no recording devices, and no DVD's. Movies were silent and not in color. The first movie with sound was in 1928 and it was called the Great Train Robbery. The first color movie was in 1932 and that was the Wizard of OZ and to have color in it they had to hand color the film. No, in 1913 the world was a different place than it is today.