A Brief History of Smart Things
Welcome, reader, and I am glad you’ve chosen to pick up this book. I wrote this book for two reasons: I think that people struggle with approaching smart devices because the hardware side of the process can be intimidating if you are unfamiliar with the c
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A Brief History of Smart Things Welcome, reader, and I am glad you’ve chosen to pick up this book. I wrote this book for two reasons: I think that people struggle with approaching smart devices because the hardware side of the process can be intimidating if you are unfamiliar with the concepts and basics of working with hardware like circuits and components. The second is that I have seen in my speaking and teaching efforts that having a little bit of context around what you are learning and working on can help inform the process and make it more relevant. That is what I will take you through in the first chapter of the book, the context of the smart device: where did they come from, why are they here, and how they can be used to change and improve the environment around us.
The Computer According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word “computer” was in 1613 in a book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue [sic] read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that euer [sic] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.” This usage of the term referred to a human computer, a person who carried out calculations or computations. © Christopher Harrold 2020 C. Harrold, Practical Smart Device Design and Construction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5614-5_1
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Chapter 1
A Brief History of Smart Things
This usage continued until well into the modern era with “computers” being literally “people who did calculations.” As the book Hidden Figures pointed out, these computers were oftentimes women, who were doing some of the most important mathematical work of their time. In that same movie, we also see the arrival of the first mainstream modern computer, the IBM 3070 mainframe, at NASA. This new digital computer promised the ability to complete complex calculations in a fraction of the time of human computers. It was not without its flaws, and took an army of human computer experts to get it installed and working, but it represented a huge leap forward into the digital age that we now inhabit. There is an axiom coined by Arthur C. Clarke that states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indiscernible from magic.” Certainly, to anyone not familiar with the operation of those computers they must have felt like a truly magic device. They were able to take a mundane task and allow the operator to focus on the inputs and outputs as opposed to all the dense mathematical operations in the middle part. This is also arguably the first instance of a digital assistant; something that a human controls, but that works digitally. Fundamentally all modern computers are really digital extensions of the controller, providing the ability to perform basic tasks faster and more easily without having to resort to math on paper, and by delivering capabilities that far exceed the user’s own. The ability of these digital assistants to perform complex calculations is not lost on the business world, and the rise of the tabulating machine and the
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