The Past, Present, and Future of Computers

The Past

Computing

The first feature of computers also provided their name. Computing accepts inputs and generates outputs. In World War II, it aided physicists creating the first atomic bomb and intelligence offers deciphering enemy communications. These scientists could have done the work by hand but computers automated repetition and minimized human error by providing the computer with a set of instructions (a computer program).

Storing

Though powerful, these first computer programs lacked storage. If they needed to perform 2 + 1, they needed to explicitly specify both numbers (data) along with the operation (behavior). Persistent storage brought computers' second leap forward. By separating the behavior and data, programs could work together: one reads in data while another analyzes it, a meaningful separation of responsibilities that led to more complex functionality. Databases were developed that allowed governments and businesses to analyze unheard of amounts of information.

New storage methods were developed improving reliability, capacity, and speed. To ensure different programs could understand the same data, formats like gif, wav, and mpg were standardized. Soon entire encyclopedias, books, songs, movies, and even the Earth (through satellite and aerial imagery) were digitized. These standards and the increasingly cheap/reliable methods of storing have allowed data to essentially live forever.

Rendering

As programs and their data became more complex, computers needed new ways to interact. Computers that only displayed text were replaced with ones that could generate (render) more complex graphical imagery:

Drawing lines led to pong
Manipulating pixels produced the arcade games of the 70's and early 80's
Rasterizing images enabled the games of the late 80's and 90's
Rendering 3D graphics brought us the games of the late 90's and early 2000's, new special effects in movies and early computer-generated movies
Shading 3D graphics ushered in our current video games, computer-generated movies, and post-production special effects

While the technical progress can be best followed in the evolution of video games and movies, the graphics pipeline plays a critical piece in every computer: displaying data, icons, windows, menus, pictures, videos, and webpages. Because rendering graphics differs so greatly from what the CPU does, computers now contain a GPU. They are more limited than CPUs but given the right problem they can be 10x, 100x, >1000x faster, leading them into non-graphical applications like artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, bioinformatics, and molecular dynamics.

The Present

Currently, computing speeds have plateaued between 2-3Ghz, harddrives are big enough to store everything most people desire, and renderings are limited by only the artist's abilities, but our current computers are defined by other advancements.

Networking

ARPANET was developed by the United States government in the 1960's and 70's and would pioneer how computers talked to one another with TCP/IP (the protocol of the Internet). Before TCP/IP, sharing information across computers required a physical disk or a direct connection along with compatible software+hardware. After TCP/IP, any computer could communicate to all other connected computers. A network of cables, routers, and switches would handle the rest.

The number of connected computers grew, and by the mid-1980's communication across the world was commonplace. New protocols built on top of TCP/IP emerged such as email, usenet, HTTP, chatrooms, and instant messaging. New online services like American Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy were established to introduce these features to the non-tech savvy. Traffic on the Internet doubled every of year the 1990's (PDF), but the need for a network of wires connecting every computer kept it limited to rather wealthy/populated areas, until the wireless explosion of the 2000's.

Shrinking

The invention of the transistor slowly shrank room-sized computers to handheld ones while wireless networks removed the wires. Mobile devices were born. They gained momentum with Palm Pilots and BlackBerrys then boomed with Android and the iPhone.

The Future

All life-changing advancements in computers since around 2005 boil down to these two factors: your computer is networked to every other computer, and it's small enough to carry everywhere with you. Everyone is always connected and always communicating: the Communication Age.

This communication drives "the Internet Economy" which now holds most of computers' interest and investment. Computers are the driving force behind gathering, organizing, transferring, and analyzing information at a world-wide scale. If you get paid to work with computers in the 2010's, you're somewhere in this information pipeline, but computers can't stop there: we need to build on it.

Integrating

Computers are already inside your most expensive purchases. Your car has computers monitoring its engine, integrating with your phone, giving you directions, and possibly watching from afar with Lowjack or OnStar. Few people want to spend $50 to connect a light-switch to WiFi, but the prices will drop as the hardware becomes more common and new approaches develop, and once the cost of networking falls far enough computers will become ubiquitous: an afterthought that they're are in everything and networked to everything else.

Recognizing

However convenient, a computer inside your wallet, watch, shoes, coffeemaker, or bed isn't revolutionary, but computers becoming able to recognize aspects of our world (computer vision) might be. We're just beginning to see what computers connected to cameras, microphones, and accelerometers can figure out. Shazam recognizes songs. The Amazon Fire Phone promises to recognize objects. Facebook recognizes your friends' faces almost better than you can, which is good for casinos and airports, but what about on streets, in restaurants, or parks?

Computer recognition extends far past companies' ability to advertise and governments' ability to monitor: it could provide superhuman senses. There's enough detail in a key's photograph to print a working copy. Computers detect enough variation in your skin color to monitor your heart-rate and blood flow. With the right sensors, a computer could exhibit the sense of any animal:

Eagles can spot rabbits two miles away.
Animals recognize the poisonous plants and animals of their environment.
Dogs can smell cancer.

Augmenting

Computers that recognize your surroundings and change it creates an augmented reality. Building on the advancements of 3D rendering and computer vision, our entertainment has already blurred the line between reality and computer-generated reality. Can you tell what's real in a movie's background? Do you forget people at the stadium can't see the first down line?

Augmented reality extends beyond our TV screens. Our phones can insert cartoon characters onto your desk or make a $20 bill come alive. Google Glass overlays a screen between our eyes and the world. Imagine the possibilities if Google ever stops merely selling it as a way to communicate your experiences with others:

Watch explanations of your car's engine while looking under the hood.
Learn to play the piano by seeing the keys light up under your fingers.
Play a game of chess (or StarCraft) projected onto your kitchen table.
Enjoy computer-generated effects coming from the stage during a concert.
Follow directions placed directly on the road in front of you.
Share a room with someone halfway around the world.

Ten years ago, these innovations were waiting for some big leaps: small enough hardware, powerful enough batteries, detailed enough screens, and the ability to overlay images fast and accurately enough to trick your mind. I'd argue only the last roadblock exists today. Oculus VR was attacking it until Facebook bought them, who knows what they're doing now.

Interacting

Once computers reliably recognize significant parts of our world, they can learn about and interact with them:

Traffic lights could coordinate and adapt to conjested streets.
Home automation systems could adjust your A/C and lights based on where you are.
Robots could pick up trash around our roads and parks and recycle trash in our landfills.
Cars and drones will drive themselves.

In a similar way, computers can interact with our bodies:

Pacemakers regulate heartbeats.
Hearing-aides amplify noises around us.
Prosthetic limbs are developing finer motor-control and could be incredibly strong.
Augmented reality screens could be placed directly onto your eye like a contact.
Sperm and egg selectors could avoid genetic diseases and disabilities.
Nano-computers in your bloodstream could fight infection/cancer.

Simulating

Computers could also improve our lives on a more abstract level than interaction: they could generate knowledge about our world. Google crawls more of the Internet in one day than you can read in a lifetime. A fast enough computer can process a two-hour movie in seconds. Computers aren't limited by our sense of time, only by how fast they compute.

If the mechanical workings of molecules, cells, and viruses were broken down into their basic behavioral patterns, computers could simulate millions of experiments outside of "realtime". As computers get faster and the known patterns grow and improve, computers may help us:

tailor treatments to specific cancer patients
discover new forms of biotechnology like ultra-productive wheat, cotton, or fruit
test new drugs by experimenting on millions of digitized "people"

Starting to sound like science fiction? Bare with me: we are currently making computers that recognize and interact with our world. Simulation begins with computers observing, experimenting, and recording the behavioral patterns of molecules, cells, and groups of cells at levels beyond human perception. With these behavioral recordings, computers could develop new solutions to real-world problems much like today's architects use CAD systems to help them design buildings more resistant to powerful earthquakes, hurricanes, and aging.

Wrap-Up

Computers have come a long way since the 1940's. I hope their future advancement is aided (not distracted) by today's Communication Age: sharing of ideas+programs+data is easier than ever, but bright minds are also stuck organizing data, generating page views, and working beneath their ability. Innovative companies tend to be swallowed up by established ones who are unlikely to produce giant leaps forward as they are focused on controlled growth, iterative improvements, and heavily-calculated risks.

Overall, tomorrow's computer will change our world: simultaneously creating and disrupting systems of influence and power, like the computer of today. They'll just be better at it.

For more on how computers are shaping the present read my article "The Communication Age".