Essay: Random-access memories of 40 years of IT

Computerworld - It was 1967. Students were protesting an unpopular war. Beatle John Lennon was on the cover of the first issue of Rolling Stone. And Patrick J. McGovern started Computerworld, a newsweekly for the computer community, to tell computer buyers the unvarnished truth about things like disk crashes and system failures.

Since then, Computerworld has chronicled all of the big developments of the past four decades: relational databases, personal computing, the Internet, Y2k, open-source software, wireless devices and the rise of the chief information officer.

You already know about Grace Hopper, Max Hopper, Steve Jobs and outsourced jobs. Youre familiar with high-tech miniaturization to the point that were typing with the tips of our thumbs on BlackBerry devices. Youve been subject to Moores Law, Murphys Law and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

But what I find just as interesting as the megatrends and milestones are the stories that wont make it into the history books: the industry flops, quirky inventions and computer glitches  with headlines like Woman Dead Three Years Gets Medicaid. Consider the hand-cranked laptop, patented 10 years ago. When the battery started to run down, a red-alert message would tell the user to start turning a winding key ... similar to winding up a large windup alarm clock, according to U.S. Patent No. 5,630,155.

When I started at Computerworlds Washington bureau in 1984, I used a PortaBubble word-processing machine with magnetic bubble memory and an acoustic coupler to send stories to headquarters. It was the size of a microwave oven and just as heavy to lug around.

Bubble memory didnt catch on, though, because semiconductor memory got bigger, better and cheaper. The PortaBubbles maker, Teleram Communications Corp., went bankrupt in 1985 because journalists switched in droves to RadioShack Corp.s much lighter TRS-80 laptop.

And its always fun to watch conventional wisdom turn out to be spectacularly wrong. In 1984, for instance, it was widely assumed that AT&T, unshackled from its local telephone companies, would become a formidable competitor against IBM in the computer business. AT&T did give it a try; it owned Unix and NCR Corp. for a while but didnt know what to do with them and eventually left the computer business.