Dividing computer history into two groups

 

Most computer museums are trying to explain on a time axis the development of computer technology. The idea is that all the computers in the 1960s have something in common and were replaced by much faster computers in the 1970s. The problem is, that this description emphasizes to much revolutionary technology so each year is labeled as a major milestone. But if every year is important no year is important and the technology can't be described at all.

The more elegant way in structure the computer history is to introduce only two periods. First one is from 1940s to 1992 and the second is from 1992 until today. From the self understanding of computing history the year 1992 can be seen as the transition from forth generation microprocessors to 5 th generation artificial intelligence. That means, the generations 1 to 4 are put into the same basket and the 5 th generation since 1992 is the second basket.

Let us describe the situation in detail. The most advenced computers in the year 1992 were systems like the atari ST, the 296 Intel PC and the early sun workstations. These systems are able to emulate all the computers before, that means an MS-DOS 286 PC can be seen as a modern calcluator which has replaced transistorized computers. The idea was to combine electornics compoenents like a harddrive, a cpu and a monitor into a single unit and this called a personal computer. This was exactly the objective of the are from 1940-1992. That means all the computers were created with this objective in mind and took many decades until the goal was realized.

The computers invented after the year 1992 were created with a different objecitve. The main goal of this area which is valid today is to connect the computers to a world wide internet and to realize Artificial Intelligence.

Let us describe the situation until 1992. The interesting situation was, that none of the computers in that area were used to control robots and none of the computer were connected the internet. Sure, some exception from this rule are available, because the internet has it's roots in the 1970s. But this application was a minor application and not discussed widely. In contrast the computing debate until 1992 was around more technical things like how to build 8bit cpus, how to implement programming languages and how to use a pc as a word processing machine.