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Edison was primarily searching for a source of light that could derive from electricity rather than hydrocarbon gas or liquids. However, he arrived at something that provided a great deal more than just light. The serendipitous concept that flowed from Edison’s light bulb was the discovery that when heating is induced in a filament in a vacuum by passing an electric current through the filament, a stream of free electrons was sent emanating from it. If a metal plate was placed in the same vacuum, in proximity to the filament, then an electric current could be detected passing from the filament to this plate; a configuration that came to be known as a diode. John Fleming, who patented the diode tube only to see the patent invalidated by the United States Supreme court, subsequently discovered that various configurations of vacuum tubes could be used to detect radio waves in the aether; that is, radio waves passing through the vacuum of the tube would actually imprint themselves upon (i.e. modulate) the electric current passing through the vacuum of the tube. Lee de Forest then found that by placing a third element into the same vacuum, a grid placed between the filament and the plate, he could create the first amplifier vacuum tube; the triode. The triode had the ability to modulate an electric current flowing between the filament and the plate, amplify that same signal and form a switch allowing the signal (current) to be turned on and off. He found that by attaching an antenna to the grid, he could systematically modulate the electric current with radio waves, thus forming the first true radio. In any case, among these various facilities are found the basic operations needed to build an electronic computer.

Through the applied research efforts of many scientists, the period up through the late 1940’s resulted in the development of a number of computer-like devices, culminating in what is generally recognized as the first electronic, store-program computer; the Eniac machine constructed at the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, we must observe, albeit just a bit early in our considerations, the impingement of a superior social organization in the form of the United States District Court for Minnesota that found, in the civil case of Honeywell Inc. versus Sperry Rand Corporation and Illinois Scientific Developments, Inc. that John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State University developed and built an automatic digital computer.

Mainframes

The first great epoch of the computer age is the era of the mainframe. One can derive much of the architecture of such machines purely from the name: mainframe. Such computers made use of large electrical components as building blocks; vacuum tubes, discrete electronic components (resistors, capacitors and the like) and even some mechanical elements. Much of what went into the computer was simply connection material that held the more involved pieces together and that allowed electrical signals to flow among them. As a consequence, the various pieces of the computer were assembled on standard size frames or racks that provided mechanical regularity for these pieces, including the provision of electrical power and cooling. Indeed, these large machines generated tremendous amounts of excess heat from their incredibly inefficient (by today’s standards) operations. Mainframes encompassed a wide variety of computer characteristics. Their large size brought with them a large price tag, both for acquisition and for operations. This, in turn, placed a number of requirements on the software that brought the mainframes to life. These include the concepts of high availability, high security and very high computing and storage capacity, yielding a high trust environment for the users of such systems. Moreover, a high trust environment that can address the full range of problems amenable to computer activity.

Mainframes appeared in the early-to-mid-1950’s, led by the IBM 650 as a transitional machine that extended the species from the one-of-a-kind systems that arose at the initial emergence of electronic computers into a significant number of machines of a common design that established a

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