certain of its software characteristics (which might be presented as wrapped in the concepts of complex policy) have yet to be supplanted. In fact, the transition from mainframes to mini-computers involved something of a retrograde advance for software systems.

The third epoch is the personal computer era. Wrought from another adaptation event, personal computers were based upon the high volume production of basic processor units which, while significantly less capable than the processors of mainframes or mini-computers, were nonetheless able to address many of the basic issues faced by the office worker as well as peoples’ private activities as well. From a software standpoint, if mini-computers entailed a retrograde advance then personal computers turned that into a rout. Certainly the mainframe developers could have considered the early personal computers as evolutionary throwbacks; a reversion from vertebrates to insects if you will. As Darrel Royal, legendary football coach at the University of Texas so eloquently commented in equating a decided underdog victor over the Longhorns to cockroaches, “It’s not what they eat that’s the problem, it’s what they get into and mess up!” In any case, limited in scope and capability though they may have been, personal computers certainly brought the species out of the pure workplace and into the home, giving us computers that travel with us and that provide us services on a 24x7 basis.

The fourth epoch is the personal electronic devices era. Traditionally well represented by cellular phones and their Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM), they are used in the billions as of this writing. Newer forms have developed, such as personal digital assistants, e-mail communicators (such as the much used Blackberry e-mail manager) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags (such as the tags used to pay toll on the highway). Based on the adaptation event comprised of a small assembly of computer processor and memory, we entered this era in the early 1990’s and at the present time we are still in an environment involving competition among the relevant technologies. The competition is constructive at the moment, perhaps indicating a time of sufficient resources for nature to experiment. However, the competition is turning into a dog-eat-dog contest.

In considering each epoch, we will consider not just the technology, but also the dominant companies involved in each. The evolutionary process in this case involves the organizational environment as well as the technical. Financial considerations will be discussed rather tersely at best. The transition between epochs generally finds an inflation-adjusted cost of raw computing power to vary inversely with the numbers of computers or their power.

Vacuum Tubes and Dinosaurs

Mathematical computation has always invited the invention of performance enhancing tools. In early days, marks or pebbles of different sizes were used to represent different numbers of items; in essence, objects were used as metaphorical representations of collections of other objects. The abacus was one of the earliest mechanisms that facilitated relatively simple mathematical operations. In more recent centuries, more complex mechanical assemblies were constructed to perform complex, repetitive operations. In any specific era, the nature of these tools was limited by the construction technologies currently available. It required a true mutational discovery in 1879 to provide the seminal event in the development of the computer; an invention by the icon of modern invention, Thomas Alva Edison. His invention was, of course a commercially viable, integrated system for electric lighting, exemplified by the incandescent electric light bulb. The light bulb went on; a new idea for the ages was the result. The symbolism is almost staggering.

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