developerWorks: From Monolithic to Grid: A Lighthearted History Lesson

“The very first computers were monolithic in design. Teams of
men and women in suits worked in the mid-1940s to late-1960s in
highly secured rooms like priests and acolytes in some mysterious
temple. There was very little reach into civilian, secular life,
and the work they performed was an esoteric science. The major
feature of computing was the mainframe computer that took up a few
hundred square feet of space, plus working space for its human
masters and for the specialty air-cooling systems, the heavy
printers, and the oh-so-crucial spare-parts room (where they kept
cans of insecticide to literally debug the system).

“Applications were mostly mathematical equations that required
more iterations than the human mind can follow without drooping
into boredom. The input went in either by manually toggling
switches (like turning on a room light switch), or typing into a
big typewriter-like device. The output arrived on a specialty
printer the size of a large desk, mostly in the form of
punch-cards. Each card had 80 characters per line, and ten lines on
which letters could be punched out to indicate a command or a
parameter. And it was slow. A good scientific calculator that fits
in your pocket today is probably several magnitudes faster and more
complex…”

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