B005HFI0X2 EBOK Read Online Free

Bush predicted that the ballistic missile “would never stand the test of cost analysis. If we employed it in quantity, we would be economically exhausted long before the enemy.” 17
    In 1960, Bush told Congress: “Putting a man in space is a stunt: the man can do no more than an instrument, in fact can do less. There are far more serious things to do than indulge in stunts. . . . [T]he present hullabaloo on the propaganda aspects of the program leaves me entirely cool.” 18 Bush’s opinion eventually was shared by the American government, which abandoned the Apollo program in the 1970s and then, in the 2010s, shut down the space shuttle without having any other method of sending astronauts to space except for reliance on, ironically, Russian rockets.
    Along with exploration of the planets by robotic probes, the most important products of the space program have been satellites, used for military purposes, environmental monitoring, and communications. The United States created the US-dominated Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) in 1962, and the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) in 1964, a multigovernment consortium that was privatized in 2001. The United States controlled 61 percent of Intelsat’s original ownership, compared to 30.5 percent for Western Europe and 8.5 percent for Canada, Australia, and Japan. In order to be less dependent on the United States, the Europeans eventually founded the European Space Agency in 1971. 19
    As the basis of global communication, submarine cables were eclipsed by communications satellites in the years following Sputnik. By 2000, the majority of international telephony took place by means of satellites.
    THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER
    One trail leads us back to Bush’s differential analyzer, from which we follow another trail to the earliest origins of the computer. The US federal government bore paternal responsibility for the infant computer industry. In 1886, Herman Hollerith, an employee of the US Census Office, invented an electrical punch-card reader that could be used to process census information and other data. The company that Hollerith formed in 1896, the Tabulating Machine Company, evolved by 1924 into International Business Machines (IBM). In 1911, another Census Office employee, James Powers, devised an automatic card-punching machine and founded the Powers Tabulating Machine Company which, in 1927, merged with Remington Rand. In the decades that followed, Remington Rand and IBM dominated much of the private-sector development of information technology.
    At MIT, Bush advanced the technology of computing with his electromechanical device. An early model of the analyzer inspired a front-page headline in the New York Times in 1930: “ ‘Thinking Machine’ Does Higher Mathematics; Solves Equations That Take Humans Months.” 20 Inspired by Bush, others built differential analyzers at Aberdeen Proving Ground, General Electric, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Texas, California, and Cambridge. Other analyzers were constructed in Germany, Russia, Norway, and Ireland. Beginning in 1935, the Rockefeller Foundation invested in the analyzer’s development. 21
    But the future of the computer would be electronic and digital, not electromechanical. In 1939, IBM funded Howard Aiken, a graduate student at Harvard, on the basis of a memo that Aiken had written about digital computing. By 1944, IBM had developed the automatic sequence controlled calculator.
    Bush’s analog approach to computing would be superseded by the far more efficient binary approach. Here, too, there is a link. One of Bush’s graduate students at MIT, Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis, explored the idea of using electrical circuits to replace the clumsy mechanical components of Bush’s differential analyzer. Shannon proposed using a binary system based on Boolean algebra. When he went to work for Bell Labs, he influenced the evolution of telephone