Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Much has changed in computers in the past 30 years. Something that has not changed is that the input/output part of the computer is paramount. See, for example, the iPhone computer.

It was in the dark ages of computing back in 1978. I was taking a class in assembly language programming for the IBM 360. (For the young, see footnotes at the end of this post.) The textbook had been written by the head of the computer science department (also see footnote). At the start of each chapter, the author placed cute little quotes from people.

At the start of the chapter on input/output statements was something like this:

All that computing power doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t input/output.

You see, back in these dark ages, we were taught over and over that a computer had three basic parts:

1. the processor
2. the memory
3. the input/output

At the time, I knew an engineer working for IBM. I asked him about this input/output stuff. He confirmed the quote. “Anyone,” he assured me, “could make a processor, but no one could make input/output devices like IBM.”

Thirty years later, I still agree with the quote from the textbook. Intel makes the processors these days. Lots of people make the memory devices. Regardless, the input/output is still the most important. It is too bad that IBM is no longer the king of input/output. The new king is Apple.

Look at the iPhone. It is a computer comprising

1. the processor
2. the memory
3. the input/output

I don’t know what kind of processor my iPhone has. I cannot remember how much memory it has (I checked, 16GigaBytes which is 1,000 times more memory than the university’s mainframe computer in 1978). I do know about the input/output of my iPhone. It has

1. touchscreen
2. color graphics
3. camera
4. radio (cell phone)
5. speaker
6. microphone
7. GPS

I am probably missing some things in this list. The newer iPhones also have a compass which enables augmented reality applications – a big deal. These input/output devices have turned the computer from a large metal thing in an air-conditioned room into a powerful appliance I keep in my pocket.

Thirty years later, that statement buried in a lost textbook remains true:

All that computing power doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t input/output.

FOOTNOTES:

Assembly language was something we used before C to do things efficiently on computers. The IBM 360 was a big computer that banks and lots of other big businesses used.

Lo and behold, I found the textbook available from Amazon.com. A used version is available for one cent. A pretty good investment in computing history, “Assembly Language Programming and the IBM 360 and 370 Computers,” by Walter G. Rudd.