1896/7 Telephone Exchanges1901 Wireless Telegraphy 1946 The Computer1956 Communications Satellites 2000? Mobile Phones2000? The Internet The Computer - 1946 Electric brain thinks for man It has a memory By Daily Mail Reporter The rather cumbersome first computer Admiral Lord Mountbatten, speaking to a group of wireless specialists in London yesterday, announced that man now had at his disposal an electronic brain and machines which could memorise. They would, he said, cut down work now being done by expert scientists from years to hours. For the housewife too there were cookers which, in a matter of minutes, would turn out a dinner that now takes many hours to prepare. Lord Mountbatten, himself a wireless specialist, was addressing the 21st dinner of the British Institution of Radio Engineers, of which he is president. This is what he told them: The electronic brain will receive information about the situation of the machinery under its control, and will provide an intelligent link between that information and the action necessary to keep the machine in general conformity with the overall directions given to it by man. "The electronic brain will extend enormously the scope of the human brain, not only in essence but also in distance. "This will be done by radio valves activating each other in the way that brain cells do. "One such machine, the electronic numeral integrator and computer (Eniac) employs 18,000 valves and consumes as much power as 100 electric radiators. "Even at a distance it will obey orders. "The Eniac can solve complicated mathematical problems in a fraction of the time taken by a mathematician. "The answer to one particular problem, for instance, which concerns the trajectory of projectiles in flight and takes a mathematician about 10 days to find, can be extracted from this machine in four seconds. "The solution of many mathematical problems - particularly in integral equations - requires the exercise of choice and discrimination on the part of the mathematician, which he is able to exercise as a result of experience. "Even this factor can be covered. Machines now actually in use can exercise a degree of memory, and some are now being designed to exercise those hitherto human prerogatives of choice and judgment. "One of them could even be made to play a rather mediocre game of chess! "In the field of memory alone, however, it seems likely that man is to be provided with vastly greater and speedier access to the inherited knowledge of the ages than he is able to command at the present time." Lord Mountbatten ended: "Now that the electronic brain and the memory machine are upon us, it seems that we are really facing a new revolution, not an industrial one but a revolution of the mind. "In this revolution the responsibilities facing scientists today are formidable and serious. "The scientist has been too much inclined to sit in his ivory tower, washing his hands of the results of his discoveries and inventions. "The world is moving very fast, and it is largely up to the scientist to see that it does not move downhill." Dr Bush, Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, points out that our present methods of storing knowledge are extremely cumbersome. "Most of it is put into book form, which occupies 10,000 times the space that micro-film storage of the same information need take up. "The reference library of the future will be a kind of memory machine of the size of a large desk. "It will store such a fantastic amount of information that it would take hundreds of years to fill if the user inserted every day the equivalent of what is now 5,000 pages of material."