33
“Computer” was a job, not a thing. If
you said you had a supercomputer, this is
what you meant. 38
At about this time, the technological
legacy of Charles Babbage stirred again at
the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia. ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and calculator), the first electronic
computer, was developed in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. 39
It weighed 30,000 pounds, had a 900bit memory, ran at .017 MIPS (million
instructions per second), and blew a tube
every 45 minutes. It was programmed by
someone moving plugs and wires around.
Computers got a little better in the early
1950s (more memory and longer times
between failures). But a battalion of nerds
was still needed to get them to do anything
useful twice in a row. 40
This modest-looking little science project is what unleashed the torrent of computation we see all around us today. 41
It’s the very first transistor, developed
at Bell Labs in 1948 by Walter Brattain,
William Shockley and John Bardeen. They
were awarded a Nobel Prize for it in 1956,
around the time transistors started being
manufactured in quantities large enough
to show up in things like radios and, a few
years later, computers.
Computers became much more manageable. One could fit in a room smaller
than a barn, and it might work for a
whole week without breaking down. It
had enough memory that a programmer
didn’t have to move wires or think in
binary to program it. The NYSE had to
have one. In 1966, they got it. And there
he is, the first nerd on Wall Street: Keith
Funston, then president of the NYSE. 42
Computers continue to get better, faster,
smaller and cheaper. They’re everywhere
in trading. Floor traders can interact
directly with algorithms using the NYSE
handheld. 43
» continued on page 74
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www.MoAF.org | Spring/Summer 2011 | Financial History 55