The mainframe decade
The 1960s were the decade when computers became a normal part of large organizations. Banks, airlines, insurers, universities and government agencies bought or leased machines in growing numbers, and a computing industry with its own jobs and professions took shape. The era is closely tied to mainframe computers, large central systems run by specialist staff.
IBM was the dominant supplier in the United States. In 1964 it announced the System/360, a family of computers of different sizes that could run the same software. That idea may sound obvious now, but earlier customers often had to rewrite programs whenever they bought a new model. A compatible family reduced that cost, and the announcement is widely seen as a turning point for the business. Other companies, and manufacturers in Britain, France, Japan and the Soviet Union, built their own lines.
Time-sharing
Mainframes were expensive, so the usual way to use one was batch processing: you handed over a deck of punched cards, an operator ran it with other jobs, and you collected printed output later. A mistake could cost a whole day.
Researchers looked for ways to let many people use one machine interactively at the same time, each at a terminal such as a teleprinter or a video display. This is time-sharing. The computer switches rapidly among users so that each seems to have the machine to themselves. Projects at MIT, including the Compatible Time-Sharing System in the early 1960s, and the system built at Dartmouth College in 1964, demonstrated the approach. The Dartmouth work also produced the BASIC language, designed to make programming approachable for students who were not specialists. Multics, a larger project begun in the mid-1960s, influenced later operating systems, including Unix, which began at Bell Labs near the end of the decade.
Time-sharing changed the feel of computing. Programmers could try something, see the result and revise it within minutes, and commercial time-sharing services let smaller companies rent access instead of buying a machine.
Smaller machines and new chips
Not every computer was a mainframe. Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the PDP-8 in 1965, often described as an early successful minicomputer. It was small and cheap enough for a laboratory or a factory to own, and similar machines appeared from other firms. These were the beginning of a branch of the industry separate from the big mainframe vendors.
Hardware was changing underneath. Transistor-based machines improved through the decade, and integrated circuits, which put many components on a single chip, began to appear in commercial computers in the second half of the 1960s. The Apollo spacecraft’s guidance computer was one of the best-known early users of integrated circuits. Semiconductor memory was still in its infancy, and magnetic core remained common.
The Control Data Corporation’s CDC 6600, released in the mid-1960s, is often cited as an early supercomputer because it was far faster than most of its contemporaries, but such descriptions are comparisons for their time, not exact measurements.
Networking research
The decade also saw the first serious research into connecting computers. Several groups reached the idea of packet switching, in which messages are cut into small pieces that travel separately, around the same period. Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain are commonly mentioned, and both worked from somewhat different motivations. Their work fed into ARPANET, a research network funded by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its first connections were made in late 1969, linking a small number of university and research sites. It carried very little traffic compared with anything modern, and it was not yet what we call the internet.
Interaction and graphics
Researchers were also working out how people might interact with computers. Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, from the early 1960s, showed a way to draw on a display with a light pen. Douglas Engelbart’s group at Stanford Research Institute demonstrated a system in 1968 that included a mouse, linked documents and shared screens. The demonstration is remembered mostly for the ideas it showed rather than for any immediate products, since it was years before such features reached ordinary users.
Early games and experiments appeared too. Spacewar!, written by students and staff at MIT in the early 1960s for a minicomputer, was passed among other computer sites and is often cited as an early example of a game spreading through the computing community.
Standards and practice
Standards also mattered. The ASCII character code was published in the early 1960s, and it helped different machines exchange text. Programming languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN were widely adopted, and professional bodies began to discuss software engineering. By late in the decade, programmers complained that large software projects were slow and prone to delays, a concern that was discussed openly at conferences.
Looking back
The 1960s did not yet bring computers into homes, but nearly everything that did so later was prototyped, imagined or invented during the decade: interactive use, networks, small machines, chips and new interfaces. For most of the public, the computer was a distant corporate or government tool, sometimes feared as impersonal, but the groundwork for the next change was in place.