This is the world's most powerful computer in 1948. It was called 'The Baby', or more technically, the Small Scale Experimental Machine ;
The Baby was the first machine that had all the components now classically regarded as characteristic of the basic computer. Most importantly it was the first computer that could store not only data but any user program in electronic memory and process it at electronic speed.This is an every day computer, already a few years out of date and few billion times more powerful than 'The Baby', attached to a bicycle :
From That to This in only six decades. As a heavy reader of science fiction in my early teens, I still can't help but be blown away even now by how far, how fast, how unimaginably creative, even within the science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, this world re-defining technology has already evolved.
We are now in an age of extensive testing of direct brain-to-computer control. No more keyboards and mouses, even voice-recognition will become obsolete. You think it, the computer does it.
And for those with brain injuries, computer-to-brain control. A computer in some form will soon take control of the bodies of the very sick, and the very old, and make decisions faster and more precisely than a damaged, or meager, human brain can.
But six decades on, B(G)oogle brain chips, liquid nano-memory and wi-fi thought communication will be as retro as solar-powered calculators are today. Six decades on again is a science fiction that few today can even imagine. As the men who worked 'The Baby' in 1948, with its 1000 bit memory, could not imagine an age where radio, television, a telephone, a movie studio and a record player could be squeezed into something no bigger than a quarter deck of playing cards.
