“Computers in the future may weigh less than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics, 1949

Abstract

The use of computers in health care, specifically in pain medicine, has the potential to improve the quality of care provided to patients, increase its efficiency, and decrease costs. For the past half century, computer technology has undergone rapid evolutionary change. In 1948, the first computer program ran on “Baby” in Manchester, England; in 1949, the first computer bug was reported—a moth stuck between relays in the Harvard Mark II computer. The IBM selective sequence electronic calculator used from 1948 to 1952, which occupied 1,000 square feet of floor space, produced the first moon position tables for the 1969 Apollo flight. In the 1960s, a student might spend hours punching holes in cards to run a program to solve a monumental problem such as finding the mean and standard deviation of a column of numbers. After submitting the “job” to the administrators of the only computer around, the “new job” got in line for processing, and the user waited for days before learning the results. If there were even one mistake on a single card, a new card had to be typed, reinserted into the deck, and all the cards resubmitted. Eight-inch floppy disks were invented in 1971, and 3-inch floppies became available in 1982. Kenbak Corp. began selling the first personal computer for $750 in 1971 and went out of business 2 years later after selling only 40. The first computer worm was discovered as recently as 1979 and was named after a powerful “tapeworm” that infected computers, as described in John Brunner's …