The picture seems quaint to us now--how unlike contemporary computing.
But in the intervening 35 years, what has changed in the picture? Not much--just the scale. The speed of computation has increased by perhaps a factor of 3000, the size of feasible computations by a factor of about 1000, and the size of the computer has decreased dramatically: The contemporary computer--the one that's 1000-3000 times more powerful than the one in the picture--sits on a desk and is used routinely in the office and at home. But a block diagram of the major components, their roles, and how they work together hasn't changed at all. We've merely shrunk the computer and sped it up, but we haven't advanced it as a tool. This is significant.
Other significant things have changed as well--the smiling cleancut gentleman has disappeared, sort of. That man was the system administrator (sys admin) who was responsible for making sure that the gargantuan computer worked properly, that programs it needed were kept up to date and in good working order, and that the programs you wanted to run were loaded and executed as you specified. The problem is that he hasn't disappeared entirely: If you work in a small office, have a home office or a moderately sophisticated home computer system, or if you work in a department with limited resources, most of his duties have fallen on your shoulders. You make sure the computer is working properly; you keep the programs you use loaded and up to date; and you make sure that all the components are in working order and communicating properly with each other. In larger organizations, the smiling man is still called a sys admin, but his or her job is to install your computer when it first arrives and to fix it when it breaks down--and you share him or her with 20 or more other people.
What else has changed? Computers have become ubiquitous, and many have disappeared. They've disappeared by donning coats of automobile hide, telephone skin, stereo fur, and microwave scales. Quite a few of the things we use have a computer in them, and all of these computers are easy to use, while the only thing we think of as a computer is hardest to use of all. There is nothing magical or paradoxical about this: Throughout history the best technology has always sunk below our view within tools and toys that do something we need or want.
By disappearing they dominate our lives. But also their pervasiveness is quite visible on the Internet and the Web. With Web browsers we visit computers all over the world--sometimes in peoples' dens and bedrooms, sometimes in corporate halls the other side of sunset. When we work the Web, aren't we operating under the model that there is exactly one computer in the world?
And when we connect to a site with wonderful animated graphics, we've actually installed and successfully run a program that someone far away has put together in her or his spare time. It's a simple piece of code written in the Java[tm] programming language, but what we've done was once considered remarkable. And even today, the simplest program we can buy from the best professional software developer can take many minutes or hours of devoted attention to install and run.
These three facts (you are the new sys admin, computers are nowhere, the one computer is everywhere) should combine to improve the world of using computers as computers--by making the boundaries of computers disappear, by making the computer be everywhere, and by making the details of working with the computer as simple as putting a DVD into your home theater system.