Last fall I watched a 21 year old pitcher with only three days rest hold the New York Yankees scoreless for nine innings as the Marlins won the World Series, four games to two. Fifty thousand NY fans sat quietly, stunned at the near impossible feat. The newest team in the League, in only its second winning year ever, had beaten the oldest established baseball dynasty. It was a momentous event.
Fifty two years earlier I had sat, watched and cheered with my father in Yankee Stadium as Joe DiMaggio led the Yankees to victory at the beginning of that dynasty. At the same time, unknown to any fan at the stadium, another dynasty was starting.
In 1951, Univac delivered the world's first commercial computer, a Univac I, to the Bureau of Census. A quiet revolution had begun silently, one that would change the world. Ten years after the Univac I, I wrote my first program in Fortran on an IBM 1620 located at Harvard.
To understand just how dependent we are on computers, let me pose a hypothetical situation where almost every commercial computer stops working.
If, by some remote chance, an antimatter meteor would hit the stratosphere over the central US, our modern world would stop. A large antimatter explosion at high altitude would create an EMP, an ElectroMagnetic Pulse, that would wipe out the circuits of almost all electronic equipment and computers that were not well shielded and grounded.
Few cars built after 1980 would run, most gas stations could not pump gas. Your coffee maker wouldn't work, the microwave controls would be dead, all but a few old TVs would be showing static if anything. Only a few old radios that use tubes or single transistors would receive stations.
Power stations would be able to shift back to manual controls, but most power would shut down automatically for safety. Many telephone systems would be dead and even if your computer survived, the public Internet would be down for months. Airlines would be grounded, many trucks dead on the road, most radio communications gone.
Credit cards would be useless, and while cash would be king, cash registers wouldn't work. For a while, business and people would have to run on promises to pay, an economy based on IOUs or exchange of services. Ebay, Amazon and a whole host of business based on the Internet would be out of business for quite a while. The economic impact would be stunning.
Without the protected military systems and vehicles, a week later food would run short and a panic would start. It's a grim picture, one which fortunately is extremely unlikely. But not impossible.
Fortunately, the military would be mostly unaffected. Their communications systems are designed to survive an EMP, the vehicles would still work and for a while, the military would hold things together as vital infrastructure was rebuilt, stronger this time. Also to our good fortune, the railroads could continue to carry the majority of critical supplies because they can fall back on earlier operations procedures that don't depend on electronics.
Against this very remote chance of major problems, computers do so much for us that the tradeoff seems not just reasonable, but compelling. We benefit from many new publishers and an amazing educational resource via the Internet. Our computers manage energy, find scarce resources, reduce pollution and traffic jams. We can look forward to advancing science and improving our health. We can even include saving our planet through better understanding of how it works.
Today our civilization is nearly totally dependent on electronics, much of it in the form of computers. While the benefits are huge, unfortunately, our computers and electronics systems are vulnerable to more than just viruses. Maybe now people will think more about protecting them.
While it would be more than inconvenient, we would survive and learn from such a disaster. Remember, fifty two years ago we got along without computers and didn't even notice their absence.