On September 11, 1940, Bell Labs researcher George Stibitz gave the world’s first public demonstration of remote computing — dialing into a computer over ordinary telephone lines from hundreds of miles away.
The machine in question was the Complex Number Calculator, a relay-based computer Stibitz and colleague Samuel Williams had built at Bell Labs in New York and gotten running earlier that year. For a joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Stibitz had a teletype terminal installed in the lecture hall and connected it back to the calculator in New York over a leased telephone line. Audience members called out complex-number equations, an operator typed them into the teletype, and about a minute later the answer clattered back from a machine none of them could see. Mathematicians in the room — including Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly, both of whom would go on to shape early computing themselves — watched a computation happen somewhere else entirely.
It’s a small, almost quaint scene by today’s standards, but the underlying idea is exactly the one modern computing runs on: a person at a terminal using processing power that lives somewhere else, accessed over a communications line. That’s the same basic premise behind everything from time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s to the cloud servers powering apps today. Stibitz’s Dartmouth demo is widely cited as the first time the public saw it work.
Source: Computer History Museum, EDN
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