An Analogy Of Trains And Automobiles To Mainframes And Personal Computers

So I was thinking about the early history of automobiles and trains as I like to do, cornering people in restaurants and elevators and bars and saunas and seizing their upper arms with unexpected firmness as I lock eyes with them and explain my theories in an unrelenting geyser of excited, monotone words. Usually, people plead with me to set them free, or at suggest I should at least attempt to say it, not spray it, or just weep openly out of boredom or disgust, often lashing out and striking me with shoes or laptop bags or the occasional bottle. It’s not great.

But I think I have a solution; a way to express my belief that trains and cars are really both part of a broader category of automobiles, and our lives and culture would be better served if the distinction between rail-based and road-based automobiles was less dramatic. I think the key here is to use an analogy. Specifically, an analogy relating to computers.

Before I present my analogy for your approval, let me just remind you of my fundamental premise, that automobiles as a category should include rail-based machines as well, and that cars and trains share a common ancestor, and their evolutionary development splits starting around 1804. This timeline should make things clear:

As you can see on the chart, the split happens between two automobiles developed by British inventor Richard Trevithick: the first was the 1803 London Steam Carriage, likely the first practical passenger-carrying automobile ever built, and then in 1804 he built a locomotive designed to run on rails.

That’s the London Steam Carriage above there, and here’s a fun video of a recreation of Trevithick’s 1804 locomotive:

A train is really just a car that has had its steering automated via a network of tracks on which to run, which also helps avoid the issue of poor road conditions.

So why did rail travel take off so much quicker than private automobiles? Rail travel was common and well established by the 1850s, but common and well-established car travel really didn’t happen until the early 1900s. The technology of early steam cars and steam trains isn’t terribly different, so why did one succeed so much quicker?

Well, here’s where our analogy comes in. Early automobiles were like the early days of computers; the first ones were experimental and made to solve specific tasks, like Alan Turing’s Enigma-cracking machine, or were military projects, like ENIAC in America, designed to calculate artillery tables. The first actual automobile, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot’s steam drag was a military project, too, designed to haul heavy artillery.

But the first commercialization of computers wasn’t a personal computer for everyone; it was the mainframe, huge machines that filled entire floors of buildings and required special teams of highly-trained people to operate.

Much like railroads and trains, which were also huge machines that required teams of professionals to run. It was not economically viable to make and sell individual cars in the early days, just as it was not viable to make and sell individual computers.

People who wanted to use a computer in the early 1950s had to share the computer, either by handing off stacks of  punch cards for processing or, later, by using a terminal that connected to a shared mainframe. This is roughly the equivalent of people buying tickets to ride a train.

In the cases of trains and mainframe computers, a large company owned the expensive and huge and complex machines, trains or mainframes. They had staffs of people to operate and maintain them, and they owned the networks these machines worked on as well – in the case of railroads, the physical tracks of the rail networks, and in the case of early computers, the electronic network that connected remote terminals and storage devices and printers and other mainframes to the mainframe in question.

Both mainframes and railroads were the only way to get their respective technologies – computers and automobiles – available for use by larger numbers of people. A train is a large, shared automobile that is limited to a specific set of roads with rails on them, and whose paths and times of travel are decided by a large company.

Old mainframe systems were large, shared computers that were limited to a specific network of terminals for access, and whose programs and tasks were decided by a large company or organization like a university.

It’s essentially the same basic idea; and as technology developed and became more affordable and physically smaller and easier to operate, we get personal cars on one side and personal computers on the other. Again, same idea.

So a train is to your own, private cars as a mainframe computer is to the laptop or mobile device you’re reading this on now!

And that leads to my larger point, which is that just like how both a mainframe and your laptop are considered computers, a locomotive and my Citroën 2CV should both be considered automobiles.

Does that make sense? Is this even a point worth making? I’m not sure anymore, but it’s done. So there.