After countless years in grade school working hard on science fair projects and not receiving a ribbon, I finally gave up and wrote a “non-experimental” paper on computers in the eighth grade. Despite the paper being weak, I finally won a ribbon (third or fourth place) in the school science fair. Remember, this was the early 1980s and everyone was still fascinated with the then new concept of computers entering “everday” life. Why am I going down memory lane? Well I came across an article on the 60th anniversary of Eniac, the “first” computer built which of course was mentioned in that paper of mine some 25 years ago.

Though, only to find out after reading the article, ENIAC wasn’t the first computer and really didn’t do a whole lot. They just had a good public relations department that explained well to the American audience what role the computer would play in the future. If you read the article you’ll find (not included in my excerpt) that the PR people went so far to include the placing of flashing light bulbs on the computer console so that people had something to look at besides vacume tubes and switches. Still, you have to admit it was an amazing engineering achievement.

Compared with other computers that performed such practical functions, ENIAC was an odd bird in technical terms. It relied on a 10-digit decimal system, rather than the binary systems of ones and zeros used by virtually all subsequent computers, even those developed by Eckert and Mauchly. Programs could not be stored on ENIAC. It didn’t really employ conditional branching–the if/then statements that form the cornerstone of modern programming.

And only one ENIAC, in fact, was ever built.

“It was a monstrosity. It was rapidly overtaken by general purpose machines,” thundered Jay Forrester, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and one of the leading computer architects of the last century. “There wasn’t anything in it that survived into modern machines, except maybe electricity.”

But supporters respond with an indisputable fact: It worked. Until it was immobilized by lightning in 1955, ENIAC performed computational problems relating to the development of the hydrogen bomb and other military projects. Penn professor Irving Brainerd once even speculated that during the 80,223 hours ENIAC operated, it crunched more calculations than had been performed by all humanity since time began.

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to build a Website focused on reporting today’s news in the world of content management systems (CMS). In simple terms, a CMS is a system used for storing, managing, organizing, and displaying content. There are all kinds of CMS out there, with one that you’re most likely familiar with, the Web CMS (we use one here at Like that Idea). While a CMS is more than just software, among the computer techies it is usually the software that is talked about most.

Building a site for the Internet, whether for business or personal use, can be overwhelming. Where do you start? Well that’s the question I would like to help answer. While the concept for the new site is still being developed, I would like to occasionally post here information regarding the process it takes to build a Website. We currently plan to build the new site, CMS Report, around an open-source application called Drupal. I don’t want to overwhelm our Like that Idea readers with too much computer talk, so as soon as we can, we’ll move this conversation over to the new site. Until we make the move, a hearty welcome to any Drupal users that happen upon this site looking for information about Drupal. You’ll find some information about Drupal, but you will also find that we chat about all good ideas, even those ideas that don’t require a computer.