history of computer

History of ComputerSubmitted by:

Ismel Jr.O. Oporto

Edwin Jaca

Brief summary of the history of Computers

It is supplemented by the two PBS documentaries video tapes "Inventing theFuture" And "The Paperback Computer". The chapter highlights some of theadvances to look for in the documentaries.

In particular, when viewing the movies you should look for two things:• The progression in hardware representation of a bit of data:1. Vacuum Tubes (1950s) - one bit on the size of a thumb;2. Transistors (1950s and 1960s) - one bit on the size of a fingernail;3. Integrated Circuits (1960s and 70s) - thousands of bits on the size of ahand4. Silicon computer chips (1970s and on) - millions of bits on the size ofa finger nail.

The progression of the ease of use

of computers:

1.Almost impossible to use except

by very patient geniuses

(1950s);

2.Programmable by highly trained

people only (1960s and 1970s);

3.Useable by just about anyone

(1980s and on).

First Computer

ENIAC machine by John W. Mauchly and

J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC

(Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator) used a word of 10 decimal digits instead of binary ones like previous automated calculators/computers. ENIAC was also the first machine to use more than 2,000 vacuum tubes, using nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes.

First Computer

Storage of all those vacuum

tubes and the machinery

required to keep the cool took

up over 167 square meters

(1800 square feet) of floor

space. Nonetheless, it had

punched-card input and

output and arithmetically had

1 multiplier, 1 divider-square

rooter, and 20 adders

employing decimal "ring

counters," which served as

adders and also as quick-

access (0.0002 seconds) read-

write register storage.

First Computer

The executable instructions composing a program were embodied in the separate units of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a route through the machine for the flow of computations. These connections had to be redone for each different problem, together with presetting function tables and switches

First Computer

This "wire-your-own" instruction technique was inconvenient, and only with some license could ENIAC be considered programmable; it was, however, efficient in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is generally acknowledged to be the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and was productively used from 1946 to 1955

First Computer

A controversy developed in

1971, however, over the

patentability of ENIAC's basic

digital concepts, the claim

being made that another U.S.

physicist, John V. Atanasoff,

had already used the same

ideas in a simpler vacuum-

tube device he built in the

1930s while at Iowa State

College. In 1973, the court

found in favor of the company

using Atanasoff claim and

Atanasoff received the

acclaim he rightly deserved.

Mainframes to PCs

The 1960s saw large mainframe computers

become much more common in large

industries and with the US military and space

program. IBM became the unquestioned

market leader in selling these large,

expensive, error-prone, and very hard to use

machines.

Mainframes to PCs

A veritable explosion of personal computers occurred in the early 1970s, starting with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak exhibiting the first Apple II at the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The Apple II boasted built-in BASIC programming language, color graphics, and a 4100 character memory for only $1298. Programs and data could be stored on an everyday audio-cassette recorder. Before the end of the fair, Wozniak and Jobs had secured 300 orders for the Apple II and from there Apple just took off

Mainframes to PCs

Also introduced in 1977 was the TRS-80.

This was a home computer manufactured by

Tandy Radio Shack. In its second incarnation, the

TRS-80 Model II, came complete with a 64,000

character memory and a disk drive to store

programs and data on. At this time, only Apple

and TRS had machines with disk drives. With the

introduction of the disk drive, personal computer

applications took off as a floppy disk was a most

convenient publishing medium for distribution of

software.

Mainframes to PCs

IBM, which up to this time had been producing mainframes and minicomputers for medium to large-sized businesses, decided that it had to get into the act and started working on the Acorn, which would later be called the IBM PC. The PC was the first computer designed for the home market which would feature modular design so that pieces could easily be added to the architecture.

Mainframes to PCs

Most of the components, surprisingly,

came from outside of IBM, since building it

with IBM parts would have cost too much

for the home computer market. When it

was introduced, the PC came with a

16,000 character memory, keyboard from

an IBM electric typewriter, and a

connection for tape cassette player for

$1265.

Mainframes to PCs

By 1984, Apple and IBM had come out with new

models. Apple released the first generation

Macintosh, which was the first computer to come

with a graphical user interface(GUI) and a mouse.

The GUI made the machine much more attractive

to home computer users because it was easy to

use. Sales of the Macintosh soared like nothing

ever seen before. IBM was hot on Apple's tail and

released the 286-AT, which with applications like

Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet, and Microsoft Word,

quickly became the favourite of business concerns.

Mainframes to PCs

That brings us up to about ten years ago. Now

people have their own personal graphics

workstations and powerful home computers.

The average computer a person might have in

their home is more powerful by several orders of

magnitude than a machine like ENIAC. The

computer revolution has been the fastest

growing technology in man's history.

TIMELINE

• 1939

• Hewlett-Packard is Founded. David Packard and Bill Hewlett found Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, which rapidly becomes a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to use as sound effects generators for the 1940 movie “Fantasia.”

TIMELINE

• 1940

• The Complex Number Calculator (CNC) is completed. In 1939, Bell Telephone Laboratories completed this calculator, designed by researcher George Stibitz. In 1940, Stibitzdemonstrated the CNC at an American Mathematical Society conference held at Dartmouth College. Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC (located in New York City) using a Teletype connected via special telephone lines. This is considered to be the first demonstration of remote access computing.

TIMELINE

• 1941

• KonradZuse finishes the Z3 computer. The Z3 was an early computer built by German engineer KonradZuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. The original Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid of Berlin in late 1943. However, Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the 1960s which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

TIMELINE

• The first Bombe is completed. Based partly on the design of the Polish “Bomba,” a mechanical means of decrypting Nazi military communications during WWII, the British Bombe design was greatly influenced by the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and others. Many bombes were built. Together they dramatically improved the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities of Allied

TIMELINE

• 1942

• The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed. After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in 1939, Atanasoff received funds to build the full-scale machine. Built at Iowa State College (now University), the ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942.

TIMELINE

• 1942

• The ABC was at the center of a patent dispute relating to the invention of the computer, which was resolved in 1973 when it was shown that ENIAC co-designer John Mauchly had come to examine the ABC shortly after it became functional.

TIMELINE

• 1943

• Project Whirlwind begins. During World War II, the U.S. Navy approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about building a flight simulator to train bomber crews. The team first built a large analog computer, but found it inaccurate and inflexible. After designers saw a demonstration of the ENIAC computer, they decided on building a digital computer. By the time the Whirlwind was completed in 1951, the Navy had lost interest in the project, though the U.S. Air Force would eventually support the project which would influence the design of the SAGE program.

TIMELINE

• The Relay Interpolator is completed. The U.S. Army asked Bell Labs to design a machine to assist in testing its M-9 Gun Director. Bell Labs mathematician George Stibitzrecommended using a relay-based calculator for the project. The result was the Relay Interpolator, later called the Bell Labs Model II. The Relay Interpolator used 440 relays and since it was programmable by paper tape, it was used for other applications following

TIMELINE

• 1944

• Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Conceived by Harvard professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. The Mark-1 was used to produce mathematical tables but was soon superseded by stored program computers.

TIMELINE

• The first Colossus is operational at Bletchley Park. Designed by British engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus was designed to break the complex Lorenz ciphers used by the Nazis during WWII. A total of ten Colossi were delivered to Bletchley, each using 1,500 vacuum tubes and a series of pulleys transported continuous rolls of punched paper tape containing possible solutions to a particular code. Colossus reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours. The machine’s existence was not made public until the 1970s

TIMELINE

• 1945

• John von Neumann wrote "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in which he outlined the architecture of a stored-program computer. Electronic storage of programming information and data eliminated the need for the more clumsy methods of programming, such as punched paper tape — a concept that has characterized mainstream computer development since 1945

TIMELINE

• Hungarian-born von Neumann demonstrated prodigious expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, statistics, and the use of mechanical devices for computation. After the war, he concentrated on the development of Princeton´s Institute for Advanced Studies computer and its copies around the world.

TIMELINE

• 1946 ENIACI• In February, the public got its first

glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. PresperEckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.

• Start of project: 1943• Completed: 1946• Programmed: plug board and

switches• Speed: 5,000 operations per

second• Input/output: cards, lights,

switches, plugs• Floor space: 1,000 square feet• Project leaders: John Mauchly and J.

Presper Eckert.

TIMELINE• AVIDAC

• An inspiring summer school on computing at the University of Pennsylvania´s Moore School of Electrical Engineering stimulated construction of stored-program computers at universities and research institutions. This free, public set of lectures inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, later, IAS machine clones like the AVIDAC. Here, Warren Kelleher completes the wiring of the arithmetic unit components of the AVIDAC at Argonne National Laboratory. Robert Dennis installs the inter-unit wiring as James Woody Jr. adjusts the deflection control circuits of the memory unit.

TIMELINE

• 1947

The Williams tube won the race for a practical random-access memory. Sir Frederick Williams of Manchester University modified a cathode-ray tube to paint dots and dashes of phosphorescent electrical charge on the screen, representing binary ones and zeros. Vacuum tube machines, such as the IBM 701, used the Williams tube as primary memory.

TIMELINE

• On December 23, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen successfully tested this point-contact transistor, setting off the semiconductor revolution. Improved models of the transistor, developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, supplanted vacuum tubes used on computers at the time.

TIMELINE

• 1948

• IBM´s Selective Sequence

Electronic Calculator computed

scientific data in public display

near the company´s Manhattan

headquarters. Before its

decommissioning in 1952, the

SSEC produced the moon-

position tables used for

plotting the course of the 1969

Apollo flight to the moon.

TIMELINE

• Norbert Wiener published "Cybernetics," a major influence on later research into artificial intelligence. He drew on his World War II experiments with anti-aircraft systems that anticipated the course of enemy planes by interpreting radar images. Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" from the Greek word for "steersman."

TIMELINE

• In addition to "cybernetics," historians note Wiener for his analysis of brain waves and for his exploration of the similarities between the human brain and the modern computing machine capable of memory association, choice, and decision making.

TIMELINE

• Claude Shannon´s "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" showed engineers how to code data so they could check for accuracy after transmission between computers. Shannon identified the bit as the fundamental unit of data and, coincidentally, the basic unit of computation.

TIMELINE

• 1951

• MIT´s Whirlwind

debuted on Edward R. Murrow´s

"See It Now" television series.

Project director Jay Forrester

described the computer as a

"reliable operating system,"

running 35 hours a week at 90-

percent utility using an

electrostatic tube memory.

TIMELINE

• England´s first commercial computer, the Lyons Electronic Office, solved clerical problems. The president of Lyons Tea Co. had the computer, modeled after the EDSAC, built to solve the problem of daily scheduling production and delivery of cakes to the Lyons tea shops. After the success of the first LEO, Lyons went into business manufacturing computers to meet the growing need for data processing systems.

TIMELINE

• The UNIVAC I

• delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.

TIMELINE

• John von Neumann´s IAS computer became operational at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. Contract obliged the builders to share their designs with other research institutes. This resulted in a number of clones: the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the ILLIAC at the University of Illinois, the Johnniac at Rand Corp., the SILLIAC in Australia, and others.

TIMELINE

• On election night, November 4, CBS News borrowed a UNIVAC to make a scientific prediction of the outcome of the race for the presidency between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. The opinion polls predicted a landslide in favor of Stevenson, but the UNIVAC´s analysis of early returns showed a clear victory for Eisenhower. Its sharp divergence from public opinion made newscasters Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood question the validity of the computer´s forecast, so they postponed announcing UNIVAC´s prediction until very late.

TIMELINE

• Grace Hopper completes the A-0 Compiler. In 1952, mathematician Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. Other compilers based on A-0 followed: ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC

TIMELINE

• 1954A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal of Texas Instruments Inc., brought the price of this component down to $2.50. A Texas Instruments news release from May 10, 1954, read, "Electronic "brains" approaching the human brain in scope and reliability came much closer to reality today with the announcement by Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes."

TIMELINE

• The company became a household name when the first transistor radio incorporated Teal´s invention. The radio, sold by Regency Electronics for $50, launched the world into a global village of instant news and pop music.

TIMELINE

• The IBM 650 magnetic drum calculator established itself as the first mass-produced computer, with the company selling 450 in one year. Spinning at 12,500 rpm, the 650´s magnetic data-storage drum allowed much faster access to stored material than drum memory machines

TIMELINE

• Alan Turing was found dead at age 42. He had published his seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers," in 1936, as well as posing significant questions about judging "human intelligence" and programming and working on the design of several computers during the course of his career.

TIMELINE

• A mathematical genius, Turing proved instrumental in code-breaking efforts during World War II. His application of logic to that realm would emerge even more significantly in his development of the concept of a "universal machine."

TIMELINE

• 1956Burroughs buys Electrodata. Calculator

manufacturer Burroughs gained entry to the computer industry by purchasing the southern California company ElectrodataCorporation. The combined firm became a giant in the calculating machine business and expanded into electronics and digital computers when these technologies developed. Burroughs created many computer systems in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually merged with the makers of the Sperry Rand (maker of Univac computers) to form Unisys

TIMELINE

• MIT researchers built the TX-0, the first general-purpose, programmable computer built with transistors. For easy replacement, designers placed each transistor circuit inside a "bottle," similar to a vacuum tube. Constructed at MIT´s Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-0 moved to the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where it hosted some early imaginative tests of programming, including a Western movie shown on TV, 3-D tic-tac-toe, and a maze

TIMELINE

• At MIT, researchers began experimentation on direct keyboard input on computers, a precursor to today´s normal mode of operation. Doug Ross wrote a memo advocating direct access in February; five months later, the Whirlwind aided in such an experiment

TIMELINE• The era of magnetic disk storage

dawned with IBM´s shipment of a 305 RAMAC to Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco. The IBM 350 disk file served as the storage component for the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. It consisted of 50 magnetically coated metal platters with 5 million bytes of data. The platters, stacked one on top of the other, rotated with a common drive shaft.

TIMELINE

• 1958

Jack Kilby created the first

integrated circuit at Texas

Instruments to prove that resistors

and capacitors could exist on the

same piece of semiconductor

material. His circuit consisted of a

sliver of germanium with five

components linked by wires.

TIMELINE

• SAGE — Semi-Automatic Ground Environment — linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communications network. An operator directed actions by touching a light gun to the screen.

The air defense system operated on the AN/FSQ-7 computer (known as Whirlwind II during its development at MIT) as its central computer. Each computer used a full megawatt of power to drive its 55,000 vacuum tubes, 175,000 diodes and 13,000 transistors.

TIMELINE

• 1962

Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. produced the first widely accepted epitaxial gold-doped NPN transistor. The NPN transistor served as the industry workhouse for discrete logic.

TIMELINE

• The LINC (Laboratory Instrumentation Computer) offered the first real time laboratory data processing. Designed by Wesley Clark at Lincoln Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp. later commercialized it as the LINC-8.

Research faculty came to a workshop at MIT to build their own machines, most of which they used in biomedical studies. DEC supplied components.

TIMELINE

• MIT students Slug Russell, Shag Graetz, and Alan Kotok wrote SpaceWar!, considered the first interactive computer game. First played at MIT on DEC´s PDP-1, the large-scope display featured interactive, shoot´em-up graphics that inspired future video games. Dueling players fired at each other´s spaceships and used early versions of joysticks to manipulate away from the central gravitational force of a sun as well as from the enemy ship.

TIMELINE

• Published in 1962, Kenneth Iverson’s book A Programming Language detailed a form of mathematical notation that he had developed in the late 1950s while an assistant professor at Harvard University. IBM hired Iverson and it was there that APL evolved into a practical programming language. APL was widely used in scientific, financial, and especially actuarial applications. Powerful functions and operators in APL are expressed with special characters, resulting in very concise programs.