*Several of these slides have been adapted and modified from LUMS CS101 course (Dr Sohaib Khan and Dr Arif Zaman), VU CS101 slides (Dr. Altaf A. Khan)

*Several of these slides have been adapted and modified from LUMS CS101 course (Dr Sohaib Khan and Dr Arif Zaman), VU CS101 slides (Dr. Altaf A. Khan) and Peter Norton’s supplementary material.

Ghulam MurtazaCSCS100 - Fall 2008 Forman Christian College

History of Computers

“If you want to understand today, you have to search

yesterday.” Pearl Buck

Goals• To look at how computers evolved to take

the form that they have today.• To discuss key milestones in the history

of computers to:• Learn lessons from the successes, as well as

failures• Discover patterns of evolution• Draw inspiration for the future

Abacus – Computer?

Not really a computer, but Not really a computer, but rather a rather a computing aidcomputing aid

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

• Charles Babbage was born in 1791, just as the industrial revolution was getting into its swing, by the time he died in 1871 the UK had transformed into most industrialized country the world had ever seen.

• Babbage was at the heart of the scientific and technical development during that period.

• Babbage is best known for his 'Calculating Engines', or rather the plans for the engines as they were not built in his lifetime.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine - 1833 • First Mechanical, Digital,

general-purpose computer

• Crank-driven • Store instructions • Perform mathematical

calculations • Store information

permanently in punched cards

• Components: input, memory, processor, output

Image credits: www.britannica.com copyright©

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52)• Babbage: the father of computing

Ada: the mother? • Wrote a program for computing the

Bernoulli’s sequence on the Analytical Engine - world’s 1st computer program

• Ada?• A programming language specifically

designed by the US Dept of Defense for developing military applications was named Ada to honor her contributions towards computing

Type Writer (1876)

• Christopher Sholes designs the original Remington "Type Writer" keyboard layout, commonly called QWERTY after the order of the first few letters on its top row.

Vacuum Tube – 1904• John Fleming, an English

Physicist

• Electronic devices, consist of 2 or more electrodes encased in a glass or metal tube

• Used in the construction of earlier computers

• Now replaced by transistors -more reliable and less costly.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Minaturevacuumtube.jpg

Cathode Ray Tube based TV -1926

• Television appeared to almost universal apethy, invented by John Logi Baird it laid down the basis for stareing at that little box in the corner of the room. Television (Latin Far Seeing) really took off in the late 1950's.

The World’s First Computer Colossus

• Colossus was built at Bletchley Park during WWII.

• Bletchley Park was a major code-breaking site. Alan Turing and others worked on cracking the German Enigma machine codes.

• Colossus was built to decipher the Enigma codes.

• Bletchley Park is open today as a museum. It includes a computer museum and a working replica of Colossus.

• http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk

ABC – 1939• Attanasoff-Berry Computer (John Attanasoff & Clifford

Berry at Iowa State College)• World’s first electronic computer • The first computer that used binary numbers• Used for solving equations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_Computer

Harvard Mark 1 – 1943 • Howard Aiken of Harvard University • The first program controlled machine • Included all the ideas proposed by Babbage for the

Analytical Engine • The last famous electromechanical computer

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I

ENIAC – 1946• Electronic Numerical

Integrator And Computer • World’s first large-scale,

general-purpose electronic computer

• Built by John Mauchly & John Echert at the University of Pennsylvania

• Developed for military applications

• 5,000 operations/sec, 19000 tubes, 30 ton

• 9’ x 80’• 150 kilowatts: Used to dim

the lights in the City of Philadelphia down when it ran

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Eniac.jpg

Transistor – 1947 • Invented by Shockly,

Bardeen, and Brattain at the Bell Labs in the US • Compared to vacuum

tubes: • much smaller size • more reliability • much lower power

consumption • much lower cost

• All modern computers are made of miniaturized transistors

• For this discovery they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Replica-of-first-transistor.jpg#file

IC on Intel chip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit

Computing at Manchester after WW –II Mark Io The University of

Manchester made a considerable contribution to the development of computing. They produced the first stored program computer, the first floating point machine, the first transistor computer and the first computer to use virtual memory.

The Transistor• John Bardeen, Walter Brattain

and William Shockley discovered the transistor effect and developed the first device in December 1947, while the three were members of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956.

• Developed as a replacement for bulky and inefficient vacuum tubes and mechanical relays, the transistor later revolutionized the entire electronics world.

From Tubes to Transistors and beyond• Tubes replaced mechanicals • Transistors replaced tubes • What is going to replace the transistors?

What's the next big thing?

Floppy Disk - 1950

• Invented at the Imperial University in Tokyo by Yoshiro Nakamats

• Provided faster access to programs and data as compared with magnetic tape

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Floppy_disk_90mm.jpg

UNIVAC 1 - 1951

• UNIVersal Automatic Computer • Echert & Mauchly Computer Company • First computer designed for commercial

applications • First computer that could not only

manipulate numbers but text data as well • Max speed: 1905 operations/sec • Cost: US$1,000,000 • 5000 tubes. 943 cu ft. 8 tons. 100

kilowatts • Between 1951-57, 48 were sold

ARPANET - 1969

• A network of networks • The grand-daddy of the today’s global

Internet • A network of around 60,000 computers

developed by the US Dept of Defense to facilitate communications between research organizations and universities

Intel• 1950's: Shockley leaves Bell Labs to establish Shockley Labs in California.

Some of the best young electronic engineers and solid-state physicists come to work with him. These include Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

• 1969: Intel was a tiny start-up company in Santa Clara, headed by Noyce and Moore.

• 1970: Busicom placed an order with Intel for custom calculator chips. Intel had no experience of custom-chip design and sets outs to design a general-purpose solution.

• 1971: Intel have problems translating architectures into working chip designs - the project runs late.

• Faggin joins Intel and solves the problems in weeks.

• The result is the Intel 4000 family (later renamed MCS-4, Microcomputer System 4-bit), comprising the 4001 (2k ROM), the 4002 (320-bit RAM), the 4003 (10-bit I/O shift-register) and the 4004, a 4-bit CPU.

Intel 4004 - 1971• The first microprocessor • Speed: 750 kHz• Introduced in 1971, the Intel

4004 "Computer-on-a-Chip" was a2300 transistor device capable of performing 60,000 operations persecond.

• It was the first-ever single-chip microprocessor and had approximately the same performance as the 18,000 vacuum tube ENIAC. The 4-bitIntel C4004 ran at a Clock Speed of 108 KiloHertz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004

Altair 8800 - 1975

• The commercially available 1st PC

• Based on the Intel 8080 • Cost $397 • Had 256 bytes of

memory; my PC at home has a million times more RAM (Random Access Memory)

Cray 1 - 1976• The first commercial

supercomputer • Supercomputers are state-of-

the-art machines designed to perform calculations as fast as the current technology allows

• Used to solve extremely complex tasks: weather prediction, simulation of atomic explosions; aircraft design; movie animation

• Cray 1 could do 167 million calculations a second; the current state-of the-art machines can do many trillion (1012) calculations per second

Intel 8008• 1972: Faggin begins work on an 8-bit processor, the

Intel 8008. The prototype has serious problems with electrical charge leaking out of its memory circuits. Device physics, circuit design and layout are important new skills. The 8008 chip layout is completely redesigned and the chip is released.

• There is a sudden surge in microprocessor interest.

• Intel's 8008 is well-received, but system designers want increased speed, easier interfacing, and more I/O and instructions. The improved version, produced by Faggin, is the 8080.

• Faggin leaves Intel to start his own company Zilog, who later produce the Z80.

Federico Faggin : Zilog

• Zilog produced the 3.5MHz Zilog Z80 (a very popular processor taught in many universities)

• … and, later, a 16-bit Z8000. Another great design but Zilog struggled to provide good support, they were a new and inexperienced company and had only a few hundred employees; at this time Intel had over 10 thousand.

The Zilog Z80• The Z80 microprocessor is an 8 bit CPU with

a 16 bit address bus capable of direct access of 64k of memory space.

• It was based on the 8080; it has a large instruction set.

• Programming features include an accumulator and six eight bit registers that can be paired as 3-16 bit registers. In addition to the general registers, a stack-pointer, program-counter, and two index (memory pointers) registers are provided.

• It had a 40 pin DIP package manufactured in A, B, and C models, differing only in maximum clock speed. It was also manufactured as a stand-alone microcontroller with various configurations of on-chip RAM and EPROM.

• It proves useful for low cost control applications.

Early Microcontrollers• 1974: Motorola (originally car radio manufacturers) had

introduced transistors in the 1950s and decided to make a late but serious effort in the microprocessor market. They announced their 8-bit 6800 processor. Though bulky, and fraught with production problems, their 6800 had a good design.

• 1975: General Motors approach Motorola about a custom-built derivative of the 6800. Motorola's long experience with automobile manufacturers pays off and Ford follow GM's lead.

• 1976: Intel introduce an 8-bit microcontroller, the MCS-48. They ship 251,000 in this year.

• 1980: Intel introduce the 8051, an 8-bit microcontroller with on-board EPROM memory. They ship 22 million and 91 million in 1983.

Early Computer Games• 1972: The video game industry gets

underway as Nolan Bushnell starts his own company, Syzygy, later renamed ATARI.

• Bushnell had studied the first 8-bit microprocessors and uses them to duplicate an arcade version of the computer games he had used on his University's computers.

• His first attempt at a video game, Computer Space, is 'too complicated' and fails. In his next attempt he decides to "build a game so mindless and self-evident that a monkey or its equivalent (a drunk in a bar) could instantly understand it".

• Depressingly, PONG, the electronic equivalent of Ping-Pong, was a great success.

Early Computers• 1975: An advert in Popular

Electronics describes an $800 ready-to-build computer kit based on the Intel 8080. At this time the smallest commercial computers are selling for $30,000.

• Steve Wozniak builds a computer in his garage with a $20 8-bit processor from MOS Tech. Inc. (absorbed by Commodore in 1977). This was the prototype for the Apple 1.

• 1978: Intel announces the 16 bit, 16-bit bus 8086, based on the 8080; it has 10 times the performance.

The Intel 8086

• 29,000 Transistors

• Clock Speeds: 5, 8 and 10 MHz

• Introduced: June 8,1978

• Approx. 10 times the performance of the 8080

The IBM PC

• 1981: IBM, having seen Apple's success recognise a new personal computer market. They choose Intel over Motorola and Zilog (and their own proprietary processors) because of Intel's long-term commitment to the 8086 line.

• IBM selects the Intel 8088 for their PC, introduced in August.

• Intel bring out the 16-bit 80286 for the IBM PC AT but it has weaknesses, most notably in virtual memory support. The newest 'killer' application software, Microsoft Windows, needs a more powerful processor.

• IBM’s service to the computer industry was to make the PC 'open', this meant clone makers could compete with IBM-compatible PCs. New companies such as Compaq and Dell (both from Texas) fare well, as do South Korea's Leading Edge and Taiwan's Acer who produce PCs with AT performance at half the price.

• 1985: Intel announce the 80386 a 32-bit microprocessor, of 275,000 transistors. It was the world's best performing processor at this time.

• 1986 Compaq are the first company to bring out a 386 PC. IBM's 386 PC, the PS/2, does not come out for another year.

Moore’s Law

• Dr. Gordon E. Moore co-founded Intel in 1968.

• His observation that number of transistors doubled every 2 years became known as “Moore’s Law”

Transistors per Processor

Year of introduction

Transistors

4004 1971 2,250 8008 1972 2,500 8080 1974 5,000 8086 1978 29,000 286 1982 120,000 386™ processor 1985 275,000 486™ DX processor 1989 1,180,000 Pentium® processor 1993 3,100,000 Pentium II processor 1997 7,500,000 Pentium III processor 1999 24,000,000 Pentium 4 processor 2000 42,000,000

IBM PC & MS DOS - 1981

• IBM PC: The tremendously popular PC; precursor of 95% of the PC’s in use today.

• MS DOS: The tremendously popular operating system that came bundled with the IBM PC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC

Apple Macintosh - 1984

• Based on the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device) ideas first developed for the Star computer at Xerox PARC (1981)

•The first popular, user-friendly, WIMP-based PC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_macintosh

World Wide Web -1989

• Tim Berners Lee – British physicist • 1989 – At the European Center for

Nuclear Energy Research (CERN) in Geneva

• 1993 - The 1st major browser “Mosaic” was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Deep Blue -vs- Kasparov - 1997

• In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer designed by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, the World Chess Champion

That computer was exceptionally fast, did not get tired or bored. It just kept on analyzing the situation and kept on searching until it found the perfect move from its list of possible moves

The next milestone?

• Mechanical computing • Electro-mechanical computing • Vacuum tube computing • Transistor computing (the current state-of the-art) • Quantum computing

The Future – Quantum Computing?• QUANTUM MECHANICS is the branch of physics which

describes the activity of subatomic particles, i.e. the particles that make up atoms

• Quantum computers may one day be millions of times more efficient than the current state-of-the-art computers. • For example, finding the largest from a list of four

numbers: • current computers require on average 2 to 3 steps to

get to the answer • Whereas, the quantum computer may be able to do

that in a single step

• Suggested reading: www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Quantum_Computing_with_Molecules.pdf