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Lecture 2

History/Evolution of Computers

CSCS100 - Fall 2009 – Forman Christian CollegeAsher Imtiaz

*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.

“If you want to understand today,

you have to search yesterday.”

Pearl Buck

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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

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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©

Jacquard Loom – A Real Computer?

• Intricate textile patterns were prized in France in early 1800s.

• Invented by Frenchman Jacquard for storing weaved patterns for textile looms (“khadian”)

• Jacquard’s loom (1805-6) used punched cards to allow only some rods to bring the thread into the loom on each shuttle pass.

• Their value for storing computer-related information was later realized by the early computer builders

• Punched cards were replaced by magnetic storage only in the early 1950s

http://65.107.211.206/technology/jacquard.html

Slide Credit: Prof Slotterbeck, Hiram College

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Jacquard Loom

http://65.107.211.206/technology/jacquard.htmlSlide Credit: Prof Slotterbeck, Hiram College

Protests against Jacquard’s Invention

• Hand weavers saw the automatic loom as a threat to their livelihood

• They burned several of the new machines

• A few weavers even physically assaulted Jacquard

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Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52)

• Babbage: the father of computingAda: 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

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Intel 4004 - 1971

• The first microprocessor

• Microprocessor: A complete computer on a chip

• Speed: 750 kHz

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)

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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

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

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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

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Deep Blue -vs- Kasparov - 1997

• In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputerdesigned by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, theWorld Chess Champion

That computer was exceptionally fast, didnot get tired or bored. It just kept onanalyzing the situation and kept onsearching until it found the perfect movefrom 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

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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