What is computer?

An electronic device that can receive a set of instructions, or program, and then carry out this program
by performing calculations on numerical data or by compiling and correlating other forms of
information.

What are computers?

The first computers were people! Electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers)
assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings
(predominantly women)

Counting Tables Picture of ancient counting tables

Early computer operation(people)

Abacus- an early aid for mathematical computations. It aids the memory of the human performing the
calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a
person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower).

Abacus- The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in
300 B.C. by the Babylonians.

John Napier- In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms,
which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition.

Ex: log₂x = 5

Napier's Bones- The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained
from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were
carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.

Slide Rule - first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the
Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never
built any.

Calculating Clock- The first gear-driven calculating machine so named by its inventor, the German
professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon
afterward in the bubonic plague.

Blaise Pascal- In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a
tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator

Blaise Pascal *8-digit Pascaline *6-digit Pascaline (Cheaper) *Pascaline Insides

Leibniz- a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of
calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator
that he called the stepped reckoner. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number
system (each drum had 10 fiutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system.
Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.

Jacquard - In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its
weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically. read from punched wooden
cards (remember the "hanging chad from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 20007).

Jacquard's Loom

• By selecting particular cards for Jacquard's loom you defined the woven pattern

• The first significant use of binary automation

• Jacquard Loom Salesman's Model

• Close up of a card

1793-1871: Charles Babbage - Envisioned a steam-powered difference engine and then an analytical
engine. By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating
machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine.

Difference Engine- able to compute tables of numbers, such as logarithm tables. He obtained
government funding for this project due to the importance of numeric tables in ocean navigation.

Babbage- (Analytic Engine) This device, large as a house and powered by 6 steam engines, it was
programmable, thanks to the punched card technology of Jacquard.

Babbage saw that the pattern of holes in a punch card could be used to represent an abstract idea such
as a problem statement or the raw data required for that problem's solution.

Babbage realized that punched paper could be employed as a storage mechanism, holding computed
numbers for future reference.

Because of the connection to the Jacquard loom, Babbage called the two main parts of his Analytic
Engine the "Store" and the "Mill", as both terms are
used in the weaving industry. The Store was where numbers were held and the Mill was where they
were "woven" into new results.

In a modern computer these same parts are called the memory unit and the central processing unit
(CPU).

Babbage - Analytic Engine

The Analytic Engine also had a key function that distinguishes computers from calculators: the
conditional statement.

• A conditional statement allows a program to achieve different results each time it is run.

• Based on the conditional statement, the path of the program can be determined based upon a
situation that is detected at the very moment the program is running.

Ada Byron

Babbage befriended Ada Byron, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron

Though she was only 19, she was fascinated by Babbage's ideas.

She began fashioning programs for the Analytic Engine, although still unbuilt.

The Analytic Engine remained unbuilt (the British government refused to get involved with this one) but
Ada earned her spot in history as the first computer programmer.

Ada invented the subroutine and was the first to recognize the importance of looping.
1816-1852: Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace

The first programmer.

US Census

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be taken
of all U.S. citizens every 10 years in order to determine the representation of the states in Congress.

While the very first census of 1790 had only required 9 months, by 1880 the U.S. population had grown
so much that the count for the 1880 census took 7.5 years. Automation was clearly needed for the next
census,

The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won
by Herman Hollerith,

1860-1929: Herman Hollerith

Devised a punched- card tabulating machine to speed up the 1890 U.S. census

Hollerith desk

The Hollerith desk. consisted of:

a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards,

a gear driven mechanism which could count (similar to Pascal's)

A large wall of dial Indicators to display the results of the count.

0000000000

0000000000

Hollerith Desk

2000000000

0000000000

Hollerith Desk

Hollerith's technique was successful and the 1890 census was completed in only 3 years at a savings of 5
million dollars.

0000000000

00000

IBM

IBM.
sponsert Frankfurt

Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually
became International Business Machines, known today as IBM.

Hollerith's Inovation

By using punch cards, Hollerith created a way to store and retrieve information.

This was the first type of read and write technology

Examples of Punch Cards

US Military

The U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific computation.

By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing as much as a small car over
distances up to 25 miles.

Physicists could write the equations that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle
velocity, etc. would determine the trajectory of the shell, but solving such equations was extremely
laborious.

US Military

Human computers would compute results of these equations and publish them in ballistic "firing tables"
During World War II the U.S. military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to
hire for the

job of computing these tables, but not enough humans could be found to keep up with the need for new
tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the battlefield without the necessary firing
tables and this meant they were close to useless because they couldn't be aimed properly.

Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to invest in even hair-brained schemes to
automate this type of computation.

Mark I

One early success was the Harvard Mark / computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard
and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a
purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts,
and clutches.

Mark I

The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and had a
50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor.

The Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting.

Mark I

The First Bug

One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper.
Hopper found the first computer "bug"; a dead moth that had gotten into the Mark I The word "bug"
had been used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word
"debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults.

Humor

On a humorous note, the principal designer of the Mark I, Howard Aiken of Harvard, estimated in 1947
that six electronic digital computers would be sufficient to satisfy the computing needs of the entire
United States.

The Future of Computers?

IBM had commissioned this study to determine whether it should bother developing this new invention
into one of its standard products (up until then computers were one-of-a-kind items built by special
arrangement).

Aiken's prediction wasn't actually so bad as there were very few institutions (principally, the government
and military) that could afford the cost of what was called a computer in 1947. He just didn't foresee the
micro-electronics revolution which would allow something like an IBM Stretch computer of 1959:

First Generation Computers

The first electronic computer was designed at lowa State between 1939-1942

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer used the binary system(1's and 0's).

Contained vacuum tubes and stored numbers for calculations by burning holes in paper

IBM Stretch - 1959

IBM Stretch - 1959

1903-1995: Dr. John V. Atanasoff and His ABC (Atanasoff Berry Computer)

Atanasoff-Berry Computer

One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital
computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a
capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or dynamic
RAM). As far as its Inventors were aware, it was also the first to employ binary arithmetic

Colussus

The Colossus, built during World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes
used by Germany.

Britain led the world in designing and building electronic machines dedicated to code breaking, and was
routinely able to read coded Germany radio transmissions.

Not a general purpose, reprogrammable machine.

Eniac

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which
stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of
Pennsylvania

between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got
funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the
"computers"
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes.

ENIAC

ENIAC

Programming the ENIAC

To reprogram the ENIAC you had to rearrange the patch cords that you can observe on the left in the
prior photo, and the settings of 3000 switches that you can observe on the right.

To program a modern computer, you type out a program with statements like:

Circumference = 3.14 diameter

To perform this computation on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch cords and then
locate three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4.

Programming the ENIAC

Problems with the ENIAC

The ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes to hold a charge

Vacuum tubes were so notoriously unreliable that even twenty years later many neighborhood drug
stores provided a "tube tester"

Replacing a vacuum tube

The Stored Program Computer

In 1945 John von Neumann presented his idea of a computer that would store computer instructions in
a CPU

The CPU(Central Processing Unit) consisted of elements that would control the computer electronically

The Stored Program Computer

The EDVAC, EDSAC and UNIVAC were the first computers to use the stored program concept

They used vacuum tubes so they were too expensive and too large for households to own and afford

Edvac

It took days to change ENIAC's program.

Eckert and Mauchly's next teamed up with the mathematician John von Neumann to design EDVAC,
which pioneered the stored program. After ENIAC and EDVAC came other computers with humorous
names such as ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, and, of course, MANIAC

Second Generation Computers

In 1947, the transistor was invented The transistor made computers smaller, less expensive and
increased calculating speeds.

Second Generation Computers

Second generation computers also saw a new way data was stored

Punch cards were replaced with magnetic. tapes and reel to reel machines

Univac

The UNIVAC computer was the first commercial (mass produced) computer.

In the 50's, UNIVAC (a contraction of "Universal Automatic Computer") was the household word for
"computer" just as "Kleenex" is for "tissue".

UNIVAC was also the first computer to employ magnetic tape.

Third Generation Computers

Transistors were replaced by integrated circuits (IC)

One IC could replace hundreds of transistors

This made computers even smaller and faster.

Fourth Generation Computers

In 1970 the Intel Corporation invented the Microprocessor:an entire CPU on one chip

This led to microcomputers- computers on a desk

Computer Programming in the '70's

If you learned computer programming in the 1970's, you dealt with what today are called mainframe
computers, such as the IBM 7090 (shown below), IBM 360, ог IBM 370.

Time-Sharing

There were 2 ways to interact with a mainframe.

The first was called time sharing because the computer gave each user a tiny sliver of time in a round-
robin fashion.

Perhaps 100 users would be simultaneously logged on, each typing on a teletype such as the following:

Teletype

A teletype was a motorized typewriter that could transmit your keystrokes to the mainframe and then
print the computer's response on its roll of paper.

You typed a single line of text, hit the carriage return button, and waited for the teletype to begin noisily
printing the computer's response

Batch-Mode Processing

The alternative to time sharing was batch mode processing, where the computer gives its full
attention to your program. In exchange for getting the computer's full attention at run-time, you had to
agree to prepare your program off- line on a key punch machine which generated punch cards.

Punch Cards

University students in the 1970's bought blank cards a linear foot at a time from the university
bookstore. .

Each card could hold only 1 program statement

To submit your program to the mainframe, you placed your stack of cards in the hopper of a card
reader.

Your program would be run whenever the computer made it that far.

You often submitted your deck and then went to dinner or to bed and came back later hoping to see a
successful printout showing your results.

Programming Today

But things changed fast. By the 1990's a university student would typically own his own computer and
have exclusive use of it in his dorm room.

Microprocessor

This transformation was a result of the invention of the microprocessor.

A microprocessor (uP) is a computer that is fabricated on an integrated circuit (IC).

Computers had been around for 20 years before the first microprocessor was developed at Intel in 1971.

Microprocessor

The micro in the name microprocessor refers to the physical size. Intel didn't invent the electronic
computer, but they were the first to succeed in cramming an entire computer on a single chip (IC)

Integrated Circuits

The microelectronics revolution is what allowed the amount of hand-crafted wiring seen in the prior
photo to be mass-produced as an integrated circuit which is a small sliver of silicon the size of your
thumbnail

Integrated Circuits

Integrated circuits and microprocessors allowed computers to be faster

This led to a new age of computers

The first home-brew computers is called the ALTAIR 8800

Fupele Hectones

Apple 1 Computer - 1976

AFFLE COMPUTER
The IBM PC

Commodore 64

Apple Macintosh

The Amiga

Windows 3

Macintosh System 7

Apple Newton

Standard UNIX

22

PowerPC

ICO

IBM OS/2

Windows 95