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PIONEERS
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CHARLES BABBAGE - 1791-1871 - the father of digital computing. British
mathematician, mechanical engineer and inventor. At Cambridge University
(England) in 1812 he conceived the idea of a mechanical digital computer.
The machine of his design proved to be too difficult to build and his
machine was never completed. It would have weighed 15 tons and
composed of 25,000 parts.
GEORGE BOOLE - 1848 British Mathematician develops binary algebra
ALAN MATHISON TURING. (1912 - 1954.) British Mathematician,
elected Fellow at King's College, Cambridge at the age of 22. In 1934 he
invented the abstract computing machine - now known simply as a Turing
machine - on which all subsequent stored-program digital computers are
modeled.
JOHN VON NEUMANN (1903 in Budapest - died 1957 in Princeton, NJ).
He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern
history. In 1945 he wrote the first draft of a report describing a design
architecture for an electronic digital computer with programming stored in
RAM.
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EARLY ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTERS
Atanasoff-Berry Computer constructed in 1939-1942 at the Iowa State
University in Ames, Iowa, provided the basic ideas for an electronic digital
computer, although it only solved systems of linear equations. However it
did incorporate a primitive digital random access memory (DRAM), used
binary digits, performed all calculations using electronics.
Used a system in which computation and memory
are separated. It was not patented and was
described in a paper. Project was abandoned.
Konrad Zuse created Z3, in Germany in 1941, the first
fully-automated, program-controlled, and freely-programmable computer
for binary floating-point calculations. It used telephone relays and punched
35mm film for input. He built a working model and obtained a patent but did
not receive support from the Nazi government for further development.
Colossus, built in 1943 at Bletchley Park, England, was the first electronic
digital machine with programmability. However it had no internally stored
programs or memory, and it was not a general-purpose machine, being
designed solely for decoding German encrypted messages, involving
counting and Boolean operations. Mark I, completed in February 1944,
used over 1500 tubes; Mark II 2400 tubes.
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ENIAC and EDVAC________________
ENIAC, completed February 1945 at University
Of Pennsylvania for the U.S.Army Ordnance Dept.
The first programmable electronic computer,
19,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons
Programmed with switches and plug-in cables.
Cost $500,000,
designed by Dr. John Mauchly and Presper Eckert.
EDVAC, was the first internally stored program computer to be built.
Designed by Mauchly and Eckert with assistance of Dr. von Neumann.
Was smaller and faster than ENIAC. Programs entered in punched cards
and stored on magnetic tape. Built in 1949 by Eckert Mauchly Computer
Corporation in Philadelphia for U.S.Army Ballistics Research Laboratory.
6,000 vacuum tubes, 12,000 diodes, weighed 8 tons
5.5kB of RAM (in mercury delay lines)
Cost $500,000
FIRST COMMERCIAL DIGITAL COMPUTERS
LEO, based on Cambridge University's EDSAC,
funded by Lyons and Co, British catering and
food manufacturing company, was first
commercially funded and applied digital
computer, commenced operation Sept 1951,
running inventories and payroll
UNIVAC I was the first commercial computer
produced in the United States, design begun by Eckert–Mauchly
Computer Corp, and completed after the company acquired by
Remington Rand. First unit delivered to U.S.Census Bureau March 1951.
First units delivered for commercial use to General Electric and
Metropolitan Insurance in 1954.
Contained 5,200 vacuum tubes, consumed 125kW power
Weighed 13 tons. Mercury tube RAM stored 12 kiloBytes.
Tape drives provided input and output
IBM Model 701 introduced in 1953, used cathode-ray Williams tube RAM,
later replaced by magnetic-core RAM doubling the speed and increasing
capacity to 40kB. Price >$1,000,000.
THE TRANSISTOR REVOLUTION
The first Transistor was made on December 16, 1947 by the team of
William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen at Bell Laboratories in
Nutley, NJ. For their work they were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for
Physics.
Silicon Transistor development by Gordon Teal at Texas Instruments
1954 was stable and easy to manufacture and production took off. First
used in Sony transistor radios.
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Integated Circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas
Instruments in 1958. 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics,
Enabled production of RAM, CPU and BIOS in single
Chips and development of smaller computers
Microprocessor chip Intel 4004 invented by Ted Hoff at Intel in 1971
revolutionized the industry. 2300 transistors in space 3/4" x 1/4" x 0.16",
first used in Busicom scientific calculator.
Later models , faster and still more powerful made the Microcomputers
of the 1980s possible.
MINICOMPUTERS
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1970s – Integrated Circuits and magnetic disc drives replaced
tubes and tape drives reducing size and costs. Computers
became affordable for small companies.
DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) PDP8 first
to offer high speed and large
data capability for less than $25,000.
Over 600,000 units were sold
Programming languages, such as
Fortran, COBOL, C and BASIC
enabled users to write problem
solutions independent of machine
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PERSONAL MICROCOMPUTERS
Microprocessors such as Intel 8088 and
Zilog Z80 and invention of floppy discs
paved way for inexpensive personal
computers in the 1980s.
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Apple 1 – in kit form in 1976 for $666
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Apple 2 – 1977 with 2 5.25” floppy drives
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Commodore PET – 1977, audiotape storage
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IBM-PC in 1981, PC-DOS, $2400 and applications such as WORDSTAR and
VISICALC brought easy computing to every
home and office
GUI - Graphic User Interface
XEROX – PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)
developed graphical interface and use of
mouse, hyperlinks and pull down menus in
1973. Several thousand Xerox Alto computers
were built and interconnected over Ethernet.
Xerox failed to develop commercial market.
APPLE developed these ideas further and
introduced them in the first commercial GUI
computer Macintosh in January 1984.
IBM introduced GUI operating system OS/2 in
1988.
MICROSOFT WINDOWS - first successful
version 3.0 released October 1991, dominated
market for GUI operating systems on personal
computers.
WWW - World Wide Web
ARPANET first connections 1969 – UCLA,
Stanford, Un. Utah, UC Santa Barbara.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP)
established Sept 1981 – to enable
communication between all computers.
ASCII 7-bit character encoding adopted 1981
as international standard for English alphabet,
extended to 8-bit for all European languages.
1993 16-bit Unicode extended to all languages.
World Wide Web established 1993, providing
hypertext links.
WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C)
established 1994 to standardize protocols and
technologies, enabling direct communication by
millions around the world.
PORTABLE - LAPTOP - COMPUTERS
GRID COMPASS 1982 - first clamshell
laptop – 1982 – weight 11lbs – cost $10,000.
340kB magnetic bubble RAM, all drives
external. Used by NASA & military.
PANASONIC Senior Partner 1983 - first
IBM compatible “portable” - weight 31 lbs. cost $2495. 2 – 5 1/4” 320kB disk drives.
RAM 162kB, 4.7Mhz. Built in thermal paper
printer. 9” green on black screen
ZENITH Supersport 286 1987 - first LCD
10” screen, blue with 8 degrees of shading Weight with batteries 14 lbs. Cost ~ $3000.
Early version with 2 – 3 1/2” 720kB disk
drives, later version, 20MB hard drive. 640kB
RAM 12 Mhz.
ACCESSORIES
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PRINTERS The output of computers went to noisy high-speed
printers using old typewriter technology. At Palo Alto Research
Center, Xerox developed laser printers, which were first released
in 1977. Widely available by 1980.
InkJet Printers were invented in1976, but the HP DeskJet was
released in 1988 and made color printing available to everyone.
Scanners, cameras, video drives, storage drives extended the
applications for computers. They and many other useful
accessories all used different connectors and cables. Only desk-top
computers had all the required connectors.
Universal Serial Bus – USB - 1998 made connection easy between
devices. Laptops can now replace desktop computers. Docking
stations allow many devices to connect, laptop easy to take away.
WiFi – 1993 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, established
the first campus-wide Wireless Internet network, doing away with
the necessity of expensive cabling.